Bits Blog: From North Korea With Love: a Tablet With No Internet Access

Bits Blog: Syria Loses Access to the Internet

Umbrella Security Labs A graphic shows Internet addresses in Syria were no longer reachable after 3 p.m.

Syria’s access to the Internet was cut on Tuesday. The most likely culprit, security researchers said, was the Syrian government.

Syrian Internet traffic came to a halt just before 3 p.m. Eastern time. Google reported a drop in Internet traffic around that time, as did the Local Coordinating Committees, an antigovernment activist group in Syria.

Four physical cables connect Syria to the Internet — three under the sea, and the fourth over land through Turkey. For outsiders to cause Tuesday’s outage, security experts say, they would have had to physically cut all four cables simultaneously.

That does not appear to have happened in this case, according to security experts. Instead, someone with access to the physical connections dropped the Border Gateway Protocol, or B.G.P., routes into Syria in such a way that any information trying to enter the country was not able to find its way.

“It’s akin to someone removing all the street signs into Syria,” said Matthew Prince, the founder of CloudFlare, an Internet security firm that distributes large volumes of traffic across the Internet. The firm put together a video illustrating Syria’s outage.

The same technique was used to shut down the Internet and mobile phone service last November. Syrian government officials said terrorists, not the government, were responsible for that outage, but evidence pointed to government involvement.

Ironically, Syrian opposition groups are more immune to Internet and cellphone outages than ordinary Syrians. In Syria’s opposition-controlled territories, rebels have successfully built an alternate system of Internet and cellphone connectivity using two-way satellite devices.

But experts warn that the use of satellite devices also makes it much easier for the Syrian government to track the rebels’ location.

“Radio direction finding and signals intelligence could easily be deployed in this scenario to figure out where the opposition is communicating from,” said John Scott-Railton, a research fellow at the Citizen Lab, an organization at the University of Toronto that focuses on Internet security.

German Bill Limits Search Engines’ Free Access to News

The bill, which follows years of debate, came as the newspaper industry in Germany, as elsewhere, struggles to find new sources of revenue as readers and advertisers move online in droves.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right coalition, which faces an election in September, watered down its original plans amid pressure from Internet lobbyists, lawyers and others who argued that it undermined freedom of information. The opposition parties could still block the bill in the Bundesrat, the upper house of Parliament, where the government has no majority.

Google began an ad campaign in German newspapers and set up a Web site called “Defend your Web” to lobby against the proposals, saying they would result in less information for consumers and higher costs for companies.

The “ancillary copyright” bill now makes clear that search engines can publish “individual words or small snippets of text such as headlines” without incurring any costs.

They would have to pay for use of longer pieces of content, though opposition parties said the wording of the bill was vague and could lead to courts having to rule on individual cases.

“It is not at all clear who is now meant to be protected from whom and why there is this law,” said the opposition Greens on their Web site on Friday, saying the bill served neither cash-hungry publishers nor the free flow of information.

Google echoed such criticism.

“The law is neither necessary nor sensible. It hampers innovation and hurts the economy and Internet users in Germany,” said Kay Oberbeck, communications director at Google.

But the association of German newspaper publishers welcomed the bill as “an important element in the creation of a fair legal space in the digital world.”

They have argued that search engines raise the vast majority of their revenue from online advertising and that a substantial part of this come directly or indirectly from the free access to professional news or entertainment content produced by news media companies.

The German draft bill states explicitly that it is not intended to protect newspapers from the effects of ongoing structural changes in the market.

In a Slight Shift, North Korea Widens Internet Access, but Just for Visitors

Cracking the door open slightly to wider Internet use, the government will allow a company called Koryolink to give foreigners access to 3G mobile Internet service by next Friday, according to The Associated Press, which has a bureau in the North.

The North Korean police state is famously cloistered, a means for the government to keep news of the world from its impoverished people. Only the most elite North Koreans have been allowed access to the Internet, and even they are watched. And although many North Koreans are allowed to have cellphones, sanctioned phones cannot call outside the country.

Foreigners were only recently allowed to use cellphones in the country. Previously, most had to surrender their phones with customs agents.

