As countries step up their use of Internet shutdowns to muzzle dissent, some are also taking advantage of the blackouts to increase censorship firewalls, Internet privacy company Proton said.
Proton, known for its encrypted e-mail and virtual private network (VPN) services, has for years observed how authoritarian governments apply “censorship as a playbook,” lead product manager Antonio Cesarano said.
Increasingly, it is observing governments in countries such as Iran and Myanmar emerging from Internet shutdowns with a supercharged ability to censor Internet access.
Photo: AFP
VPNs delivered by Proton and others provide a secure, encrypted connection over the Internet between a user and a server, giving users greater anonymity and often allowing them to avoid local restrictions on Internet use. However, the company worries governments are using long blackouts to beef up their ability to counter VPNs.
In several cases, internet shutdowns saw countries’ censorship capabilities “going from nothing, or something laughable, to something very skilled,” Cesarano said.
Proton VPN general manager David Peterson said the sudden jump in capabilities could indicate that “censorship as a service” technology “is being sold by other countries that have more know-how.”
“For example, over the past couple of years, we’ve seen the Chinese ‘great firewall’ technology used by Myanmar, Pakistan and some African nations,” he said.
The trend is emerging as the willingness to impose total Internet shutdowns is also growing, said Proton, which runs a non-profit VPN Observatory that tracks demand for its free VPN services to detect government crackdowns and attacks on free speech.
Cesarano, the spokesman for Proton’s Internet censorship and online freedom work, said the extreme and once almost unthinkable measure has “happened three times in six months.”
He highlighted the shutdown in Iran, when the country’s more than 90 million people were forced offline for nearly three weeks, obscuring a crackdown on country-wide protests which rights groups say killed thousands of people.
There was also the week-long shutdown implemented in Uganda in the days prior to the elections last month, and Afghanistan’s Internet and telecoms blackout last year.
Iran also completely shuttered the Internet for a week in June last year amid the conflict with Israel.
Blacking out the Internet completely was “very concerning, because it is very extreme,” Cesarano said, adding that a country’s entire economy basically grinds to a halt when the Internet shuts down.
“It’s very dangerous and costly for the population,” he said.
In some countries, such as Myanmar, where VPN use is illegal, the authorities deploy fake VPNs “as honeypots” to detect dissidents, Cesarano said.
Police might also stop people on the streets and search their phones for VPNs, he added.
Proton spokesman Vincent Darricarrere said the company launched a special feature “to disguise the VPN app and to disguise it as a different app, like a weather app or the calculator,” to help people escape detection.
Cesarano said the VPN Observatory can predict that a clampdown is coming from spikes in sign-ups.
Right before Iran’s Internet shutdown took effect on Jan. 8, the VPN Observatory noted a 1,000 percent rise in use of Proton’s VPN services, indicating an awareness of the coming clampdown.
It saw an 890 percent hike in VPN sign-ups in Uganda in the days before last month’s elections, the observatory said.
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