What is an Internet shutdown?
Today, we are starting a new series of articles to explore the disruptions of the Internet network. While the Internet becomes more and more regulated, it is also more and more prone to shutdowns according to a 2011 study. According to a very complete report of Access Now, this tendency increases. These shutdowns can be due to several reasons, from a technical flaw to a state’s deliberate will to prevent citizens from communicating, especially during revolts or periods of political instability.
Even though the legend tells us the Internet has been designed to survive an atomic winter as a whole, access can still be cut locally. Since the network is built by joining autonomous but inter-connected networks, a part of these smaller networks could go offline without severely impacting others. Information could keep on circulating within the rest of the network.
Because the internet is often a key tool for protests against illegitimate power or to help victims of natural or human disasters, it is vital to study how to maintain connections and the ability to spread information. As stated on page 6 of the Access Now report, in more than 140 cases, governments have justified their shutdowns because of “National Security” or “fake news” control.
“It is often evident to observers that, in reality, authorities may fear protests and cut off access to the internet to limit people’s ability to organize and express themselves, whether online or off. The data reveal that when authorities cite “fake news,” rumors, or hate speech, they are often responding to a range of issues including protests, elections, communal violence, and militant activity, among others. Using these threats as scapegoats, it appears that governments are leveraging shutdowns to shape the political narrative and control the flow of information.”
— Access now, The #KEEPITON Report, 2018
This undoubtedly proves how important a tool the Internet is. In this first article, we start by studying the different types of shutdowns. In a second phase, we will study how to bypass censorship and restore connections. Finally, when restoring a connection is not possible or not advisable, we shall consider how to organize without Internet or even without computers.
Who shuts Internet down?
First, one should know the Internet has a physical reality through different types of infrastructures. As much as cables are important, data warehouses, transnational operators and local operators also play a part. Our connections are made possible by these layers of operators. The more an operator is high in the hierarchy of interconnections, the more power they will have on the network.
So let’s talk about shutdowns. A shutdown is an interruption in one’s connection to the Internet network. This cut can be complete – nothing gets through – or partial – one can connect to some parts of the network, but not to others. Or the connection might be unstable, preventing normal use. Reducing connection speed can sometimes produce similar effects to a shutdown.
There are several ways to cut an Internet connection, but in reality, there is not one single connection. We should think instead of many interconnections, and many ways to make them. Shutdowns are just as varied: they can be long, running over months, or rather short. They can happen with more or less regularity. Let us now look at what can cause these shutdowns.
Climate
First and foremost, Internet is an interconnection between computers on a world scale. These interconnections happen mainly through cables, and other computers, which are sensible to climate. For example, a fire can seriously jeopardize the network. The ongoing climate crisis, which provokes floods, mudslides, and other events that can compromise our buildings and infrastructures, is an extremely important threat. China, a country where online payments are widespread, had to confront to such a situation during recent floods.
Animals
Our infrastructures are not only sensitive to climate, they are also sensitive to the animals with whom we share lands and seas. Indeed, just as rodents can chew wires, sharks can attack the network, as it had happened off the coast of Vietnam.
Humans
Humans also have an ability to cut access to the network, be it deliberate, for example in case of wires theft, or mistakenly : in Georgia, a woman has cut the access of a whole country trying to recycle metal from the ground. Sometimes, it is even hard to know the exact cause of a cut…
Poor infrastructure management can lead to shutdowns. On this subject, we could talk about how fiber deployment is managed in France, as a result of a devastating economic policy, but French Data Network will do that best. Even once the network exists, it can be rendered unsable due to lack of maintenance maintenance, like in Brooklyn, USA. One might then experience shutdowns or a lack of connection in critical moments. We know exactly what this entails, because it happened to us recently in our own offices, the so-called Garage. When we moved in our new facilities (still ” the Garage”!), our operator took several weeks to connect us. And when it was done, we suffered many cuts due to outsourcing : technicians working for other operators, who were not paid enough to work correctly, cut off our fiber cables to install their own.
Governments
Unfortunately, we are not exactly short on recent examples of governmental shutdowns. We could itemize them here, but we’ll leave that to Wikipedia. Some examples nonetheless : in Myanmar, in Egypt, in India, in Cuba, in Cuba again, in Ethiopia, in Belarus… There is also the risk of attacks from a hostile government, notably like the United States in Syria (with help, among others, from French companies). States around the world equip themselves with tools to cut, filter and censor the Internet. We should not forget that the French government is not the Internet’s friend, as we saw it in 2011. The usage of Internet shutdowns to counter protests is not some theoretical threat: it is already happening. Starting from there, it becomes easy to imagine how these techniques could spread around the world.
Time going by
Where nature and human will aren’t enough, time will see to damage all fiber cables and and lay down telephone towers. For people living in place where investments in telecom networks are shaped by racist policies or social segregation, the time period between two refurbishments or maintenance operations can be enough to exclude someone from the network. We should not forget that only the half of the world population has access to the Internet, and that it remains very expensive in some parts of the world.
This overview allows to understand what we are dealing with. Although it is a ubiquitous and critically important network, the Internet remains nonetheless fragile and fluctuating.
