Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

Will the internet heal itself?

As I've reported previously, access to the internet is under threat from governments around the world.

It's not just countries such as China and Singapore that have inflicted significant censorship and restrictions on internet use but now we have the likes of Australia and the UK seeking to clamp down on the freedoms of their citizens.

There are those, myself included, who see the move to age-restrict access to things like social media as a way to backdoor the introduction of compulsory digital IDs under the guise of "won't someone please think of the children". The subject of today's column is: if this actually happens, how will freedom-fighters respond and can the internet effectively reroute around these bans and roadblocks?

I think the smarter amongst us already know the answer but for the benefit of others, let's look at how an attempt to control the internet or force mandatory digital IDs on Net users might be mitigated.

The first issue is age (or otherwise) restricting access to material that the governments of the day might consider harmful or perhaps even just unhelpful.

Most censorship will occur at the DNS and routing levels. By effectively removing or redirecting a DNS entry, those who attempt access to a restricted/censored site will find themselves most likely staring at a screen with the words "Not Allowed" or something similar. In 90 percent of cases, this will be enough to prevent access to those "harmful" sites containing material that the government of the day may consider "unhelpful".

Many people, and probably just about every cyber-savvy teenager, will quickly skirt around such simplistic protection mechanisms by way of a proxy or VPN. Those who want the best experience will simply pay a small monthly fee for access to any one of the many commercial VPN services and the rest will use open proxies or "free" VPNs as an alternative.

By tunneling under the DNS/IP censorship wall that affects local access, VPN users will effectively be free to browse whatever they want and nobody will even know what they're doing.

When "the powers that be" finally realise that simplistic DNS/IP blocking is not stopping huge numbers of people from just using a VPN, chances are that the next level the battle would be rolled out. In this case, you'd probably need to authenticate your identity by providing credentials to an authentication service before your computer would actually be allowed to exchange packets with the rest of the internet.

This alone wont stop people sidestepping the roadblocks that prevent access to the "verboten" websites or services through a VPN but odds are that such a measure will also come with significant restrictions (with penalties) for using such VPNs without license to do so.

License?

Yes, can't you just see the potential revenue stream here?

If you're a business or someone with a legitimate justification for using a VPN, chances are that to do so legally you'll need to obtain a license from "the powers that be". If you use a VPN without the requisite licence then you'll risk penalties and be labeled a terrorist or worse.

This mechanism may be a whole lot harder to circumvent than the simple DNS/IP-level blocking but I'm pretty sure that clever people will come up with cunning solutions.

One option may be to hack the systems of companies and entities with legitimate (licensed) VPN access and piggyback on that connectivity via wireless connections. A mesh network of nodes connected by 2.4 or 5.8GHz links could provide ready connectivity for anyone wanting to anonymously access those forbidden sites and that network itself could be a lucrative money-spinner for those doing the hacking.

Another option is the creation of an alter-net that, at least within the affected country, operates completely separately to the internet itself.

Again, using wireless mesh technology, local traffic could be routed through a single or multiple hacked VPNs to provide access that sidestepped the roadblocks.

Another option is that these "unhelpful" sites could be mirrored locally and accessed through the alter-net mesh without the need for any VPN or realtime international connectivity.

I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to mitigate the harm that state-enforced censorship of the internet could produce and there are plenty of folk far smarter than me who would step up to the plate to implement those methods.

The real risk to the powers that be is that, once they have lost total control and even the abilty to see what people are doing after they start using these mitigations, the door opens to some of the really harmfull stuff (CSAM etc) -- not just the politically inconvenient material that they don't want you to see.

Governments need to be very careful what they do when it comes to the internet. The unintended consequences of trying to control something as big and free as the internet can be significant and highly counter-productive to those doing the censoring.

Carpe Diem folks!

Please visit the sponsor!

Here is a PERMANENT link to this column

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font