Internet Press Freedom Conference

L. Gordon Crovitz
“Press Freedom on the Internet”
World Press Freedom Committee/Bar Association of the City of New York
June 26, 2003, New York City

Slide: Overview of Internet Topics [title page]

Slide: Overview of Internet News: Key Topics

Good morning. I’m delighted to be able to open this conference on Press Freedom and the Internet--two of my favorite topics. And I’m especially delighted to be joined by two comrades in arms in internet publishing, who will comment on the topic following my presentation: Martin Nisenholtz and Christopher Schroeder, who run the New York Times and Washington Post web sites, respectively. You won’t often see the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal all equally interested in a topic, but the subject matter of this conference is a rare exception.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’d like to start with two matters. One is that early in my career, I had the great pleasure to report for the Wall Street Journal editorial page on the activities of UNESCO in the early 1980s. This was during the period when UNESCO was one of the leading proponents of the “New World Information and Communication Order” that threatened the liberal values of free speech and limited government influence over the media. This was a great story for a journalist--and not just because my best sources were dissidents within UNESCO's Paris headquarters, meaning that I had to make numerous trips to interview them, usually in secret places in Paris such as cafes and restaurants. I also feel compelled to disclose that while my presentation this morning will focus on the issue of how news travels on the web and thus how it can be blocked, I am not a technologist. On the other hand, Dow Jones has a great internet developers and technology visionaries, who have done as good a job as anyone can in educating people like me.

We will hear much about what news is on the Internet as this conference proceeds. I think one of the clauses of the Statement of Vienna on “Press Freedom on the Internet” captured the definitional issue well. It said,

“There are many forms of communication over the Internet, and it is important to not to confuse them. News, for example, is different from such things as pornography, pedophilia, fraud, conspiracy for terrorism, incitement to violence, hate speech, etc.... Such matters ... are normally covered in existing national general legislation and can, if appropriate and necessary, be prosecuted on the national level in the country of origin.” In other words, no new legislation or international treaties are needed.

I will focus on news as we usually understand it--as reporting by a journalistic enterprise, edited and posted onto a web site. I’ll also touch on news that may exist on the web outside of news web sites, such as information sent by e-mail or by cell-phones messaging.

Slide:  Connectivity on the Internet
 
As so let me start with a warning: My talk will focus on the nuts and bolts of how the Internet works, because we must understand how it works in order to understand how governments can cause it not to work. On the other hand, especially given the early hour, I will try to keep this as simple as I can.

This is a network diagram that shows how most people think of the Internet. They click a link in a web browser, the request is transmitted through “the Internet”  to some computer somewhere, which sends back a web page. But it of course is not that simple. What actually goes on in this cloud determines what you can and cannot read and view online. In most Western countries, we usually think of this cloud as completely clear and transparent -- and assume that if we’re having trouble accessing a web page that it’s due to a temporary overload on the system or perhaps a glitch in our phone line. For people in many countries, that cloud blocks their access to news and information.

Slide:  Map of the Internet

Don’t spill your coffee, but this is a peek inside the cloud--very simplified, believe it or not. The Internet is not a network. It’s a conglomeration of networks that have agreed to build interconnections with each other. Each color in this diagram is one Internet Service Provider--one of the companies that provides most people with their Internet access. AT&T, Sprint, and many other companies are all shown. Each of them has reached what are called “peering agreements” with the other companies to whose networks they’re connected.

Slide: Map of the Internet (...2)

So when you visit a site on the web, or send e-mail to a colleague, the information you send could travel through any number of networks on its way to its destination. In the United States, we have a large number of service providers, most of who freely interconnect with each other, so our networks are robust. If one provider has trouble, messages will be routed through other providers.  Usually, you won’t even notice the problem. The machines that pass these messages along are called “routers,” [rhymes with “doubter” not “rooter”], and thanks to arcane protocols, they can tell each other about the best ways to reach a particular site, and alert each other to trouble. In this way the Internet, to some extent, maintains itself.

