Here you go China, have this for a light second...
The internet is fast approaching the forefront of the political sphere and many aspects of it are now perceived as not only technological problems, but political ones also. Aspects such as non-geographically defined boundaries, the ‘technological emancipator’ and access as a human right all clearly hold fast as political problems in relation to the internet, but these are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s not only technological issues with shared rhetoric to that of politics which should concern the study, but those which are in essence, technological problems with the internet itself; these too have vital implications for the political. New innovations are using the internet to create political problems before we can think them up; Google is bringing the internet to your face questioning privacy laws, Anonymous is creating volunteered botnets questioning cybercrime and 3D printing is open-sourcing the creation of weapons for anyone connected, questioning firearms and intellectual property legislation. However, the widely perceived technological problem I shall identify as relevant to the political is that of traffic. Throughout this essay I shall show how and why the packets of information which move through the network we call the internet are to a large degree, causing a political problem.
The political problem I perceive within this issue is widely interconnected with the non-geographic borders or “borderless world” aspect of the internet and the inherent lack of ability to control the flow of information around the global network because of the widely distributed nature built into the foundations of the internet. As Vint Cerf, the ‘father’ of the internet states: “the internet was designed without any contemplation of national boundaries. The actual traffic in the Net is totally unbound with respect to geography”
The problem which arises in the political realm can therefore be boiled down to how we perceive the legality of the “information superhighway”, that is, what can happen to a packet of information between send and receive destinations and even where that information is copied to and/or stored, especially in the evolving cloud based systems.
This essay argues that although the time spent between destinations may be minimal, (in the case of fibre optics, literally lightning speed) the Westphalian system adopted by our globalized world does not yet have a system or protocol in place to categorise the ownership, privacy or anonymity of information within these realms, and so needs to firstly understand both the functions and efficiencies of web traffic through the eyes of Wegman and Marchette’s more than capable explanation and in turn categorise and legislate upon it. My argument shall be developed through initially focusing upon the social perception of web traffic and how it is commonly understood in comparison to the literal technological workings which in turn will shed light on the problem at hand and simultaneously have bearing on how to both categorise it within the current political system and how the proposed solutions may also effect the political.
To understand the issue, we must first be aware of Internet Protocol, or how the internet works. The notion that I may send an email to my friend in LA and that email should travel from my computer in Aberystwyth directly west to his in LA flying through underground tubes at light speed straight under the Atlantic and into his screen is a flawed one. Whilst it is true that internet traffic may indeed attempt the fastest route, (again, not always a direct one) the likelihood of my information passing through another state is high- especially as my ISP may have to allow it through an exchange point from another ISP. It is therefore imperative to understand how the internet works in order to comprehend the problem which faces the nation state. What in fact does occur when sending an email (Or when obtaining, requesting or exchanging any sort of information on the internet, but for the sakes of this example, I have used an email) is relatively simple: Your email is split up into hundreds or thousands (depending upon the size of the mail) of tinier ‘packets’ of information which are then sent out through your router to the distributed network of the internet. These packets consist of both the byte sized strip of information, a unique identifier for the packet itself and the address information of its source, destination and various routing options. The packets are then “dynamically routed” as each network router the packets go through will determine the next best router for it to travel until eventually reaching its desired destination. As Wegman and Marchette point out though, this will almost inevitably result in different packets of the same communication taking different routers and therefore not arriving in the order in which they were sent to be reassembled. The indestructible nature inherent within the internet is what has caused this political problem. Being that the internet is essentially a completely decentralised network of networks with no single point of failure; causing heavy flows of traffic through or inhibiting the performance of single routers will simply mean your information will take a different path. Through determining these paths or directing traffic, one has the ability to control the flow of information through the internet and in turn, utilise it. This is a process called IP hijacking or border gateway protocol (BGP) hijacking.
