2007 Circumvention Landscape report

Methods, Uses, and Tools

Tags: Digital Natives
Additional tags: Cirumvention, ICT

The Berkman institute research focuses on the methods, uses and tools of the circumvention landscape. Their report shows that most circumvention tools functioned as they intended. However, the Berkman institute discovered that all tools slow down access to the Internet, that most tools featured serious security holes, and that some tools were extremely difficult for a novice Internet user to use.

2007 Circumvention Landscape report: Methods, Uses, and Tools

Hal Roberts, Ethan Zuckerman, and John Palfrey

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University

Over the past fifteen years, we have collectively transformed the Internet from an academic curiosity to an essential piece of the global communications infrastructure, an engine for commerce and a major platform for free expression. As states have connected their citizenry to the Internet, leaders of some of those states have discovered speech they find threatening, unsettling or counter to national values and norms. In turn, some states have taken measures to limit citizen access to the Internet and prohibited the publication of various types of information online. In the past five years, government filtering of the Internet has become endemic.

Even in the early days of the Internet’s popularity, when tools to circumvent Internet filtering predated government filtering of the internet, hundreds of simple websites –proxies- existed to help users evade Internet filtering. Since then governments and human rights funders have supported the building, maintaining and marketing of circumvention tools as there had been a long history of the importance of free media in closed society.

Hivos is involved in the domain of human rights in the information society for many years now. The ICT and media programme of Hivos aims to increase capacity of citizens (in particular poor and marginalised women and men) to participate in decision-making processes at all levels of society. Hivos believes that access to information and communication can empower citizens and enable them. To identify what is needed to enable these citizens, it is important to understand how Internet filtering is circumvented, which tools and how they are used. For this reason Hivos supported the research into Circumvention tools by the Berkman Center.