But it is unlikely that the small opening will compromise the North’s tight control of its people; the relatively few foreigners who travel to North Korea — a group that includes tourists and occasional journalists — are assigned government minders.

The decision, announced Friday, to allow foreigners Internet access comes a month after Google’s chairman, Eric E. Schmidt, visited Pyongyang, the North’s capital. While there he prodded officials on allowing Internet access, noting how easy it would be to set up through the expanding 3G network of Koryolink, a joint venture of North Korean and Egyptian telecommunications corporations. Presumably, Mr. Schmidt’s appeal was directed at giving North Koreans such capability.

“As the world becomes increasingly connected, their decision to be virtually isolated is very much going to affect their physical world, their economic growth and so forth,” Mr. Schmidt told reporters following his visit. “We made that alternative very, very clear.”

North Koreans will get some benefit from the 3G service, as they will be allowed to text and make video calls, The Associated Press said. They can also view newspaper reports — but the news service mentioned only one source: Rodong Sinmun, the North’s main Communist Party newspaper.

IHT Rendezvous: North Korea Widens Internet Access, but Just for Visitors

Jon Chol Jin/Associated Press North Korea said it will allow Koryolink to give foreigners access to mobile Internet service. In January, above, tourists inquired about cellphone rentals at Pyongyang Airport.

HONG KONG — North Korea will finally allow Internet searches on mobile devices and laptops. But if you’re a North Korean, you’re out of luck — only foreigners will get this privilege.

Cracking the door open slightly to wider Internet use, the government will allow a company called Koryolink to give foreigners access to 3G mobile Internet service by March 1, The Associated Press reported.

The decision, announced Friday, comes a month after Google’s chairman, Eric E. Schmidt, visited Pyongyang and prodded officials on allowing Internet access, noting how easy it would be to set up through Koryolink’s expanding 3G network. Presumably, his appeal was directed at giving North Koreans such capability.

“As the world becomes increasingly connected, their decision to be virtually isolated is very much going to affect their physical world, their economic growth and so forth,” Mr. Schmidt told reporters after arriving at Beijing International Airport following his visit to North Korea. “We made that alternative very, very clear.”

Foreigners were only recently allowed to use cellphones in the country. Previously, they had to surrender their phones with customs agents.

China Blocks Web Access to Times

The authorities were also blocking attempts to mention The Times or the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, in posts on Sina Weibo, an extremely popular mini-blogging service in China that resembles Twitter.

The Foreign Ministry spokesman on duty in Beijing early Friday morning did not answer phone calls seeking comment.

China maintains the world’s most extensive and sophisticated system for Internet censorship, employing tens of thousands of people to monitor what is said, delete entries that contravene the country’s extensive and unpublished regulations and even write new entries that are favorable to the government.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a senior fellow specializing in Internet free expression and privacy issues at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan group headquartered in Washington, said that the Chinese interruption of Internet access was typical of the response to information that offended leaders.

“This is what they do: they get mad, they block you,” she said.

The English-language and Chinese-language Web sites of The Times are hosted on servers outside mainland China.

A spokeswoman for The Times, Eileen Murphy, expressed disappointment that Internet access had been blocked and noted that the Chinese-language Web site had attracted “great interest” in China.

“We hope that full access is restored shortly, and we will ask the Chinese authorities to ensure that our readers in China can continue to enjoy New York Times journalism,” she said in a statement, adding, “We will continue to report and translate stories applying the same journalistic standards that are upheld across The New York Times.”

Former President Jiang Zemin of China ordered an end to blocking of The New York Times Web site after meeting with journalists from The Times in August 2001. The company’s Web sites, like those of most other foreign media organizations, have remained mostly free of blocking since then, with occasional, temporary exceptions.

By 7 a.m. Friday in China, access to both the English- and Chinese-language Web sites of The Times was blocked from all 31 cities in mainland China tested. The Times had posted the article in English at 4:34 p.m. on Thursday in New York (4:34 a.m. Friday in Beijing), and finished posting the article in Chinese three hours later after the translation of final edits to the English-language version.

Publication of the article about Mr. Wen and his family comes at a delicate time in Chinese politics, during a year in which factional rivalries and the personal lives of Chinese leaders have come into public view to a rare extent and drawn unprecedented international interest.

