Chat program censorship and surveillance in China: Tracking TOM-Skype and Sina UC

Crandall, Jedidiah R.; Crete‐Nishihata, Masashi; Knockel, Jeffrey; McKune, Sarah; Senft, Adam; Tseng, Diana; Wiseman, Greg

doi:10.5210/fm.v18i7.4628

Cited by 13 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…This is especially so because of conflicting conclusions and lack of a unified interpretation in the academic and policy literatures about which keywords provoke action by the government, how automated review works, and what impact this process ultimately has on the content of speech which is blocked and which can be consumed by the Chinese people [20,21]. We offer a possible resolution to these issues here.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reverse-engineering censorship in China: Randomized experimentation and participant observation

King

Pan

Roberts

2014

Science

279

166

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Existing research on the extensive Chinese censorship organization uses observational methods with well-known limitations. We conduct the first large-scale experimental study of censorship by creating accounts on numerous social media sites, randomly submitting different texts, and detecting from a worldwide network of computers which are censored. We also supplement the usual interviews with secret sources by creating our own social media site, contracting with Chinese firms to install the same censoring technologies as existing sites, and -with their software, documentation, and even customer support -reverse engineering how it all works. Our results offer rigorous support for the recent hypothesis that criticism of the state, its leaders, and their policies are published, whereas posts about real world events with collective action potential are censored.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reverse-engineering censorship in China: Randomized experimentation and participant observation

King

Pan

Roberts

2014

Science

279

166

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“…China has no history of persecuting Internet users for attempting to connect to evasion technologies such as the Tor network. China's basic approach to censorship and surveillance on the Internet is to have these functions carried out by companies (see, e.g., Crandall et al [21]), with the government only stepping in when the companies fail to do an adequate job [22]. For more information about Internet controls in China, see the Open Net Initiative's country profile [23].…”

Section: Discussion Of Ethical Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detecting Intentional Packet Drops on the Internet via TCP/IP Side Channels

Ensafi

Knockel

Alexander

et al. 2014

Passive and Active Measurement

Self Cite

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We describe a method for remotely detecting intentional packet drops on the Internet via side channel inferences. That is, given two arbitrary IP addresses on the Internet that meet some simple requirements, our proposed technique can discover packet drops (e.g., due to censorship) between the two remote machines, as well as infer in which direction the packet drops are occurring. The only major requirements for our approach are a client with a global IP Identifier (IPID) and a target server with an open port. We require no special access to the client or server. Our method is robust to noise because we apply intervention analysis based on an autoregressive-moving-average (ARMA) model. In a measurement study using our method featuring clients from multiple continents, we observed that, of all measured client connections to Tor directory servers that were censored, 98% of those were from China, and only 0.63% of measured client connections from China to Tor directory servers were not censored. This is congruent with current understandings about global Internet censorship, leading us to conclude that our method is effective.

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“…[64], [27], [13]. Previous systems determining such keywords have largely focused on individual countries and services, especially related to Chinese social media such as Weibo and TOM-Skype [35], [12].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring the Deployment of Network Censorship Filters at Global Scale

Raman

Stoll²,

Dalek

et al. 2020

Proceedings 2020 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium

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Content filtering technologies are often used for Internet censorship, but even as these technologies have become cheaper and easier to deploy, the censorship measurement community lacks a systematic approach to monitor their proliferation. Past research has focused on a handful of specific filtering technologies, each of which required cumbersome manual detective work to identify. Researchers and policymakers require a more comprehensive picture of the state and evolution of censorship based on content filtering in order to establish effective policies that protect Internet freedom. In this work, we present FilterMap, a novel framework that can scalably monitor content filtering technologies based on their blockpages. FilterMap first compiles in-network and new remote censorship measurement techniques to gather blockpages from filter deployments. We then show how the observed blockpages can be clustered, generating signatures for longitudinal tracking. FilterMap outputs a map of regions of address space in which the same blockpages appear (corresponding to filter deployments), and each unique blockpage is manually verified to avoid false positives. By collecting and analyzing more than 379 million measurements from 45,000 vantage points against more than 18,000 sensitive test domains, we are able to identify filter deployments associated with 90 vendors and actors and observe filtering in 103 countries. We detect the use of commercial filtering technologies for censorship in 36 out of 48 countries labeled as 'Not Free' or 'Partly Free' by the Freedom House "Freedom on the Net" report [26]. The unrestricted transfer of content filtering technologies have led to high availability, low cost, and highly effective filtering techniques becoming easier to deploy and harder to circumvent. Identifying these filtering deployments highlights policy and corporate social responsibility issues, and adds accountability to filter manufacturers. Our continued publication of FilterMap data will help the international community track the scope, scale and evolution of content-based censorship.

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Chat program censorship and surveillance in China: Tracking TOM-Skype and Sina UC

Cited by 13 publications

References 0 publications

Reverse-engineering censorship in China: Randomized experimentation and participant observation

Reverse-engineering censorship in China: Randomized experimentation and participant observation

Detecting Intentional Packet Drops on the Internet via TCP/IP Side Channels

Measuring the Deployment of Network Censorship Filters at Global Scale

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