Slide: Reading an Article from the Wall Street Journal Online

Now let’s say you visit a news site, here the Wall Street Journal Online, and you notice an interesting article. (We have lots of them.) You click on the link, and your web browser asks a server at your Internet Service Provider, or “ISP” for the information. It then passes the request to the larger company from which it buys Internet access--probably one of the major telecom companies. The largest of these companies run what’s called the “backbone,” the huge high-speed connections that span the country.

The larger provider then routes the request through its own network, pointing it toward servers at Dow Jones. Sprint is one of our Internet Service Providers, so perhaps the request will be handed from Earthlink’s provider to Sprint, which in turn will send it through its networks to our web server.

Slide:  Reading an article from the WSJ (...2)

The article will be sent back to you via a similar, but probably not identical, series of handoffs. We have two major Internet providers. Your web page could perhaps come back to you via Sprint, our other provider. But what’s important to understand is that you were able to see our publication, and read our articles, because a series of privately owned companies agreed to carry your requests to us and back again. When people in the U.S. read the Online Journal, there are so many paths between them and our servers that they’re almost certain to make a connection.

Slide:  World Connectivity

That’s not true for the entire world, however. Here’s another view of the Internet, created using the Mapnet tool from the University of California’s San Diego Supercomputing Center. The colored lines represent the networks of about half a dozen of the major Internet Service Providers: AT&T, Qwest, Sprint, Cable & Wireless, UUNet, and some others. You’ll notice that the U.S. and Europe have a huge number of connections, while other regions of the world have very few. These sparse connections mean that service is probably slower and less reliable in those areas. The relatively low number of connections also gives governments an opportunity for control that doesn’t exist in N. America or Europe.

Slide:  Censorship Options

I hope this short lesson in how the Internet works makes clear that there is nothing inherently “free” about the web. It’s controlled by the people who run it. Countries that see the free flow of information as a threat have plenty of tools to throttle it. The easiest way to do this is to simply deny people the right to use the Internet at all. Cuba, for instance, allows very few people access to e-mail and even fewer are allowed to use the Web. Citizens of Libya and North Korea have no access to the net whatsoever. This does ensure control of information, but also limits the economic potential of the net. So many companies opt to provide access through a state-controlled Internet provider, or a set of private providers controlled by the state. Other countries, such as Saudi Arabia, have licensed private providers, but require all traffic to go through a state-controlled backbone.

You can only access what your provider allows you to; if your only provider is the government, it is a final and absolute arbiter over what you may look at.

Slide:  Single Point of Control

So every request someone in these countries makes is sent through government systems. If you’re accessing the Online Journal from one of these countries, the diagram has the added link of the government ISP. Just like postal mail, the request is opened and examined before being sent along, and the response is examined before being returned to the user.

Slide:  How News is Blocked

The easiest way to censor news is to block access completely to the sites that provide it. There are several ways to do this, and to understand them we need to look more closely at how requests are sent. When you type “http://online.wsj.com” into your web browser, it has no idea where you want to go. Computers on the Internet are known by their numeric addresses, or “IP address” - something like 192.168.1.10. Your web browser needs to ask a computer known as a “name server” for the numeric address corresponding to “wsj.com.” This actually happens in several steps. First you ask a name server at your local ISP where “wsj.com” is.

Slide:  How News is Blocked (...2)

The name server tells your browser where to find WSJ.com, and it makes the request as we discussed earlier.

Slide:  How News is Blocked (...3)

But let’s imagine that you’re in a country that’s decided it doesn’t want you to read The Wall Street Journal. Several things could happen. The government controls the name server, so it could return to you a false address pointing to a government server that might provide more palatable news than WSJ.com. And of course the list of unpalatable addresses could well also include newyorktimes.com and washingtonpost.com.

Slide: How News is Blocked (...4)

Or, the government ISP might have a list of addresses to which it won’t allow access, and if WSJ.com is on that list, it will not send your request on. You’ll get a message indicating there’s been a browser error, or in some countries, such as Saudi Arabia, you’ll see a page explaining that you are being denied access to the site.

