Helmi Noman

Internet & Democracy project release study of the Arabic blogosphere

Harvard University Berkman Center releases a major research from the Internet & Democracy project: “Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture and Dissent.”

“Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere” utilizes a unique methodology that blends link analysis, term frequency analysis, and human coding of individual blogs to investigate the online discussions taking place across the Middle East and North Africa. Internet & Democracy project director Bruce Etling and his team, with Morningside Analytics founder and Berkman affiliate John Kelly, and co-authors Robert Faris and John Palfrey, identified a base network of approximately 35,000 active blogs (about half as many as found in their previous study of the Persian blogosphere), created a network map of the 6,000 most connected blogs, and with a group of Arabic speakers hand coded 4,000 blogs. Congratulations and thanks to all who collaborated on this significant work!

The goal for the study was to produce a baseline assessment of the networked public sphere in the Arab Middle East, and its relationship to a range of emergent issues, including politics, media, religion, culture, and international affairs. Whereas the previous study of the Persian blogosphere revealed a network organized primarily around political ideologies and topical issues, such as reformist and conservative politics, religion, and poetry, the Arabic blogosphere is organized primarily around countries. Moreover, personal life and local issues are the most important topics of discussion: most bloggers write mainly personal, diary-style observations, but when writing about politics, bloggers tend to focus on issues within their own country. Bloggers link to Web 2.0 sites like YouTube and Wikipedia (English and Arabic versions) more than other sources of information and news available on the Internet. The overall picture is one of country-based groupings of blogs focused on domestic issues.

To download the paper, including the full Key Findings, or to view the map of the Arabic blogosphere, visit http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2009/Mapping_the_Arabic_Blogosphere

ONI releases the Year in Review

The OpenNet Initiative is proud to present its Year in Review: a summary of events worldwide concerning  the practices and polices of Internet filtering and surveillance.

The Summit is Now Over!

 The Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008 brought together members of the Global Voices Online citizen media project, and its wider community with a diverse group of bloggers, activists, technologists, journalists around the world, for two days of public discussions and workshops.

Image by Neha Viswanathan

 Global Voices, Global Voices Advocacy and Média Hungária hosted the Summit in Budapest, Hungary on June 27-28, 2008 with generous support from McCormick Tribune Foundation, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Google, Open Society Institute, Knight Foundation, European Journalism Centre and dotSUB.

Social Networks to connect with the Summit

OpenNet Initiative Releases Results!

The OpenNet Initiative has just released the findings of its first global study of Internet filtering at St. Anne’s College at the University of Oxford; the culmination of five years of work and the first report of its kind.  It was the first public conference on Internet filtering hosted by the ONI -- with major assistance from the staff of the Oxford Internet Institute.

After ONI Research Director Rob Faris and Principal Investigator Ron Deibert presented the data, the ONI team solicited comments and questions from the audience of over 100 human rights activists, journalists, technologists, academics.  They discussed ways in which the communities in the room and around the world could use the findings to further their own research and advocacy.

The conference also marked the launch of the new ONI website that, in addition to several new functions, will host forty country profiles, eight regional overviews, and much more.

*You can find the latest coverage of the OpenNet Initiative and their findings from the San Jose Mercury News, BBC, Businessweek, MIT Technology Review, International Herald Tribune, IT News, Slashdot, and Digg.

Access Denied

The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering
Edited by Ronald J. Deibert, John G. Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski and Jonathan Zittrain

Many countries around the world block or filter Internet content, denying access to information--often about politics, but also relating to sexuality, culture, or religion--that they deem too sensitive for ordinary citizens. Access Denied documents and analyzes Internet filtering practices in over three dozen countries, offering the first rigorously conducted study of an accelerating trend.

Internet filtering takes place in over two dozens states worldwide including many countries in Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. Related Internet content control mechanisms are also in place in Canada, the United States and a cluster of countries in Europe. Drawing on a just-completed survey of global Internet filtering undertaken by the OpenNet Initiative (a collaboration of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, and the University of Cambridge) and relying on work by regional experts and an extensive network of researchers, Access Denied examines the political, legal, social, and cultural contexts of Internet filtering in these states from a variety of perspectives. Chapters discuss the mechanisms and politics of Internet filtering, the strengths and limitations of the technology that powers it, the relevance of international law, ethical considerations for corporations that supply states with the tools for blocking and filtering, and the implications of Internet filtering for activist communities that increasingly rely on Internet technologies for communicating their missions.

Reports on Internet content regulation in forty different countries follow, with each country profile outlining the types of content blocked by category and documenting key findings.

Contributors:
Ross Anderson, Malcolm Birdling, Ronald Deibert, Robert Faris, Vesselina Haralampieva, Steven Murdoch, Helmi Noman, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, Mary Rundle, Nart Villeneuve, Stephanie Wang, and Jonathan Zittrain

Ronald Deibert is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for Internet Studies, University of Toronto.

