published_or_final_version / abstract / Journalism and Media Studies Centre / Master / Master of Philosophy

二零一零年一月，全球最大的互联网搜索引擎谷歌在其官网上宣布了他们由于不满中国政府长期以来的网络审查制度而有意退出中国市场的决定。西方主流媒体及评论家对于中国的网络审查制度惯常以负面评价为主。中国民众对此又持怎样的态度呢？这个研究将焦点放在了中国的海归派身上。由于长年游走在中国大陆及海外之间，他们常常可以体验及比较不同地区的网络世界，故此对网络审查比一般的中国大陆民众有更深的体会及更详尽的洞悉。本研究旨在探索这群曾在或仍在中国境外居住的中国人是如何理解中国的互联网审查制度的。 / 在此研究的受访对象中，有些人将网络审查视为一个来自政府的负面干涉，并认为它代表了一个不诚实的政府。而另一些人则认为由于中国社会及中国文化的特殊性，网络审查制度有其存在的道理。虽然受访对象的看法多样，但他们在谈论这个话题的时候都表现出了一种充满矛盾感的民族主义情节 ---他们会竭力为一个另自己蒙羞的政府辩护。通过深入分析了这种充满矛盾感的民族主义情节：它是如何产生的，又意味着什么，它与网络审查制度又有何相关，笔者力图强调，本研究受访对象的国家认同感在这个辩护过程中得到了加强。此分析有助于更好的了解中国的网络审查制度，以及它的合理性是如何被塑造出来的。 / In January, 2010, the biggest internet search engine, Google, announced its potential exodus from the Chinese market due to China’s practice of censorship. Many foreign commentators have criticized China’s practice of censorship. But what are the views of Chinese citizens? This research focuses on a special group of Chinese netizens called “returnees“ [overseas Chinese who are living in between China and elsewhere], who have experienced both the domestic and overseas cyber-worlds. Through studying their perspectives on censorship, this research seeks to understand how those who have lived outside China understand internet censorship within China. / Some informants view internet censorship as a negative intrusion and a representation of an untruthful government while others consider it as a necessity in managing China’s cyberspace due to the special cultural context of Chinese society. Though their perceptions vary, my informants expressed a paradoxical nationalism, defending a government they felt ashamed of; this was expressed repeatedly during interviews. In this thesis, by bringing censorship and nationalism together, I analyze in depth my informants’ paradoxical and conflicting attitude toward these two concepts, in order to better understand Chinese censorship and how it may be justified. I argue that by defending censorship, my informants’ Chinese identities have been reinforced. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Chang, Xinyue. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 156-165). / Abstracts also in Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Chapter Chapter 1. --- Introduction --- p.1 / Introduction: “The Google-China Affair“ --- p.2 / Chinese Returnees --- p.4 / TheNascent Public Sphere, Censorship, and the Google-China Affair --- p.5 / AnHistorical Perspective --- p.13 / Methodology --- p.21 / Chapter Breakdown --- p.24 / Chapter Chapter2. --- Literature Review --- p.26 / The Anthropology of Cyberspace --- p.26 / China’s Cyberspace --- p.36 / Nationalismand Chinese Nationalism --- p.39 / Chapter Chapter3. --- The Google-China Affair --- p.53 / TheSage of Google and China --- p.58 / Reviewing the Saga through the Eyes of Chinese Returnees --- p.63 / Follow-Up --- p.77 / Conclusion --- p.77 / Chapter Chapter4. --- Freedom of Information --- p.79 / Universal Human Rights vs. Cultural Relativism --- p.79 / Individual Agency vs. State Control --- p.85 / Market Domination vs. State Control --- p.90 / The Concept of Rationality --- p.92 / Responses to Moral Discipline --- p.97 / Conclusion --- p.101 / Chapter Chapter5. --- Freedom of Speech --- p.103 / Freedom in Relation to Speech --- p.105 / Twitter and Sina Weibo --- p.109 / Liu Xiaobo --- p.116 / Ai Weiwei --- p.119 / The Chinese Jasmine Movement --- p.122 / Conclusion --- p.124 / Chapter Chapter6. --- Conclusion: Censorship and Chinese Nationalism --- p.129 / The Conundrum of Self-Flagellating National Pride --- p.130 / Repressive Hypothesis --- p.136 / Presentation of Self and Rituals of Rebellion --- p.141 / Collective Memory Construction --- p.149 / Conclusion: Censorship and Nationalism --- p.151 / Bibliography --- p.156

