Helmi Noman

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.

Web Credibility and Evaluating Web Resources in the Age of Googlism

Helmi Noman

September 13, 2005 - Dubai

The talk provided background to the issue of Web credibility, introduced major research studies which investigate what causes experts and non-experts to believe – or not believe – what they find online, and evaluated emerging measures used to evaluate Web sites for popularity, authority, and credibility. The talk also discussed legal responses that have developed to protect intellectual property online and how that affects the issue of Web credibility.

Attendees included faculty, staff and students from Zayed University.

MIDDLE EAST: Focus on contrasting fortunes with the "digital divide"

Helmi Noman is quoted in a report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs about technology for development

© IRIN

Excerpts from the report:

Public policy-makers tend to limit the definition of ICT to computers and computer networks only," technology expert Helmi Noman told IRIN, in suggesting reasons for Yemen's poor progress. "There is a lack of a comprehensive vision of the value of ICT in the development context."

Generally, Noman said, "ICT is envisioned as part of either the service or production sector. However, the impact, usability, and sustainability of ICT in development are not strongly understood."

Because there is no "comprehensive vision of the value of ICT in development", Noman suggested, "there is no implementation plan that makes effective use of ICT to address the Millennium Development Goals."

Full report from UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

Al-Jazeera TV can not acquire aljazeera.com, WIPO says.

Helmi Noman

Aljazeera Space Channel TV lost a case to acquire the domain name aljazeera.com from its current owner Al-Jazeera Publishing, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) ruled July 19, 2005.

The TV Channel whose web sites are www.aljazeera.net and english.aljazeera.net has complained to WIPO Arbitration and Media Center that the previously unknown Al-Jazeera Publishing acquired in bad faith the domain aljazeera.com which is confusingly identical to its trademarks, and that the Al-Jazeera Publishing has not been using the domain name for a bona fide purpose, as it is operating a site portraying itself to be the same entity as the Al-Jazeera Space Channel. To prove confusion, Al-Jazeera TV made use of an article I published previous in which I indicated that a BBC Web story mistakenly links to aljazeera.com instead of aljazeera.net.

Al-Jazeera Publishing argued that the filing and registration of the Al-Jazeera TV’s trademarks are dated after 2000, long after the registration of the domain name on April 12, 1996. “The Complainant’s organization did not even exist at the time the domain name was registered”, Al-Jazeera Publishing said.

While Al-Jazeera TV tried to prove that there is “bad faith” behind operating aljazeera.com, the 3-member panel appointed by WIPO had a different opinion. They said in their decision that the complaint by Al-Jazeera TV “was brought in bad faith and constitutes an abuse of the Administrative Proceeding”.

Anecdotal evidences suggest that the Al-Jazeera TV Web site has contributed to diverting some online traffic from its web site to the .com look-a-like Web site. Visitors to the TV Web site who did not type the www in the domain used to get an error message and as a result some online visitors switched to aljazeera.com believing that the .net domain was not available. This self-inflicted online "injury" had significantly contributed to the online confusion in the past.

Based in Geneva, Switzerland, the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center was established in 1994 to offer Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) options, in particular arbitration and mediation, for the resolution of international commercial disputes between private parties.

Strategic Use of Internet for Journalists Workshop

Dubai, May 22-24, 2005

A press release from UNESCO Chair

Dubai Women's College (DWC) UNESCO Chair for Communication Technology and Journalism, in collaboration with the U.S. Embassy's American Center for Press and Cultural Affairs, held a training program for a group of twenty-two Arab female journalists and educators from the UAE.

The intensive, hands-on, three-day workshop titled 'Effective use of the Internet for Journalists' covered strategies and techniques to better use the internet and technology in all aspects of journalism.

Participants were introduced to effective web surfing techniques to retrieve data and news from various internet resources by the program trainers Helmi Noman, an ICT regional specialist and the Director of the Information Resource Center at the U.S Embassy's American Press and Cultural Center in Abu Dhabi. He was joined by Henry Mendelsohn, the Regional Information Resources Officer at the U.S. Embassy, and serves as a consultant to the American Embassy Information Resource Centers on the Arabian Peninsula, Jordan and Lebanon. 'Throughout the world, technology has also been a great gender equalizer, but this has been particularly evident in the Middle East in the media field with great social and cultural barriers being broken down which previously impeded women,' stated Reem Obeidat, DWC UNESCO Chair. This training event was developed to assist female journalists and educators to make further advances in their field in the region.

Media Coverage

UNESCO Web site
AMEinfo.com (English)
AMEinfo.com (Arabic)
Al-Ittihad Newspaper (Arabic)
Albayan Newspaper (Arabic)

Whose Information Is This & Can I Use It?

Helmi Noman

A paper for the Internet Librarian International conference

London, October 12-13, 2004

About the paper

"Who owns what you find on the internet and where did it come from? Is it OK to use? To transfer to and from other web sites? This paper discusses emerging legal issues surrounding web content development and publishing, web-specific legal controversies including copyright, intellectual property, and the legality of internet fair use as it relates to various online activities, as well as the legal rights and responsibilities every information professional, webmaster, and web site owner should know."