Research Fellow Jon Penney wrote a paper titled Communications Disruption & Censorship under International Law: History Lesson, which was presented at this year’s Second USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI).
With Internet censorship on the rise around the world, a variety of tools have proliferated to assist Internet users to circumvent such censorship. However, there are few studies examining the implications of censorship circumvention under international law, and its related politics. This paper aims to help fill some of that void, with an examination of case studies wherein global communications technologies have been disrupted or censored—telegram cable cutting and censorship, high frequency radio jamming, and direct broadcast satellite blocking—and how the world community responded to that disruption or censorship through international law and law making.
Read the paper [pdf].