December 2012

While workers at many newspapers owned by Advance Publications have tried to brace themselves for what seems to be the inevitable — layoffs and the end of a daily print product — reporters and editors at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland are fighting back in an unusual way: they are taking their case directly to the public.

The staff there has started a campaign to rally community support and to try to prevent cuts like the ones Advance has made in other cities. Using money provided by Local 1 of the Newspaper Guild and a grant from the Communications Workers of America, organizers have produced a television commercial, created a Facebook page that has attracted nearly 4,000 “likes” and started a petition that has nearly 6,000 signatures so far. They have also enlisted some celebrities, like the “Hot in Cleveland” star Valerie Bertinelli, to support their cause.

A new study by mobile security vendor Lookout finds that 62 percent of American households have at least one old cellphone lying about. Some 10 percent of households have four or more old devices stuffed into a drawer somewhere. Reasons for hanging on to the redundant phones vary, but they include not knowing what to do with the devices, concerns about security, and the fact that some information remains only on that device.

Syria disappeared from the Internet. Everyone knows that by now. But one fact that didn’t resonate quite as readily in the first reports is how quickly it happened. At the order of someone — presumably an official within the government of President Bashar al-Assad — an entire nation’s communications infrastructure ceased to function within about four minutes.

When you remember the basic fundamental truths about the Internet — the part about how it was designed to be used in the event of a nuclear war and thus has redundancy and survivability in mind — one can’t help but wonder how such a thing could happen. It comes down to control, and creating a single, easily accessible choke point run by loyal people. Every single Internet connection in Syria is funneled through a single government agency that authorizes them all — the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment — and indeed all of them are run out of the same building. Today, the folks at Renesys, who were the first to notice Syria’s government-ordered outage (for it could be nothing other than that), have tackled the question of how readily what has happened in Syria — and in Libya and Egypt before it — could happen in other countries. Here’s its map. Countries where there’s a significant risk — speaking logistically, not necessarily politically — of a government-ordered shutdown are shown in darker green. The lighter the green, the lower the risk.

The events in Syria highlight the importance of the upcoming WCIT and the implications of the WCIT for free expression online.

Provisions proposed by some member states would explicitly authorize governments such as Syria to disrupt Internet traffic and control Internet architecture, including traffic routing, on the grounds that such censorship is necessary to protect public order or suppress insurrection. Today, nations and organizations that oppose such acts of national censorship are free to help those within Syria circumvent these efforts to suppress speech. For months, global civil society has expressed the concern that ITRs relating to controlling the flow of Internet traffic -- advanced in the name of worthy goals such as cyber security, combating fraud, or ensuring quality of service -- have implications for free expression and the free flow of information online. Hopefully, the events in Syria occurring on the very eve of the WCIT will encourage all member states who value free expression as a fundamental human right to carefully weigh the danger to these values inherent in any ITR expressly recognizing the right of governments to disruptor control Internet traffic routing.