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Internet: Land of the Free?
Cell phones, computers, laptops, tablets and portable media players have freed Americans to access the Internet wherever they are and at whatever time of day. World markets are now updated every minute, news feeds change by the second, and the free flow of business communication never stops.
While the U.S. and freedom seem to go hand-in-hand, it may surprise you that the U.S. actually ranks second behind Estonia in Internet independence, according to an extensive study by Freedom House. Their new report, Freedom on the Net 2011, charts different countries’ Internet activity against accessibility, revealing some rather important clusters.
Access vs. Freedom on the Internet
On one extreme, the U.S., U.K. and Australia have more than 70 percent of their population on the Internet and they enjoy almost total freedom—no surprise there. On the other extreme are Ethiopia, Cuba and Burma, where very few people access a heavily guarded Web.
As I’ve discussed previously (Read: A Look at China’s Twitter), China has an increasing amount of people on the Internet, yet there are severe controls in place to limit where they go and what they discuss. Mexico has approximately the same Internet penetration rate, yet a majority of the population is rural and lacks affordable access to the Web. Unlike China, the Internet in Mexico is mostly free of censorship: access to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blog-hosting services is available.
What’s interesting is the cluster of countries in the middle of the chart. From this group, Freedom House has identified five critical countries—Jordan, Russia, Thailand, Venezuela and Zimbabwe – where the Internet is both “vitally important and in significant danger of repression” over the next two years. Jordan, while it has boasted that it allows more freedom on the Web than other Middle Eastern countries, has strictly monitored Internet activity among citizens. There have even been incidents of popular news websites being hacked after posting sensitive material. And, as Venezuela prepares for a presidential election in 2012, restrictions to websites and blogs as well as censorship are expected to increase.
Protestors in EgyptIn Egypt, the Internet played a huge role in forcing Hosni Mubarak to resign because it allowed its citizens to organize protests in the streets. By the time the government stepped in to block Twitter and Facebook, two very important social tools to mobilize protesters, they were too late.
In the online world, the rate of change has been accelerated, and the countries in the middle section of this chart represent a tipping point. The number of people accessing the Internet will most likely grow, forcing countries to act. They can encourage the free expression we enjoy in America or create greater repression and begin a chain reaction that affects personal Internet users, businesses trying to compete worldwide and politicians trying to effect change.
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Community Talk
Re: Internet: Land of the Free?
This is a very important topic these days given the uprising in the Middle East and Northern Africa. While the internet is host to a ton of garbage, and pornography makes up a massive percentage of online websites, opening up the world wide web has endorsed mass innovation and even helped Obama become the President of the US. His social networking campaign in 2008 was extremely innovative and had a huge effect on the young voter.
If some of these nations who have put the clamps on internet freedom actually looked into ways it could help their government, they'd open up their usage. To me, countries like China, Iran and Venezuela fear what they don't know. It is more of a tool they can use rather than a weapon to be used against them.
The more the internet grows across the globe, the more great innovation we will see. As far as monumental inventions, I put the internet right up their with the lightbulb!
Re: Internet: Land of the Free?
Read this astonishing warning re Wi-Fi Precautions one should consider:
Wi-Fi pirates can make you a suspect
Protect wireless router with password, experts say, to block illegal downloads
By Carolyn Thompson
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BUFFALO, N.Y. — Lying on his family room floor with assault weapons trained on him, shouts of “pedophile!” and “pornographer!” stinging like his fresh cuts and bruises, the Buffalo homeowner didn’t need long to figure out the rea son for the early wake-up call from federal agents.
That new wireless router. He’d gotten fed up trying to set a password. Someone must have used his Internet connection, he thought.
“We know who you are! You downloaded thousands of im ages at 11:30 last night,” the man’s lawyer, Barry Covert, recounted the agents saying. They referred to a screen name, “Doldrum.”
“No, I didn’t,” he insisted. “Somebody else could have, but I didn’t do anything like that.”
“You’re a creep… just admit it,” they said.
Law enforcement officials say the case is a cautionary tale. Their advice: Password protect your wireless router.