This Master thesis deals with the subject of state censorship of the Internet. The objective of the thesis is to map the techniques of state censorship of the Internet and the methods of circumvention. In the first part, the author introduces organisations and projects that investigate state Internet censorship in the world. Subsequently, the author depicts inspection methods of communication and the Internet filtering techniques. The following part focuses on the principles of circumventing Internet censorship. It also describes various techniques of the circumvention of the censorship. Another objective of the thesis is to test the practical methods of circumventing Internet censorship. As a destination for the measurement the author has chosen PRC where he scrutinised the state of Internet censorship and tested the success rate of circumvention methods. The presented outputs serve as an overview of the techniques of the state censorship of the Internet and the methods of its circumvention, and can be used as a foundation for further work.

Thesis (M.Com. (Information Systems))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, School of Economic and Business Sciences, 2017 / Although studies have been conducted on the effectiveness of different types of filtering software, limited knowledge is available on parents’ use of strategies to monitor their children’s activities online. Thus, identifying understanding parents’ use of strategies to monitor children’s activities online and the extent in which parents use content filtering software will contribute to the body of knowledge. The purpose of this study is to understand parent’s use of strategies to monitor children’s activities online and the extent in which they use content filtering software in Gauteng Province, South Africa. The study adopted a Social Cognitive Theory to develop a conceptual framework and identify existing theoretical concepts. The conceptual framework adapted Bandura’s (2001) framework to inform data analysis. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and qualitative, thematic content analysis was used for data analyses. The results of the study indicated that parents do use various strategies to monitor children’s activities online and further apply knowledge, experience, and social support as a rationale for using those strategies. The study further revealed that there is a gap between parents, technology industry and government regarding the use of content filtering software. Thus, the study recommends parents, industry and government work together to protecting children online through various strategies and address the concerns regarding the use of content filtering software. Parents’ need to understand the importance of content filtering software and discuss this with their children to be able to protect them online without restricting access to relevant information. Keywords: Harmful content, blocking, strategies, filtering, online content, software, use, non-use, strategies / GR2018

Free and open exchange of information on the Internet is at risk: more than 60 countries practice some form of Internet censorship, and both the number of countries practicing censorship and the proportion of Internet users who are subject to it are on the rise. Understanding and mitigating these threats to Internet freedom is a continuous technological arms race with many of the most influential governments and corporations. By its very nature, Internet censorship varies drastically from region to region, which has impeded nearly all efforts to observe and fight it on a global scale. Researchers and developers in one country may find it very difficult to study censorship in another; this is particularly true for those in North America and Europe attempting to study notoriously pervasive censorship in Asia and the Middle East. This dissertation develops techniques and systems that empower users in one country, or bystanders, to assist in the measurement and circumvention of Internet censorship in another. Our work builds from the observation that there are people everywhere who are willing to help us if only they knew how. First, we develop Encore, which allows webmasters to help study Web censorship by collecting measurements from their sites' visitors. Encore leverages weaknesses in cross-origin security policy to collect measurements from a far more diverse set of vantage points than previously possible. Second, we build Collage, a technique that uses the pervasiveness and scalability of user-generated content to disseminate censored content. Collage's novel communication model is robust against censorship that is significantly more powerful than governments use today. Together, Encore and Collage help people everywhere study and circumvent Internet censorship.

