All Content Related to Elections

Norooznews.ir: Yahoo email, messenger and group blocked in Iran

ONI-MENA — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:40:39 -0400

ISPs in Iran were ordered to block Yahoo email, messenger, and group sites, reported Iranian Web site Norooznews.ir (Farsi).

The site added that the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology refused to acknowledge the reports of the blocking which went into effect March 10.

Iranian news outlets reported last week that Iran's government might shut down the Internet on parliamentary election day, March 14. Interior Minister Mostafa Pour Mohammadi denied the reports and described them as "rumors".

Testing for Internet filtering during parliamentary elections in Jordan

ONI-MENA — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 20:27:10 -0500

ONI found no evidence of Internet tampering in Jordan during the November 20 parliamentary elections despite claims by the main opposition party that the polls were marred by vote-rigging and electoral fraud. ONI, through in-country testers, monitored online activities and accessibility to Web sites of political parties, political and independent media, and blogs and discussion forums where content critical of the government and the election process appears.

The testers conducted manual tests throughout the election period using the ISPs Batelco, orange, cyberia, and link. The testers were able to access all of the Web sites including that of the main opposition party, the Islamic Action Front (http://www.jabha.net), the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. Web sites of other political parties were also accessible.

The only Web site that was found to be inaccessible was arabtimes.com, a U.S.-based political newspaper. This site, however, has been inaccessible for the past few years and is not directly linked to the elections but it did publish content satirically critical of the government's election-related practices.

Jordan's Press and Publication Office announced (Arabic) last August that it will be monitoring online publications and will resort to regulating online content via the judiciary process when needed. This monitoring program may further restrict the online activities of journalists and online writers who already engage in self-censorship because of the broad provisions of the Press and Publications Law (See ONI Jordan country profile).
Many writers who are banned from publishing in local print media have switched to electronic publishing. There is fear that this monitoring program will be used to prosecute them and other writers who publish content critical of the government. (Al-Jazeera rerport)

Some countries in the Middle East and North Africa have, in the past, blocked Web sites at sensitive political events. For example, Bahrain banned access to several Web sites in the run-up to the country's parliamentary elections. For example, Yemen blocked access to several media and local political Web sites during the country's 2006 presidential elections.

Internet Watch Report: The 2007 Presidential Elections in Nigeria

sally — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 09:47:18 -0500

ONI is pleased to release our latest Internet Watch Report, "The 2007 Presidential Election in Nigeria" (here in HTML). The report documents the ONI's efforts monitoring the Internet in Nigeria during elections held in April 2007. No filtering was found, either during the elections or in the two weeks preceding, though several sites were down at times because of faulty infrastructure. This Internet Watch Report also discusses some of the recent changes in the legal environment that governs the Internet in Nigeria and identifies some potential emerging points of control.

Nigerian Internet Remains Free of Tampering During Tumultuous Elections

Rob — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 16:17:23 -0400

Lagos, Nigeria: Nigeria’s local and national elections of April 2007 were marked by widespread charges of fraud and disenfranchisement. A team of election monitors from the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) traveled to Nigeria during the elections to test for evidence of Internet tampering. Certain sensitive political sites were inaccessible around the time of the elections, but these blockages appear to be caused solely by structural problems in Nigeria’s faulty telecommunications network. ONI’s technical monitoring did not reveal evidence of deliberate attempts to block or disable websites critical of the current regime, either during or directly preceding the elections. These conclusions were reached through the analysis of tests carried out by the ONI, a partnership among research institutes at the universities of Cambridge, Toronto, Harvard, and Oxford.

“Nigeria was an important test case given its size and importance to the African continent," said Rafal Rohozinski, an ONI principal investigator and team leader for the ONI’s election monitoring work. “This result may be atypical given the reported increase in what can be termed ‘just in time filtering’ of time sensitive Internet and communications services such as SMS that we have observed around other elections, including in several other African countries."

"The Internet is increasingly an important venue for access to information and discussion among citizens during election periods around the world,” said John Palfrey, one of the ONI’s principal investigators and executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. “The Nigerian elections of 2007 were hardly a case study in freedom and fairness, but our research offers a bit of good news: there was no evidence of anyone tampering with the ability of Nigerians to access information online during the key period of the campaigns."

