It’s August 26th and Ali Bongo will be president for a few more hours. While Gabonese go to the polls in the parliamentary elections without much tension, The internet is interrupted ” until further notice “. The reason given is: “Containing the spread of calls for violence”. […] and false information.
Less than a month earlier, much further west, the Senegalese experienced the same censorship for more or less similar reasons. It is July 31st and the opponent, Ousmane Sonko, has just been arrested and charged, specifically for inciting insurrection.
Two decisions with serious consequences for the residents of the countries concerned, which remind us that restrictions on Internet access have become a regular resort by more and more governments around the world, including some that are considered democratic. Often under the guise of combating disinformation or “preserving” national security.
One hundred and forty-two cuts in Africa between 2014 and 2022
Many African countries are used to these cuts, putting the continent in the top 3 for most acts of digital censorship each year, according to #KeepItOn, a coalition launched in 2020 by the NGO Access Now that is now fighting internet cuts with a combined 180 Organizations that defend digital rights.
Many Internet measurement organizations, including Access Now, even believe the continent played host the first large cut in history, in Egypt in January 2011, when the regime responded to the “Friday of Rage” by blocking the mobile Internet, the networks of the largest private Internet access providers, and social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
From 2014 to 2022, there were at least 142 power outages in 35 countries on the African continent, assures the NGO Let’s turn the page in a new study on these practicespublished last May.
For Gbenga Sesan, director general of the Nigerian NGO Paradigm Initiative, “it is worrying that these Internet cuts continue to increase worldwide and affect more and more countries, but also the fact that certain countries are maintaining and even have made their use constant.” It is a specialty , like Algeria, the, like other countries in North Africa and the Middle East, restricts the Internet in each reporting period, Ethiopia and Sudan, which have repeatedly cut off Internet access when internal conflicts broke out in their territory, or the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has already turned off Internet access during elections. »
“Kill switch”, blocking of services, “throttling”: three feelings of failure for the user
From the user’s perspective, there are basically three types of Internet access restrictions: Total Cutoff or “Kill Switch” in English, Blocking of certain services and Degraded Connection or “Throttling” in English.
In the first scenario, the user simply cannot access the Internet regardless of what device they use. This cut can apply to an entire country, one or more regions, or even a specific location. It can also be all types of connections or a specific category – such as mobile networks.
In the second case, the user surfs the Internet freely but does not have access to certain websites or applications, generally social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) or instant messaging services (WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.).
The third restriction method aims to blur the boundaries. The Internet user is led to believe that their connection is slow or even unusable for technical reasons – even though the Internet service provider (ISP) has deliberately reduced the quality of their service.
The six ways to harm the Internet
Behind the scenes, ISPs can use six different techniques to restrict their customers’ Internet access, depending on government requirements.
- Damaging or overloading the connection: a malicious act by nature
The worst is simple disable or even destroy the infrastructures on which the Internet relies. Although it can sometimes be a conscious decision by authorities, such as when the ruling Syrian regime regularly shut down the power grid during the Arab Spring uprising in 2011, this technique is more commonly used in the context of acts of vandalism. This happened in Malawi in May 2019 when fiber optic cables were laid in the middle of national elections were dividedprobably with axes.
A second technique,Denial of service attack (DoS or DDoS) is widespread in the world of hackers. This involves sending so many requests to the same service (website, application, etc.) that it crashes and becomes inaccessible. This technique is sometimes used by those in power, as was the case in Iran against satellite internet services. in 2012 And in 2022.
However, denial of service attacks more often originate from a foreign agent, such as in November 2016 when Russian hackers behind the Mirai malware attempted to without successto cut off Liberia from all access to the Internet using a computer network (botnet).
- Starting at the source or targeting applications: the authorities’ secret pleasure
The next two most common cutting techniques involve how one connects to the telecommunications networks through which one accesses the Internet.
The first is that ISPs “ Change routing », i.e. the communication mechanism that allows an Internet user to access websites.
In order for an internet user to access a website or an application, they basically use a device (computer, phone, tablet, etc.) that is assigned an IP address – in a sense, the equivalent of a home’s mailing address. This IP address and several others are linked to an Autonomous System (AS) – similar to the nearest post office in the case of the postal network – which is linked to the ISP to which the Internet user has logged in and to which he is also assigned a unique number (ASN).