Plenty of others would agree. The Sarasota, Fla., man, for example, who got a similar visit from the FBI last
See WI-FI on page 5A
WI-FI
FROM PAGE 1A
year after someone on a boat docked in a marina outside his building used a potato chip can as an anten na to boost his wireless sig nal and download an as tounding 10 million images of child porn, or the North Syracuse, N.Y., man who in December2009 opened his door to police who’d been following an electronic trail of illegal videos and imag es. The man’s neighbor pleaded guilty April 12.
For two hours that morn ing in Buffalo, agents tapped away at the home owner’s computer, eventu ally taking it with them, along with his and his wife’s iPads and iPhones.
Within three days, inves tigators determined the ho meowner had been telling the truth: If someone was downloading child pornog raphy through his wireless signal, it wasn’t him. About a week later, agents arrest ed a 25-year-old neighbor and charged him with dis tribution of child pornogra phy. The case is pending.
It’s unknown how often unsecured routers have brought legal trouble for subscribers. Besides the criminal investigations, there are Web stories of people who’ve had to fight charges of illegally down loading music or movies.
Whether you’re guilty or not, “you look like the sus pect,” said Orin Kerr, a pro fessor at George Washing ton University Law School. Experts say the savvy hackers can go beyond just connecting to the Internet on the host’s dime and monitor Internet activity and steal passwords or other information.
A study released in Feb ruary conducted for the Wi-Fi Alliance, a group that promotes wireless technol ogy standards, found among 1,054 Americans age18 and older, 32 percent acknowledged trying to ac cess a Wi-Fi network that wasn’t theirs. An estimated 201 million households worldwide use Wi-Fi net works, the alliance says.
The same study, con ducted by Wakefield Re search, found 40 percent said they would be more likely to trust someone with their house key than with their Wi-Fi network password.
For some, though, leav ing their wireless router open is a philosophical de cision, a way of returning the favor for the times they’ve hopped on to some one else’s network to check email or download directions.
“I think it’s convenient and polite to have an open Wi-Fi network,” said Re becca Jeschke, whose home signal is accessible to anyone within range.
“Public Wi-Fi is for the common good, and I’m happy to participate in that — and lots of people are,” said Jeschke, a spokes woman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that takes on cyberspace civil liberties issues.
Experts say wireless rou ters come with encryption software, but setting it up means a trip to the manual. The government’s Com puter Emergency Readi ness Team recommends homeusersmaketheir net works invisible to others by disabling the identifier broadcasting function that allows wireless access points to announce their presence. It also advises users to replace any default network names or pass words, because those are widely known, and to keep an eye on the manufactur er’s website for security patches or updates.
People with an open wireless router won’t know when someone else is pig gybacking on the signal, which usually reaches 300-400 feet, though a slower connection may be a clue.
For the Buffalo home owner, who didn’t want to be identified, the tip-off wasn’t nearly as subtle.
It was 6:20 a.m. March 7 when he and his wife were awakened by the sound of someone breaking down their rear door. He walked to the top of the stairs, look ing down to see seven armed people with jackets labeled I-C-E, which he didn’t immediately know stood for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“They are screaming at him, ‘Get down! Get down on the ground!’” Covert said.
“One of the agents runs up and basically throws him down the stairs, and he’s got the cuts and bruis es to show for it,” said Co vert, who said the home owner plans no lawsuit.
The homeowner later got an apology from U.S. Attorney William Hochul and Immigration and Cus toms Enforcement Special Agent in Charge Lev Ku biak.
After a search of his de vices proved the home owner’s innocence, investi gators looked at logs that showed what other IP ad dresses Doldrum had used. Two were associated with the State University of New York at Buffalo and accessed using a secure to ken that UB said was as signed to a student living in an apartment adjacent to the homeowner. Agents ar rested John Luchetti March 17. He has pleaded not guilty to distribution of child pornography.
Luchetti is not charged with using his neighbor’s Wi-Fi without permission.
“The question,” said Kerr, “is whether it’s unau thorized access and so you have to say, ‘Is an open wireless point implicitly au thorizing users or not?’ “We don’t know,” Kerr said. “The law prohibits un authorized access, and it’s just not clear what’s autho rized with an open unse cured wireless.”