This is not a new issue within the field of computer science, the ability to do this is built into the framework of the internet, the actualities of it being done however were not comprehended at the outset as it was never envisioned to be as successful as it has become and so a network built on trust and end-to-end protocol should have been enough. Internet author and pioneer Danny Hillis hails the irony in such a communist principle being applied to a system developed by the Americans during the cold war. He also points out though, that this IP hijacking may not always be the result of malicious intent, that there are bugs and flaws within the design of the internet anyway. Something many have called for a fix to already.
In Pakistan in mid February 2008, one of these bugs led to one of the most affluent websites on the internet, Youtube becoming unreachable worldwide. Following a complaint by the Pakistan government of what it called a "blasphemous" video clip showing Dutch politician Geert Wilders promoting an upcoming film depicting Islam in a bad light, it issued a “Most Urgent” corrigendum to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority requesting the blocking of the “offensive website.” However, when the PTA attempted to block access to YouTube within Pakistan, it did so by broadcasting a new route for all youtube.com requests to take and effectively become lost. However, when it was picked up by a neighbouring router of the huge China Telecom, it began to broadcast this ‘faster’ route to youtube.com to the world and in reality rerouted all YouTube traffic to this black hole, so that essentially, every request for youtube.com was lost on its way, exposing a major flaw in ISP’s and the global routing system but also causing millions of cat videos to go unwatched for around two and half hours.
In April 2010, it was observed that around 15% of all of the traffic on the internet was diverted through China for 18 minutes. An error in router information, this time from IDC China Telecommunications was once again picked up by the much larger China Telecom and broadcast again globally. As Goldsmith and Wu explain, China has been expanding the internet within its own borders exponentially for the past decade, suggesting that bandwidth within the state itself is much higher than outside of it, and that due to the “great firewall”, the highly customised entrance and exit routers for traffic to flow in and out are few and far between. This fact coupled with the erroneous part China Telecom played in the previous ‘accident’ with Pakistan and Youtube may hold some truth to the Chinese claims of another accident, however much of the traffic diverted was that of U.S. domain traffic. This makes it highly more likely to be the subject of IP hijacking as Nate Anderson, deputy editor of highly regarded technology news site Ars Technica explains. Much of the diverted traffic was outgoing and incoming traffic from specifically US government and military sites, located at ‘.gov’ and ‘.mil’, including those for the “Senate, the army, the navy, the marine corps, the air force, the office of secretary of Defense, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Commerce, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and many others.” These factors along with a large amount perceived by certain commercial websites of Dell, Yahoo!, Microsoft and IBM – all large primarily Palo Alto based companies give quiet resonance to claims of foul play on the Chinese part.
These just two infamous examples in a sea of many more. In late April of 1997, a bug in an autonomous router led to the creation of a black hole, a scandal dubbed the “AS 7007 incident”. Something similar happened Christmas Eve, 2004 in Turkey, their ISP, TTNet masqueraded as the entire internet for a few hours, and in 2006 the New York based utilities company, ConEd accidentally ‘stole’ the internet, redirecting a handful of highly important prefixes.
These instances then, throw up some important points for the political. The problem of attribution on the internet is a growing one. On the local scale, many websites and social networks demand the use of a real name and many websites now ask for location. This may not be primarily due to attribution, knowing a location of a computer can help with internet speeds and bandwidth problems but the truth is that knowing where something originated on the internet and crucially, defining a bug or accident from malicious intent is almost impossible.
Security is also inevitably a problem perceived from this issue. As Anderson points out though, “Internet traffic isn't secure [anyway] and already passes through many servers outside of one's control.” But also going on to state that sensitive information would still have been encrypted, but that no encryption is 100% fool proof. And given the chance that this was orchestrated, the levels of access this could allow are alarming for something so easily pulled off and so subversive. “It could disrupt a data transaction and prevent a user from establishing a connection with a site. It could even allow a diversion of data to somewhere that the user did not intend”. There is also the danger warned by Arbor Networks Chief Security Office, Danny McPherson that such an ‘accident’ could be intended to conceal one larger targeted attack.
