Internet Blocking Begins In Jordan | Hacker News Reader

Internet Blocking Begins In Jordan

7iber.com

67 pointshusam21219 comments

Jordanians[regime] are worried of spill-over from Syria and now Turkey. This is compounded by number of Syrian refuge as well as the past Palestanian refugees, not to mention common regional issues of youth unemployment and lack of general opportunities. Jordan probably wants to preemptively downplay the regional uprising lest it motivates internal uprisings.

Additionally, Potential uprising in Jordan will give second thoughts to global players who have been wanting to arm the Syrian rebels (mainly to block Iran's retaliation path from Lebanon against an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facility, now and in the future). Danger of Jordan falling and turning further toward an Islamist regime could cause more problem for Israel than Iran's influence in Lebonan via Syria. If we see uprising in Jordan, we'll soon forget about Syrian rebels.

There has always been internet censorship in Jordan, I don't think this is particularly motivated by a "potential uprising".

Sure...but you want creat the illusion of free press. That said, the third-world countries are not as suffesticated as western world when it comes to controlling the media.

It's ironic because censorship will only increase the chances of an uprising.

What saddens me is that this kind of censorship (blocking news sites, making them adhere to older stricter regulations for paper news, making site owners responsible for comments, etc) is widespread in Europe as well and people think this is how things should be.

«Censorship should exist in some form on the Internet: 71% somewhat or strongly agree; 24% somewhat or strongly disagree; 5% don't know / not applicable.» http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Censorship

Poland: "Polish Courts Say Websites Should Be Registered As Press" http://prawo.vagla.pl/node/8306

Italy: http://censura.bofh.it/

UK: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/12/dafamation_bill_huma...

A month or two ago, my GF attended a lecture where everyone in the room (except her, who stood aghast in astonishment) agreed that:

- Twitter is too much freedom of speech and it should be censored.

- freedom in general is going rampant these days in our societies, and should be significantly reduced by coercion.

They literally advocated for Thought Police. We're talking about top of the line students and professors, notably in Law.

I seriously don't know what the world will look like tomorrow, but I don't like where I see it headed right now (lots of semi-isolated islands of controlled GroupThink).

BTW, if anyone is versed in French, may I recommend reading "La Zone du Dehors", a fantastic novel by Alain Damasio (a dystopian novel showcasing a glimpse of the future, and a spiritual sequel to 1984)

Sadly we have a couple forms of that in the US too, its not the sole domain of any particular country. Germany/France ban free speech about certain touchy subjects, and while I can't say I blame them entirely, its not exactly smart. The US has eroded freedoms codified by the founding fathers of this country in the name of "security" and fear.

The only things we can do is attempt to promote freedom of thought, behavior and tolerance of all ideas, whether they're popular or not.

Anecdotally.. were they afraid of terrorism attacks [ or eg. cybercrime ]?

I think that threat is quite small and it shouldn't warrant blocking websites. However, the media likes to make out that the internet is a breeding ground for hundreds of thousands of terrorists and hackers, so probably.

Censorship = Admission of Fear

But... but ... I thought the Internet was supposed to route around damage.

Yes, the Internet has continued to work for me even though whole countries have implemented large scale filtering.

I'm not in any of those countries, but no-one ever claimed that the Internet would continue to work in the areas that were damaged.

EDIT: Freedomhouse has an interesting article about the state of Jordanian Internet censorship in 2011 and 2012. (http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2012/jordan)

As an aside: was robustness (routing around damage) ever an aim of the DARPA project? I hear conflicting things, and it seems to be part of the folklore now.

That's a really good question. The phrase is sometimes called [John] Gilmore's Law. http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/outerspace/internet-article.h... It has certainly been said many times that DARPA was "researching a decentralized system that would be robust enough to survive and function even if most of the network were destroyed".

http://www.inetdaemon.com/tutorials/internet/history.shtml

http://www.ciec.org/trial/complaint/facts1.html

But that was in the event of a nuclear attack - presumably a bit more random than governments with Big Switches. Of course, NO networks, NO re-routing.

If there are Jordanians reading this, could you spend some time testing out Lahana[1] - both nodes and clients and see whether or not that helps?

[1] - http://lahana.dreamcats.org/

I'm sure you mean well, but dogfooding crypto software in this sort of situation seems like a bad idea.

You're right in that I do mean well and I think you have a very valid point about dogfooding crypto. I'm aware of (and have tried to point out) the limitations of the crypto in Lahana but others might not read it and I think I jumped the gun in that respect. Thanks for making me think twice about it, I appreciate it.

To Jordanians - I would ask that you try it out, but only on things that wouldn't get you into trouble - i.e. things that are blocked but perhaps not contentious. I accept that if Lahana and it's wider goals are successful that maybe people will suffer for using it but I built this with the goal of helping people in mind, not hurting them.

I'd probably recommend just going with Tor for now. I know you're trying to help but accidentally identifying a Tor user, even indirectly could be fatal in these circumstances.

I found http://psiphon.ca/ to work pretty well when I was in the Middle East.

The internet as we know it will one day be used to enslave large groups of humans where it would be otherwise impossible to do so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com