Pakistan, YouTube, and Internet Censorship
So in the previous post I put up a YouTube clip I found amusing. If you look in the comments, you’ll see that Tom complained that the clip had been pulled from YouTube. I saw that comment and replayed the clip, which worked just fine for me. This struck me as odd, but I just assumed that there was something wrong with Tom’s connection and didn’t give it much thought.
Then I read this story about how Pakistan caused a YouTube blackout today for over an hour. It turns out that Pakistan was attempting to cut off access to YouTube across Pakistan because of content “deemed offensive to Islam.” In the process, the Asian internet service provider PCCW goofed up and caused that block to apply to the wider Internet, causing a near global shut-down of the website until engineers at YouTube made PCCW aware of their mistake.
So…yeah. The clip’s working again, Tom. Send any complaints to the government of Pakistan.
It’s kind of a funny story, with obviously disturbing undertones. Coincidentally, I just recently read this fascinating story by James Fallows in the new issue of the Atlantic about internet censorship in China. Fallows lays out why these forms of censorship are so effective even though they are pretty easy to circumvent:
Does the Chinese government really care if a citizen can look up the Tiananmen Square entry on Wikipedia? Of course not. Anyone who wants that information will get it—by using a proxy server or VPN, by e-mailing to a friend overseas, even by looking at the surprisingly broad array of foreign magazines that arrive, uncensored, in Chinese public libraries.What the government cares about is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won’t bother. Most Chinese people, like most Americans, are interested mainly in their own country. All around them is more information about China and things Chinese than they could possibly take in. The newsstands are bulging with papers and countless glossy magazines. The bookstores are big, well stocked, and full of patrons, and so are the public libraries. Video stores, with pirated versions of anything. Lots of TV channels. And of course the Internet, where sites in Chinese and about China constantly proliferate. When this much is available inside the Great Firewall, why go to the expense and bother, or incur the possible risk, of trying to look outside?
The story is interesting in terms of foreign policy and the nature of social control, but, surprisingly enough for non-techies like me, the technological details of exactly how this sort of censorship happens are just as incredible:
Thus Chinese authorities can easily do something that would be harder in most developed countries: physically monitor all traffic into or out of the country. They do so by installing at each of these few “international gateways” a device called a “tapper” or “network sniffer,” which can mirror every packet of data going in or out. This involves mirroring in both a figurative and a literal sense. “Mirroring” is the term for normal copying or backup operations, and in this case real though extremely small mirrors are employed. Information travels along fiber-optic cables as little pulses of light, and as these travel through the Chinese gateway routers, numerous tiny mirrors bounce reflections of them to a separate set of “Golden Shield” computers…As the other routers and servers (short for file servers, which are essentially very large-capacity computers) that make up the Internet do their best to get the packet where it’s supposed to go, China’s own surveillance computers are looking over the same information to see whether it should be stopped.
Wow. I mean, I know it’s evil and all, but that’s cool.
Comment by tet on 24 February 2008 at 10:01 pm:
Interesting. I also found it fascinating a week or so ago when three ‘net piplines into the Middle East were “accidentally” cut at nearly the same time.
Something interesting may be in the works. The undersea cables being cut struck me as a dry run.
Tom