This dissertation explores the role of Internet censorship and circumvention in the Arab world as well as Arabs’ views on the limits to free speech on the Internet. The project involves the creation of an Internet censorship circumvention tool named Alkasir that allows users to report and access certain types of censored websites. The study covers the Arab world at large with special focus on Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen. This work is of interdisciplinary nature and draws on the disciplines of media and communication studies and computer science. It uses a pioneering experimental approach by placing Alkasir in the hands of willing users who automatically feed a server with data about usage patterns without storing any of their personal information. In addition to the analysis of Alkasir usage data, Web surveys were used to learn about any technical and nontechnical Internet censorship practices that Arab users and content producers may have been exposed to. The study also aims at learning about users’ experiences with circumvention tools and how such tools could be improved. The study found that users have successfully reported and accessed hundreds of censored social networking, news, dissident, multimedia and other websites. The survey results show that while most Arab informants disapprove censoring online anti-government political content, the majority support the censoring of other types of content such as pornography, hate speech, and anti-religion material. Most informants indicated that circumvention tools should be free of charge, fast and reliable. An increase in awareness among survey respondents of the need for privacy and anonymity features in circumvention solutions was observed.

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2018-12-11T11:59:14Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Victor Cencini Rodrigues.pdf: 604746 bytes, checksum: 68d25d36933543ca0a28f1150e3ba5e7 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-12-11T11:59:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Victor Cencini Rodrigues.pdf: 604746 bytes, checksum: 68d25d36933543ca0a28f1150e3ba5e7 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-10-05 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / The research focused on the issue of censorship on Facebook, verify the existence of this censorship and its nature, how this censorship is made and justified to users, how the American social network treats the content published by its users, censorship cases were searched on the EFF website (Eletronic Frontier Foundiation, an American civil rights organization such as freedom of expression on the internet, the survey touched on important Internet issues such as privacy, mass surveillance by governments and the private sector. censorship found range from activists of black movements censored by the denunciation of racist messages they receive, journalists who have been censored for reasons ranging from the disclosure of documents on political scandals or war crimes, research using the terms in their version of the year of 2015, every user entering a social network on the internet had to agree with the terms and privacy policy, the terms under which conditions a publication may be withdrawn / A pesquisa se debruçou sobre a questão da censura no Facebook e sobre a verificação da existência dessa censura e sua natureza, além de como essa censura é feita e justificada aos usuários. Houve um questionamento de como a rede social americana trata o conteúdo publicado pelos seus usuários. As consultas sobre os casos de censura foram realizadas no site da EFF (Eletronic Frontier Foundiation), organização americana que milita pelos direitos civis como a liberdade de expressão na internet. A pesquisa percorreu questões importantes para a internet como a privacidade, vigilância em massa feita pelos governos e pelo setor privado. Os casos de censura encontrados variam desde ativistas dos movimentos negros censurados pela denúncia de mensagens racistas que recebem e jornalistas que foram censurados por motivos que vão desde a divulgação de documentos sobre escândalos políticos ou crimes de guerra. A pesquisa concordou com a utilização dos termos em sua versão do ano de 2015 tendo em vista que os termos atuais foram divulgados na fase de finalização desta pesquisa, portanto não seria possível analisá-los. Todo usuário ao entrar em uma rede social na internet teve concordar com os termos e a politica de privacidade, os termos colocam em quais condições uma publicação pode ser retirada

Internet users rely on the availability of websites and digital services to engage in political discussions, report on newsworthy events in real-time, watch videos, etc. However, sometimes those who control networks, such as governments, censor certain websites, block specific applications or throttle encrypted traffic. Understandably, when users are faced with egregious censorship, where certain websites or applications are banned, they seek reliable and efficient means to circumvent such blocks. This tension is evident in countries such as a Iran and China, where the Internet censorship infrastructure is pervasive and continues to increase in scope and effectiveness. An arms race is unfolding with two competing threads of research: (1) network operators' ability to classify traffic and subsequently enforce policies and (2) network users' ability to control how network operators classify their traffic. Our goal is to understand and progress the state-of-the-art for both sides. First, we present novel traffic analysis attacks against encrypted communications. We show that state-of-the-art cryptographic protocols leak private information about users' communications, such as the websites they visit, applications they use, or languages used for communications. Then, we investigate means to mitigate these privacy-compromising attacks. Towards this, we present a toolkit of cryptographic primitives and protocols that simultaneously (1) achieve traditional notions of cryptographic security, and (2) enable users to conceal information about their communications, such as the protocols used or websites visited. We demonstrate the utility of these primitives and protocols in a variety of real-world settings. As a primary use case, we show that these new primitives and protocols protect network communications and bypass policies of state-of-the-art hardware-based and software-based network monitoring devices.