The ONI team conducted two types of tests during the election period, both of which were carried out by a field team in Lagos. The first testing protocol monitored activity related to a set of politically sensitive sites accessed through a number of Nigerian Internet service providers (ISPs). The results of these tests were analyzed by researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. A second series of tests was run by researchers from the University of Cambridge scanning for anomalies in overall network traffic. Testing began a week before the local elections and continued through the national elections under the coordination of a team of researchers from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

The ONI has been developing methods of monitoring for evidence of event-based Internet filtering or other tampering with Internet access during election periods. In 2004, the ONI mounted Internet-related election monitoring efforts in Kyrgyzstan and Belarus in cooperation with local partners.

ONI ran the Internet election monitoring project in Nigeria because of widespread concerns that the elections would not be free and fair. Observers have claimed that both the local elections of 14 April, as well as the national elections on 21 April, were marred by blatant and widespread violence, fraud, and disenfranchisement. In reference to the elections on 14 April, Peter Takirambudde, Africa Director of Human Rights Watch, stated that "the Nigerian government failed completely in its conduct of a free and fair election" in several key states. Commenting on the presidential elections from the northern town of Kaduna, Max van den Berg, head of the European Union’s observer mission, noted "for now the assessment is outspokenly negative ... I’m very concerned." In addition, the National Democratic Institute (NDI) went so far as to say that the elections represent "a step backward in the conduct of elections in Nigeria."

Nevertheless, the elections appear to have been free from Internet-related attacks and website blocking. According to local statistics from 2006, only 1.1% of Nigerians have access to the Internet. As the Internet becomes a more important source of political information, many states around the world have begun to filter the Internet more extensively. The absence of tampering with the Internet during this election cycle does not mean that the network in Nigeria will remain free of censorship.

"When very few people have Internet access, the state has few reasons to worry about monitoring or censorship. It’s when the Internet begins to serve some of the roles of mass media that governments can perceive and respond to a threat," said Jonathan Zittrain, an ONI principal investigator and professor of internet governance at Oxford University.

OpenNet Initiative to Monitor Internet during the Belarus Presidential Elections

rafal — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 06:53:07 -0500

Cambridge (UK), Oxford, Toronto & Cambridge (Mass), 17 March 2006 (ONI). The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) is monitoring for disruptions to Internet access during Belarus’ presidential elections this Sunday (19 March 2006). ONI is testing for evidence of filtering and other denials of service against opposition and media sites. Several instances of alleged DDOS attacks and DNS tampering are presently under investigation. Under the increasingly authoritarian leadership of President Lukashenka, Belarus has become known as the "last dictatorship in Europe," and international observers widely expect this Sunday’s elections to be rigged. Tampering with Internet access has been alleged in past elections, including the presidential vote in 2001, and parliamentary elections in October 2004.

In the past five years Belarus has put in place extensive legal, technical and economic measures aimed at restricting access to the Internet and controlling content critical to the regime. Laws make it illegal to publish information critical of the state, and the Belarus equivalent of the US National Security Agency is responsible for management of the top level county domain, making it possible to temporarily deny access to sites by tampering with DNS records. Belarus ISPs are obliged to buy their connectivity from a single state telecommunications monopoly provider, which also additionally owns shares in most private operators. Harsh taxation measures as well as licensing requirements put operators under intense pressure to cooperate with state authorities.

To date, President Lukashenka’s regime has exercised its ability to control the Internet lightly, and without resorting to widespread internet censorship. Despite reports by human rights and opposition groups accusing authorities of filtering content, blocking websites, and in one case, shutting down the mobile phone system; ONI research has found only one instance of filtering in the past year, and apparently not undertaken for political reasons. (The filtered the sites, www.gayly.ru and www.gay.ru, carried content of interest to the gay community, rather that the political opposition.)

The election monitoring effort caps off ONI’s year-long study of the Internet in Belarus. The Open Net Initiative will release its Belarus “Country Watch” report the week of 20 March 2006.

Monitoring the Internet during election periods is of increasing importance, particularly in the former Soviet republics where the Internet played a significant role in the "color revolutions” that brought down governments in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.1 During the February 2005 Kyrgyz parliamentary elections, the ONI documented sustained DDOS attacks that disrupted two of the major opposition newspapers.2 The difficulty in tracing the perpetrators of the DDOS attacks suggests that the use of computer network attack may replace filtering as means used by governments (and others) intent on silencing critics. Unlike filtering, DDOS attacks offer a degree of plausible deniability against charges of censorship and are difficult to prove.

1 http://www.jamestown.org/edm/article.php?article_id=2370499
2 http://www.opennetinitiative.net/special/kg/