Legality may also be considered, but without the ability to attain evidence and the distributed nature of the internet and how it functions, holding anybody or state to account is also impossible. We may well come to think of encryption as similar to an embassy bag of sorts, and the opening of which to be a violation of sovereign soil, but again, how to prove it?
One thing is for certain, IP hijacking, internet black holes and other technological problems within the internet, are mostly caused by current protocol which “does not provide any guarantees of delivery or reliability” and the biggest routers on the system, those which control and see the most amount of traffic, those which have come to bring borders to the “borderless world”; the country ISP’s and Internet Exchanges. The problem posed to the political may well be the fault or at least been inadvertently facilitated by the private entity. Perhaps the problem is not technological at all, it’s simply another economic issue brought about by globalisation, and perhaps with regulation and standards for them the problem can be overcome.
Goldsmith, J. & Wu, T. Who Controls the Internet, Illusions of a Borderless World (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. vii
Ibid, p. 58 citing Vint Cerf in Guernsey, L. ‘Welcome to the World Wide Web. Passport Please?’ The New York Times, 15 March 2001
A term coined by U.S. Senator and Vice President Al Gore to describe the World Wide Web, Freedman, A. Computer Desktop Encyclopaedia (McGraw-Hill, Inc. New York, 2001), p. 464
Wegman, J. E. & Marchette, J. D. ‘On Some Techniques for Streaming Data: A Case Study of Internet Packet Headers’, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 12 (2003) p. 896.
Froomkin, A. M. ‘Habermas@Discourse. Net: Toward a Critical Theory of Cyberspace’, Harvard Law Review, 116 (2003) p. 883
Hillis, D. ‘The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B,’ Ted Talk, 18 March 2013. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOEQ9GteWbg [Accessed 08 April 2013]
Mayer-Schönberger, V. ‘Can We Reinvent the Internet? To build a better Internet may require us to rewire the social communities that created its code’, Policy Forum, 325 (2009) p. 397.
Said film asserted that Islam is Fascist and promotes violence against women and gays: ZDNet Government, Pakistan on the Youtube black hole: Never mind, Richard Koman, February. 26, 2008. Available from: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/government/pakistan-on-the-youtube-black-hole-never-mind/3673 [Accessed 08 April 2013]
Government of Pakistan, ‘Corrigendum- Most Urgent to Pakistan Telecommunication Authority’ (Zonal Office Peshawar, 2008) Available from: http://www.teeth.com.pk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/22-02-08_pta_blocking_of_websities.pdf [Accessed 08 April 2013]
Renesys, Pakistan hijacks YouTube, Martin A. Brown, February. 24, 2008. Available from: http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/pakistan_hijacks_youtube_1.shtml [Accessed 08 April 2013]
Goldsmith, J. & Wu, T., Op Cit, p. 94
U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, ‘2010 Report to Congress’ (U.S. Government Printing Office, 2010) p. 244. Available from: http://origin.www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/annual_reports/2010-Report-to-Congress.pdf [Accessed 08 April 2013]
Merit Networking, 7007 Explanation and Apology, Vincent J. Bono, April. 26, 1997. Available from: http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/1997-04/msg00444.html [Accessed 08 April 2013]
Renesys, Internet-Wide Catastrophe – Last Year, Todd Underwood, December. 24, 2005. Available from: http://www.renesys.com/blog/2005/12/internetwide_nearcatastrophela.shtml [Accessed 08 April 2013]
Renesys, Con-Ed Steals the ‘Net, Todd Underwood, January. 22, 2006. Available from: http://www.resneys.com/blog/2006/01/coned_steals_the_net.shtml [Accessed 08 April 2013]
ArsTechnica, How China swallowed 15% of ‘Net traffic for 18 minutes, Nate Anderson, November. 17, 2010. Available from: http://arstechnica.com/security/2010/11/how-china-swallowed-15-of-net-traffic-for-18-minutes/ [Accessed 08 April 2013]
Wegman, J. E. & Marchette, J. D. Op Cit, p. 898