This study assesses the value of two analytical models explaining particular contemporary political events. This is undertaken through the comparative evaluation of two international models: the Advocacy Coalition Framework and Rhodes’s model of Governance. These approaches are evaluated against an single case study: the censorship of computer network (“online”) content in Australia. Through comparison evaluation, criticism, and reformulation, these approaches are presented as useful tools of policy analysis in Australia. / The first part of the thesis presents the theoretical basis of the research and the methodologies employed to apply them. It begins by examining how the disciplines of political science and public policy have focused on the role of politically-active “interest”, groups in the process of policy development and implementation. This focus has lead to ideas about the role of the state actors in policy making, and attempts to describe and explain the interface between public and private groups in developing and implementing public policies. These, largely British and American, theories have impacted upon Australian researchers who have applied these ideas to local conditions. The majority of this part, however, is spent introducing the two research approaches: Paul Sabatier’s Advocacy Coalitions Framework and Rod Rhodes’s theory of Governance. Stemming from dissatisfaction with research into implementation, Sabatier’s framework attempts to show how competing clusters of groups and individuals compete for policy “wins” in a discrete subsystem by using political strategies to effect favourable decisions and information to change the views of other groups. Governance, on the other hand, attempts to apply Rhodes’s observations to the changing nature of the British state (and by implication other liberal democracies) to show the importance of self-organising networks of organisations who monopolise power and insulate the processes of decision making and implementation from the wider community and state organs. Finally, the methodologies of the thesis are presented, based on the preferred research methods of the two authors. / The second part introduces the case serving as the basis for evaluating the models, namely, censorship of the content of computer networks in Australia between 1987 and 2000. This case arises in the late 1980s with the computerisation of society and technological developments leading to the introduction of, first publicly-accessible computer bulletin boards, and then the technology of the Internet. From a small hobbyists’ concern, the uptake of this technology combined with wider censorship issues leads to the consideration of online content by Australian Governments, seeking a system of regulation to apply to this technology. As the emerging Internet becomes popularised, and in the face of adverse media attention on, especially pornographic, online content, during the mid to late 1990s two Federal governments establish a series of policy processes that eventually lead to the introduction of the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act 1999, a policy decision bringing online content into Australia’s intergovernmental censorship system. / The final part analyses the case study using the two theoretical approaches. What this shows is that, from the perspective of the Advocacy Coalition Framework, debate over online content does not form a substantive policy subsystem until 1995, and within this three, relatively stable, competing coalitions emerge, each pressuring for different levels of action and intervention (from no regulation, to a strong regulatory model). While conflict within the subsystem varied, overall the framework’s analysis shows the dominance of a coalition consisting largely of professional and business interests favouring a light, co-regulatory approach to online content. From the perspective of Governance, the issue of online content is subject to a range of intra- and inter-governmental conflict in the period 1995-7, finally settling into a negotiated position where a complex policy community emerges based largely on structurally-determined resource dependencies. What this means is that policy making in the case was not autonomous of state institutions, but highly dependent on institutional power relations. Overall, in comparing the findings it becomes apparent that the approaches lack the capacity to fully explain the role of key sovereigns, defined here as those individuals with legal authority over decision making in the policy process, because of their methodological and normative assumptions about the policy process. By showing these individuals as part of wider networks of power-dependencies, and exploring the complex bundle of real, pseudo, symbolic, and nonsense elements that make up a policy, the role of Ministers as “semi-sovereign sovereigns” can be accommodated in the two approaches.

The Great Firewall of China (GFC) represents one of the most sophisticated censoring infrastructures in the world. While several aspects of the GFC including HTTP keyword filtering and DNS tampering have been studied thoroughly in the past, recent work has shown that the GFC goes to great lengths to prevent its citizens from using the Tor anonymity network. By employing the so-called follow-up scanning technique, Tor bridge relays are blocked dynamically. In this thesis, we survey previous work in the area of the GFC ranging from HTTP keyword filtering and DNS tampering, to the Tor follow-up scanning. Furthermore, additional experiments are carried out to gain a better understanding of how the follow-up scanning is implemented as well as where the filtering occurs for different protocols.