To allow the Internet user to access a site, its ISP sends a request to the entity that hosts that site, asking it to establish the connection – the letter – with its AS and then with the IP address assigned to the device of the Internet user corresponds to initiate via an exchange protocol called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) – which here corresponds to the means of transport that the postman uses to drop the letter into the person’s mailbox.
“To block the connection, ISPs can either stop receiving requests to their own AS or block responses to them,” says David Belson, head of data analytics at Cloudflare, a content distribution network provider. This technique was particularly used in the 2016 presidential election in Gambia and after an attempted coup in Gabon in 2019.
The problem with this method, says Access Now in a report from June 2022This is because it can take some time for routing changes to propagate through the network and just as long for them to return to normal after the outage ends. In addition, since the Internet is international, one country’s routing network is intertwined with that of other countries: such a cut can therefore have undesirable effects outside the country’s borders.
Example of routing corruption. © FMM Graphic Studio
Another way to manipulate telecommunications systems is to do the following: Manipulation of the domain name system (DNS).
Like devices, each website has its own IP address. However, because these addresses are formulated as number combinations to make them easier for machines to process, they are difficult for humans to use. For this reason we have developed a domain name system. For example, the URL rfi.fr has the top-level domain .fr, which is associated with France.
“There are various methods to block a certain number of specific IP addresses or even access to the services of the same entity, such as the meta-company, which would effectively block Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, for example,” says David Belson. who also created the blog Internet Disruption Report, which documents outages on social networks.
Those responsible for outages may also use commercial services that allow communication to be filtered, such as those offered by Cisco, Blue Coat, or proxy services, i.e. servers that act as intermediaries between two entities (e.g. a computer and a server that hosts a website). Example).
The blocking of Twitter in Nigeria and that of Facebook in Uganda in 2021 and 2022 have certainly used these types of methods.
- Clone infrastructure or change content: for governments that can afford it
Finally, governments with the most resources can also take advantage of the last two sophisticated and much more precise techniques by obtaining technological solutions.
The first one, thatDeep packet inspection (DPI) is a technique for analyzing data flows that travel “beyond the header” through network devices. Just as the postman usually only looks at the information on the envelope when delivering a letter, classic forwarding takes place by analyzing the headers of the exchanged data packets. However, solutions allow us to go further and access more information – to open and read the letter, so to speak. They can be used to monitor a person’s online activities, but also to block certain connections.
The last technique consists of Clone existing telecommunications infrastructure and ensure that a person’s connection is through this and not through legitimate infrastructure.
Note that the The very last type of restriction, internet in restricted mode, is a little different : There are a variety of techniques for carrying out such an act, from the simplest – when the ISP degrades the quality of service through its network management equipment – to the most complex – including deep packet inspection, of which Iran, for example, likes it.
Governments and operators, a shared responsibility?
Until now, existing governments and ISPs were considered responsible for these restrictions, some moral, others technical. The reality is, of course, more complex: African ISPs are generally forced to obey the ruling regimes, which are increasingly inclined to assert their control over the Internet. According to the Freedom House think tank, at least eight African countries (Angola, Egypt, Ethiopia, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan, Zambia and Zimbabwe) voted one or more digital censorship laws.
“However, numerous statements and resolutions from international bodies of which these countries are members have repeatedly reiterated their condemnation of internet shutdowns,” assures Tomiwa Ilori, researcher at the Center for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria’s Faculty of Law in southern Africa. This applies to several UN resolutions, but also to the Principle 38 the Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information in Africa, ratified by the 54 members of the African Union. However, nothing happens, these practices continue…
Some organizations, such as the Business & Human Rights Resource Center, are excited As more and more major ISPs commit not to engage in such practices, either in their own codes of conduct or by joining cross-industry organizations such as the Global Network Initiativewhich defends a number of principles, including freedom of expression, and which includes Orange and Vodafone.
“The problem is that they face a lot of pressure in terms of possible revocation of their license or even physical threats if they do not comply,” testifies Mathieu Pourchier, program manager at Tournons la Page. I spoke to an ISP in a French-speaking African country who had refused to shut down the internet despite government orders. He revealed to me that he had since become a victim of tax harassment. »
The real remedy, the human rights defender concludes, is more likely to lie with interstate courts, such as the ECOWAS Court, which ruled in 2020 that an internet shutdown in Togo in 2017 was illegal awarded in 2022 by Global Freedom of Expression, a think tank at Columbia University in New York.