John Palfrey is Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

Rafal Rohozinski is a Research Fellow of the Cambridge Security Program and Director of the Advanced Network Research Group at Cambridge University.

Jonathan Zittrain is Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University and Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Visiting Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School.

• MIT Press, November 2007
• Order a copy of this book

 

Check it out: Wired News, "A Sneak Peak at a Fractured Web"

Last week members of the OpenNet Initiative convened at Berkman to review its research findings before setting to work on a comprehensive, annual study it will publish this spring. The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) is a joint collaborative project between the University of Toronto, Cambridge University, Oxford University, and Harvard Law School. Mark Anderson interviewed five ONI researchers, including Helmi Noman, Elijah Zarwan, Nart Villeneuve, and Stephen Murdoch. From the article:

The spectrum of internet censorship, the researchers found, ranged from transparent to utterly murky. Perhaps the country with the most accessible filtering system was Saudi Arabia, said Berkman Center research affiliate Helmi Noman. "On their website, they have all the information of why they block and what they block," he said. "And they invite contributions (of other sites to be blocked) from the public."

Vietnam, on the other hand, floats decoys. As ONI first documented this summer and confirmed in this year's study, the Southeast Asian regime purports to censor sexually explicit content. But ONI's computers found no such blocking in place. They did find, however, plenty of unadvertised censorship of political and religious websites critical of the country's one-party state.

Sometimes a censoring government tries to conceal its filtering behind spoofed web-browser error messages. ONI discovered that Tunisia, for instance, masks filtered pages by serving a mockup of Internet Explorer's 404 error page. These supposed error pages stood out, because ONI doesn't use IE. "Rather than getting a page that says 'This page has been blocked,' you get a page saying 'Page not found,' designed to look exactly like the Internet Explorer 404 page," said Cairo-based ONI consultant Elijah Zarwan.

Sometimes a censoring government apparently dips into the bag of tricks more commonly used by online extortionists and script kiddies. ONI researcher Stephen Murdoch of Cambridge University points to denial of service (or DoS) attacks on multiple opposition-party websites preceding countrywide elections in both Belarus and Kyrgyzstan.

Blogs empower non-state actors in the Arab world to speak and be heard

September 1, 2006

Excerpts from the report:

Blogging has added a new dimension to political discussion. This is especially the case in the fair share of anonymity.

According to Helmi Noman, a Fulbright scholar who researches internet usage in the Arab world, the power which was monopolised by states before the internet age is now rapidly eroding in the Arab world as citizens create and disseminate information.

Noman contends, "The internet has led to the abandonment of state-controlled media."

Full article from Gulf News.

Internet in the Arab World: A Catalyst for Power Shift

April 5, 2006

In a talk yesterday at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Helmi Noman  discussed how the Internet is creating an emerging information paradigm which democratizes access to information and liberates users from the control of content providers. These changes include ways in which the unprecedented access to information offered by the Internet empowers Arab Internet users and defies the social and political structures in the Arab world; issues surrounding state filtering systems; and the potential systemic changes which cyberspace will bring to real space in the Arab world.

"Internet Filtering in Yemen: 2004-2005"

3/6/2006

The OpenNet Initiative has released "Internet Filtering in Yemen 2004-2005," a country study that documents the degree and extent to which the Republic of Yemen controls the information environment in which its citizens live, including Web sites, blogs, e-mail, and online discussion forums.

Drawing from technical, legal, and political sources, ONI’s research finds that Yemen limits its citizens’ access to Internet content by using commercially available American filtering technology from Websense [http://www.websense.com/global/en/] and by controlling the state’s two Internet service providers (ISPs), TeleYemen and YemenNet, through the state’s Ministry of Telecommunications. The ISPs, with guidance from the ministry, set the rules on what may be accessed or published and are transparent about their efforts; users are notified that Internet content is being filtered and are told why particular sites are blocked. The ISPs primarily target pornography, gambling, proxy servers, and gay/lesbian materials, and neither blocks political material. ONI found that filtering for both ISPs increased from 2004 to 2005.

To read a copy of the report, please click here. http://www.opennetinitiative.net/studies/yemen/index.html

Blocked Arabic Content in Arab States

Helmi Noman

I have received numerous inquiries about my recent study "Content and Usage of Arabic Online Forums and Groups". Several inquiries requested information about the type of content being blocked by ISPs in the Arab countries. This information is not within the scope of this study.

Harvard's Open Net Initiative publishes studies on state filtration and surveillance practices. Among the Arab countries already covered in these studies are the UAE, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. These studies provide comprehensive understanding of what type of content is blocked by ISPs in some Arab countries.