Slide:  Other Blocking Methods

Blocking on the basis of Internet address isn’t certain, however, since sites can change their addresses, and in some cases where many sites share one address, innocent sites may be blocked. China has found that selective blocking is more successful than wholesale blocking, since it is less obvious and causes fewer protests. For example, when China blocked all access to the Google search engine, an outcry forced the block to be lifted after ten days. But users in China who try to access Google now are redirected to more compliant search engines within China.

Additionally, this type of blocking requires the government to maintain a list of undesirable sites. If those sites change addresses frequently, this could become difficult.

A more certain blocking method is to look at the content of every request and discard or block those that contain keywords found to be objectionable. However, this takes a lot of processing power, probably more than many countries could afford.

And there are also non-technical methods of blocking access. A country can threaten companies with legal actions if they do not comply with its content requirements. Some American-based sites, for example, have signed agreements to abide by Chinese government requirements for content.

Additionally, courts can institute judgments against foreign companies for publishing content found to be unsuitable. Dow Jones is currently appealing a libel judgment brought against it in Australia, whose courts decided that the availability of Barron’s Online in Australia was enough for Australian libel law to apply--even though the writer, the editors, and the servers are all based in the United States and even though there were only a nominal number of people in the Australian jurisdiction who read the article online.

Slide:  Circumventing Censorship

Censorship technology is always in an arms race with technology meant to circumvent it--sometimes for good, sometimes for bad. Web publishers can change characters or words to disguise content--the way e-mail spammers will use zeroes instead of the letter O, and a five instead of the letter S, so filters won’t recognize subject lines such as “Make M0ney Fa5t.”

Then there is steganography, which is the practice of embedding secret messages in other messages--unlike encryption, which relies on ciphers or codes to unscramble a message. Online steganography can include embedding secret messages in web pages, audio files or e-mails. One program, called “snow,” even hides a message by adding extra white space at the end of each line of a text file or e-mail message.  But these methods are more appropriate for private communication than for publishing news.

Decentralized peer-to-peer networks have frustrated record company attempts to shut them down, but they can be used to transmit news and information as well as music files. It can be difficult for blocking software to tell this type of traffic from normal web traffic if it is properly disguised. A group of activist hackers has released what they call the “Six/Four” system--named for the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre--that creates anonymous, decentralized, secure communications channels between computers.

And simpler methods, like text messaging on cell phones, and instant-messaging chat software, also can be harder to block and regulate. It’s also harder to send in-depth news by these methods, since they’re better suited to short headlines. Cell phone users in China sent text messages back and forth ridiculing the government’s handling of SARS; attempts to crack down haven’t been very successful, thought the government did manage to block the two Chinese characters that make up the word “SARS,” though of course it was easy enough for users to figure out what the missing word.

Slide: Good News: Censorship is a Double-Edged Sword

The good news is that there are significant costs to censorship and a self-regulating dynamic with all of these tools of censorship. Markets, for example, can discourage private enterprise from assisting censors. The same companies that could provide filtering software to totalitarian governments also provide it to parents via filtering software so that they can block pornography. Companies that want to develop a brand for trustworthiness in this growing market for parental controls will not want to be associated with repressive governments. Likewise, companies racing to develop overseas markets can end up supplying totalitarian governments with the tools they need to keep publishers muzzled.  This can also damage their reputations. 

Secure communications channels give terrorists unprecedented ability to communicate with one another, but on the other hand can also allow dissidents to evade government detection.  The challenge for Western governments thus is to create system to monitor potential threats while doing what can be done to keep the web a helpful medium for political free speech.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if countries crack down too hard on the flow of information, they will also lock themselves out of the economic opportunities presented by the Internet. As with other great mediums of communication in the past, from books to the telegraph to radio and television, we know the first instinct of many governments and too many special-interest groups. This instinct is to regulate, censor and control.  The Internet has the potential to permit access to news and information around the world faster, more broadly and more cheaply than any medium ever developed--making it all the more important that we keep it as free as we can.

Thank you.

I’ll now ask Martin and Chris briefly to offer their own thoughts on the topic. We’ll then all be delighted to take your questions....

Martin...