Now, we must take some time to review the ability of institutions to shutdown the Internet. This is where we will direct our actions, given our difficulties to prevent any of the other disasters. We will primarily face institutional cuts (be it in a capitalist or state form), unless we start seriously considering hunting sharks. (This would be a bad idea).
As for time going by or the lack of investment in infrastructures, others have already covered these subjects.
Which types of cuts ?
Let us review how to proceed technically to interrupt some Internet streams.
Domain name system filtering
In France, Internet censorship is sadly widespread. Since the 2000s, we fought against several laws, such as LOPPSI and HADOPI, that force the Internet Service Providers (ISP) to block websites on demand of a judge or the police. This obligation was first justified by the necessary blocking of pedophile content, and was first used to censor Holocaust denial. But it was also used to delete political statements and groups. Its evolution over the course of time is well-documented, and lately, the same fight has started again around access to porn. In 2008, we already published a note on domain name blocks via the DNS protocol.
“With this technique, it is not the illegal content that gets filtered, but the entirety of the Internet domain who hosts it. […] The operations required to block by DNS filtering are relatively simple, although the complexity and the maintenance it produces, and therefore the global costs, depend on configurations of the operators. The efficiency of this technique is very limited. A trivial manipulation on the user’s computer is enough to permanently bypass it.”
— La Quadrature Du Net, 2008
Indeed, using another Domain Name System than the one provided by default by your ISP suffices to bypass the censorship. The procedure is pretty simple, and it is explained in an article of Numerama. We thank French Data Network for hosting DNS servers available for everyone without censorship of filtering.
Censorship of services
Sometimes, not only websites get blocked, but also services, like messaging applications. It happened in Russia, where a court ordered the blockage of Telegram. Given the way Telegram connects to its servers (using Google’s servers, and therefore their IP addresses), the block had unexpected consequences.
“While the total number of blocked IPs has been up and down (though mostly up) as Russia has tweaked its approach, we’re looking at something like 16 million blocked addresses at the moment. Affected services include Viber, Office 365, elements of the PlayStation Network, and plenty more.”
— Source
In general, the services find ways to bypass this censorship, for instance by using shared IPs or through the use of VPNs. In this case, censorship of one service resulted in blocking many unrelated services. The ban has been cancelled in 2020 notably because it was a huge failure.
Slowing the connection down
Imagine you connect to social network to get news about a protest which must take place in the coming hours. But the page seems to take much time to load, and when it gets displayed, some elements don’t show because they took too much time to load and were cancelled. You want to send a message to your friends, but you realize that the message takes more than an hour to be delivered ; in these conditions, meeting with your friends in the crowd will be difficult.
This kind of restriction is much more difficult to identify, because it is much sneakier. It allows to limit access but without cutting it. It might happen that this slow down will not even be recognized as intentional, especially in places where the Internet service is originally not very stable. Nevertheless, not every slow down results from censorship. For example, when Facebook encountered a bug, other bugs occurred for some telephone operators as a side effect.
Shutdown of the 3G/4G service
For many people around the world, connecting the Internet happens first through mobile networks, via smartphones. It has been recorded that this service is often targeted, while companies and States’ services use wired connections. The Access Now report quoted at the beginning of the article offers an enlightening overview on that question.
Protocols censorship
Sometimes, surveillance and censorship go together. The protocols that we use to secure our connection, like HTTPS, avoids some forms of censorship and surveillance. Then, it seems logical to block these protocols, like in China, where the government uses the Great Firewall to block the most secure versions of HTTPS. This is a cat and mouse game, because bypassing methods can be implemented. Nevertheless, for the majority of the people, these blocks can be difficult to bypass.
Blocking VPNs is also possible, and common.
BGP
BGP is the name of the protocol which allows the Internet to work as a network of networks. If we take a look at an Internet map like this one:
We can see different colors representing different networks. Between these networks, connections happen thanks to BGP, which is in a way the glue that allows the Internet to exist.
Well, that glue can be dissolved. It can be the result of an error, like in Pakistan in 2008: an operator announced to the whole Internet that his network was the fastest one to access Youtube. As a result, Youtube became inaccessible for a while. But it can be sometimes very intentional, like during the beginning of the revolt in Syria. Anyone can see when BGP suffers interruptions on Twitter. Recently, Facebook had a similar problem.
Additionally, researchers explained that it would be possible to thoroughly and seriously break down the Internet by exploiting some loopholes in the protocol. Although complicated to do, it is still possible. But do not worry, there are still surveillance and control systems to prevent protocol abuse, so these sorts of attacks are unlikely to succeed.
Perquisition
When a block on the network is not enough, there is still the possibility of directly attacking the server hosting the website. Think of the attacks against The Pirate Bay. This practice is still going on, although less efficient than in the past. This loss of efficiency is due to distributed architectures (e.g., “cloud” type architectures), where the websites are split over a large number of servers across the world. Instead of being available on a single server, they benefit from a global redundancy, preventing their databases and resources to be concentrated in the same place.
After this article, which gives an overview of the different possible threats, we invite you to read our next article, which will explore how to bypass these cuts, re-establish the links, and catch up on news from freedom on the other side of the line.
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“network cables” by pascal.charest is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0