The Times’s statement called China “an increasingly open society, with increasingly sophisticated media,” adding, “The response to our site suggests that The Times can play an important role in the government’s efforts to raise the quality of journalism available to the Chinese people.”

The New York Times is not the first international organization to run into trouble with Chinese censors. Google decided to move its servers for the Chinese market in January 2010, to Hong Kong, a semiautonomous Chinese territory outside the country’s censorship firewalls, after the company was unable to reach an agreement with the Chinese authorities to allow unrestricted searches of the Internet.

Bloomberg published an article on June 29 describing wealth accumulated by the family of Vice President Xi Jinping, who is expected to become the country’s next top leader as general secretary of the Communist Party during the coming Party Congress.

Since then, Bloomberg’s operations have encountered a series of problems in mainland China, including the blocking of its Web site, which is in English.

Twitter Blocks Germans’ Access to Neo-Nazis’ Account

The move was the first time that Twitter acted on a policy known as “country-withheld content,” announced in January, in which it will block an account at the request of a government. But the company cracked open the gates to a complex new era in which it will increasingly have to referee legal challenges to the deluge of posts that has made the site so popular.

The company said the goal was to balance freedom of expression with compliance with local laws. “Never want to withhold content; good to have tools to do it narrowly & transparently,” Alexander Macgillivray, the company’s chief lawyer, wrote on Twitter.

A German spokesman for the company confirmed in an e-mail that it was the first time the policy had been used, although Twitter does not as a matter of policy announce government requests to block an account. In a “transparency report” issued earlier this year, the company said it had received six such requests but had not, for reasons it did not specify, acted upon them.

Uwe Schünemann, the interior minister for the state of Lower Saxony, where the neo-Nazi group is based, applauded the decision to block the Twitter feed, calling it in a statement “an important step.”

Twitter neither shut down the group’s account nor deleted the group’s posts. It blocked them for users only in Germany, who see a message that reads “Blocked” and “This account has been withheld in Germany,” along with a link to more information about the policy.

The decision to block the German feed was a relatively easy one, given that the group is banned and that the use of Nazi symbols and slogans can be criminally prosecuted. The more difficult question is how broadly and under what rules the policy will be applied by a company with users around the world.

Twitter employees are not combing through the hundreds of millions of messages posted each day searching for offensive material, but are responding only to government requests, beholden to free-expression laws in the countries in which it operates. That makes the company potentially subject to manipulation by authoritarian governments, rights advocates say.

“Where it really will be dangerous is in repressive regimes where Twitter is a very important means of communication between political dissenters, and where laws are interpreted by people who would interpret them in a politically biased fashion,” said Svetlana Mintcheva, the director of programs at the National Coalition Against Censorship in New York. “What, for instance, if the president of Belarus decides to suppress the tweets of a theater company which is critical of him?”

Authoritarian governments may wish to stifle the voices of dissidents just as ardently as German officials hope to silence the extreme right. In some countries, religious leaders may seek to prohibit messages they deem to be blasphemous.

Twitter is far from alone in negotiating these rules. Both Facebook and YouTube, owned by Google, complied with requests from German officials to take down content associated with the neo-Nazi group, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry in Lower Saxony said. Facebook and Google have long scoured content for keywords that suggest illegal material.

Last month, Google blocked access in some countries to a video on YouTube that mocked the Prophet Muhammad and touched off violent protests. The company has a policy of removing what it deems to be hate speech.

Twitter was sharply criticized over the summer after it suspended the account of a British journalist who wrote harshly about the Olympic broadcasts of NBC, a corporate sponsor. Twitter reinstated the account and apologized. The episode highlighted the tensions that Twitter faces as it tries to make money without alienating fans, who see the site as a public commons.

Twitter’s decision on the neo-Nazi group generated little controversy in Germany. In part because of its Nazi past, Germany has a different approach to free speech than that of the United States, where the First Amendment provides broad protections. People with expertise in far-right groups in Germany often point out that their Web sites are hosted on servers in the United States.

Stefan Pauly contributed reporting from Berlin, and Somini Sengupta from San Francisco.

