Criminal Justice And Human Rights Law Blog: Internet service provider

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Showing posts with label Internet service provider. Show all posts

Friday, January 28, 2011

Egypt Leaves the Internet - Renesys Blog

Coat of arms of Egypt -- standard pan-Arab &qu...

Image via WikipediaEgypt Leaves the Internet - Renesys Blog

Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air.

At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet's global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt's service providers. Virtually all of Egypt's Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.

This is a completely different situation from the modest Internet manipulation that took place in Tunisia, where specific routes were blocked, or Iran, where the Internet stayed up in a rate-limited form designed to make Internet connectivity painfully slow. The Egyptian government's actions tonight have essentially wiped their country from the global map.

What happens when you disconnect a modern economy and 80,000,000 people from the Internet? What will happen tomorrow, on the streets and in the credit markets? This has never happened before, and the unknowns are piling up. We will continue to dig into the event, and will update this story as we learn more. As Friday dawns in Cairo under this unprecedented communications blackout, keep the Egyptian people in your thoughts.

Update (3:06 UTC)

One of the very few exceptions to this block has been Noor Group (AS20928), which still has 83 out of 83 live routes to its Egyptian customers, with inbound transit from Telecom Italia as usual. Why was Noor Group apparently unaffected by the countrywide takedown order? Unknown at this point, but we observe that the Egyptian Stock Exchange (www.egyptse.com) is still alive at a Noor address.

Its DNS A records indicate that it's normally reachable at 4 different IP addresses, only one of which belongs to Noor. Internet transit path diversity is a sign of good planning by the Stock Exchange IT staff, and it appears to have paid off in this case. Did the Egyptian government leave Noor standing so that the markets could open next week?

Friday, September 03, 2010

Art Brodsky: There Is Some Leadership at the FCC

Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps has managed the art of saying much in a few words. His latest salvo came in a 245-word letter to the editor in the Washington Post, in which he not only savaged yet another misbegotten Washington Post editorial about Internet policy, but also took on the Verizon-Google joint policy "recommendation" and then noted the cruel reality of the agency to which he has devoted almost nine years of his professional career.

He, and others, recognize that this is a unique time in the history of the FCC, and perhaps of regulation and politics. It happens from time to time in Congress that a legislator will vote against a bill that he or she has introduced, usually after an amendment has been added that drastically changes the bill, or in the case of some shift in the political dynamic.

Today's situation is much different. It is normal for an FCC chairman to have to work from time to time, sometimes for tedious negotiations and edits with fellow commissioners, to gain a majority vote for an item the chairman wants. Now, however, two FCC commissioners of the chairman's party are ready, willing and able to vote to approve an item proposed by the FCC Chairman, who is, in essence, his own swing vote.

But Copps keeps pushing, the sign of a leader who knows his policies and won't back down. The Post's editorial endorsing the Verizon-Google deal "wrongly stated that a court decided the Federal Communications Commission has no authority over Internet service providers," Copps wrote, while correctly saying that the April 6 court decision hinged on which section of the communications law were involved.

His conclusions in the letter were exceptionally strong:

The Verizon-Google plan that the Post endorsed creates a two-tiered Internet at the expense of the open Internet we now have, almost completely excludes wireless and transforms the FCC from what is supposed to be a consumer protection agency into an agent of big business. I thought we'd had enough of that. To expect big telecom and cable duopolies to protect consumers while a toothless agency stands quietly by is to expect what never was nor will be.

It takes a lot of guts to call your own agency "toothless," but Copps has never lacked for guts, nor for leadership. His professional lineage comes through former Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ernest "Fritz" Hollings of South Carolina, a crafty legislator who also was known for sticking to his guns.

In contrast to the current situation at the FCC, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has been moving ahead to help independent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) gain some access to network services.

In their order of Aug. 30, the CRTC gave ISPs more access to services than U.S.-based ISPs are able to get, thanks to years of FCC decisions aimed at shutting down those would-be competitors that don't have their own networks -- which includes most of them.

The CRTC order at the same time added a 10-percent markup to the rates to compensate the telephone and cable companies for their troubles. Unlike U.S. regulators, some of whom believe anything less than total control of networks by the telephone and cable companies will result in a financial disaster of epic proportions, the Canadian regulators were relatively sanguine about the wholesale access at guaranteed speeds, with the additional 10 percent taking care of any problems for the big telephone companies (ILECs -- incumbent local exchange carriers).

Given the adjustment to the ILECs' wholesale service rates for new higher speed service options, the Commission considers that a speed-matching requirement would not result in an undue disincentive for ILECs to continue to invest in fibre-to-the-node facilities. It also considers that, in light of its determinations in this decision, such a requirement would not unduly impair the ILECs' abilities to offer new converged services such as IPTV (internet protocol TV).

As noteworthy as the order is, and the order shows how far ahead of the U.S. the Canadians are on competition, the separate statement of CRTC Commissioner Timothy Denton is even more enlightening.

Denton is a conservative who formerly represented ISPs before being appointed to the Commission on August 1, 2008. Remarkably, he was an attorney representing the Canadian Association of Internet Providers earlier in his career. In his dissent, Denton wrote eloquently about how the decision did not go far enough. Denton wrote that the ruling "neither eliminates them (ISPs) nor allows them the scope to compete effectively." He would have allowed ISPs more control over the services in order to encourage innovations that come from smaller companies. Denton wrote:

Networks are not of the same order of thing as a metal-stamping business. They are affected with the public interest, which is merely to say that the reasons why they are subject to a measure of regulation under the Telecommunications Act are valid.

The Commission does not believe that innovation occurs only at the edges of the network. The right of carriers to innovate in network architectures is absolute, subject to the normal policy constraints of non-discrimination and non-self-preference. The question remains whether innovation from the edge will ever be allowed again, after the burst of innovation which accompanied the introduction of the Internet.

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Thursday, July 29, 2010

White House proposal would ease FBI access to records of Internet activity

The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual's Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.

The administration wants to add just four words -- "electronic communication transactional records" -- to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge's approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user's browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the "content" of e-mail or other Internet communication.

But what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national security letters. These missives, which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own authority, require the recipient to provide the requested information and to keep the request secret. They are the mechanism the government would use to obtain the electronic records.

Stewart A. Baker, a former senior Bush administration Homeland Security official, said the proposed change would broaden the bureau's authority. "It'll be faster and easier to get the data," said Baker, who practices national security and surveillance law. "And for some Internet providers, it'll mean giving a lot more information to the FBI in response to an NSL."

Many Internet service providers have resisted the government's demands to turn over electronic records, arguing that surveillance law as written does not allow them to do so, industry lawyers say. One senior administration government official, who would discuss the proposed change only on condition of anonymity, countered that "most" Internet or e-mail providers do turn over such data.

To critics, the move is another example of an administration retreating from campaign pledges to enhance civil liberties in relation to national security. The proposal is "incredibly bold, given the amount of electronic data the government is already getting," said Michelle Richardson, American Civil Liberties Union legislative counsel.

The critics say its effect would be to greatly expand the amount and type of personal data the government can obtain without a court order. "You're bringing a big category of data -- records reflecting who someone is communicating with in the digital world, Web browsing history and potentially location information -- outside of judicial review," said Michael Sussmann, a Justice Department lawyer under President Bill Clinton who now represents Internet and other firms.