News Analysis: The Dangers of Allowing an Adversary Access to a Network

G. Dagli Orti/De Agostini, via Getty Images The Trojan Horse, as depicted on Greek pottery. The Trojan Horse in modern cyberspace is still something to be feared.

Schoolchildren learn the tale of the Trojan Horse, the giant gift in which Odysseus and a platoon of 30 Greek soldiers hid to gain access to the heavily defended city.

Thousands of years later, it remains a thoroughly modern concept that is increasingly found at the heart of cyberwarfare strategies. Modern Trojan horses are computer code or vulnerabilities hidden in software or hardware that would allow a spy or an attacker to gain access to an adversary’s computers and networks. Find a way to be invited into the computers of your enemy’s weapons and military systems and you can render them useless in the face of an attack.

For more than a decade, Pentagon officials have been anxious about the growing reliance by the United States electronics industry on Chinese manufacturers. As the Internet has become the nation’s critical infrastructure weaving together commerce and power systems and even military command and control, it has become increasingly unthinkable to have a foreign presence in the network. Their fear is that those building and maintaining the network could build in a Trojan horse.

Thus it was striking that the word “Trojan” was not mentioned in a 52-page report issued Monday by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence focusing on the activities of two giant Chinese telecommunications firms, Huawei and ZTE, which have long been suspected of having links to the Chinese government. Beijing has been suspected of trying to steal American corporate and government secrets through computer espionage.

Stuxnet, a surreptitious program that was reportedly designed by United States and Israeli intelligence agencies to afflict the Iranian nuclear enrichment program, had many of the properties of a highly sophisticated Trojan horse. The program was at the heart of a concerted effort to delay or destroy the Iranian Natanz nuclear fuel facility. The attack damaged centrifuges and might have provided a surveillance window into Iranian activities by giving Western intelligence agencies unfettered access to the desktop computers of Iranian project managers.

The program acted as a Trojan horse, perhaps delivered first on a USB memory stick, that then spread through computer networks inside the secret facility before reaching the outside world. A striking map of the paths followed by Stuxnet infection created by researchers at Symantec, the Silicon Valley computer security firm, indicates that Stuxnet actually broke out of Natanz, rather than breaking in, just as the Greek soldiers climbed out of the horse at night.

Possibly because the United States is making Trojan horses, that term — if it exists in the House report on Huawei and ZTE — is said to be found only in a classified annex to the report that has not been made available.

The published report consists of a series of allegations about the activities of the companies, including bribery and surveillance, but little hard evidence. Reports of “suspicious” incidents, including an ostensible case of “beaconing” from Cricket, a Texas wireless operator that uses Huawei equipment, have been heatedly denied by Huawei.

If this issue is important enough, said Richard A. Clarke, who served as the nation’s counterterrorism overseer in both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, there should be ways of declassifying the information. “They’re making important accusations,” he said. “Important accusations require important proof.”

According to several former government officials, the real issue is not what has happened in the past but rather what might happen if Huawei gear were widely used in American telecommunications networks. Such use would mean that the company would have to serve and fix the network, requiring extensive access for its technical personnel to telecommunications networks in the United States.

The danger in letting your potential adversary maintain your network has already been demonstrated, according to Mr. Clarke, who wrote in “Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It.” In 2007, a remarkably sophisticated computer attack by Israel rendered Syrian antiaircraft radar useless. Israeli aircraft were able to destroy a Syrian nuclear reactor without any response from the country’s military. He says it was vulnerable because the Syrians had relied on outsiders to maintain the network.

Mr. Clarke disputes a recent New Yorker article that asserted that the bombing attack was supported by conventional electronic warfare, which involves jamming or deceiving an enemies’ radar with high-powered radio waves. “Regular electronic warfare fills the frequencies with static and overpowers the frequencies,” he said. “That wakes people up. That didn’t happen. The Syrians didn’t notice the jamming of their radars.”

In 2009, The New York Times reported that an American semiconductor industry executive who claimed to have direct knowledge of the operation said that technology for disabling the radars had been supplied by Americans to the Israeli electronic intelligence agency, Unit 8200.

If his account is true, it may be the real reason that the government has worked so hard to make sure that American computer networks are not made in China.