In January 2013, Cyber Steward partner Bytes for All (B4A) submitted a petition to the Lahore High Court to challenge Internet censorship in the country. This case, in collaboration with the Media Legal Defense Initiative, a non-governmental organisation which helps journalists and independent media outlets around the world defend their rights, highlighted the ongoing censorship of YouTube in Pakistan. The popular video-sharing site has been blocked since 2012 since YouTube refused to remove the controversial anti-Islamic “Innocence of Muslims” video.

While the Mexican government has long been suspected of purchasing surveillance equipment, the frequency of these purchases and the level of public funds allocated to them are rapidly increasing. Last February,  New York Times published an investigative report on a USD 355 million outlay by the Mexican Ministry of Defense for sophisticated surveillance equipment. Six months earlier, Carmen Artistegui, a renowned investigative journalist in Mexico, published a report documenting five contracts from the Secretariat of National Defense for the purchase of surveillance technologies. All five contracts were confidential and granted to a single company headquartered in the state of Jalisco called Security Tracking Devices, Inc.

From 22 – 25 October 2013, over 2,000 government, civil society and private sector delegates from around the world gathered in Bali, Indonesia for the 8th Internet Governance Forum (IGF 2013).

This post will summarize Citizen Lab’s prior research on surveillance in Indonesia, including documented evidence of FinFisher command and control servers and Blue Coat Systems devices on IPs owned by Indonesian ISPs. It will then identify recent trends in Indonesian surveillance practices, laws, and regulations that provide potential avenues for further research.

This is the Indonesian translation of “Monitoring Information Controls During the Bali IGF,” the first post of a Citizen Lab series that will explore online freedom of expression and the state of information controls in Indonesia in the context of their role as host of the 2013 IGF.

On October 22-25, 2013, Indonesia will host the eighth annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF), a multi-stakeholder dialogue on the issues and policies of Internet governance. The main theme of this year’s IGF is “Building Bridges: Enhancing Multi-stakeholder Cooperation for Growth and Sustainable Development.”

This post is the first in a series that will explore online freedom of expression and the state of information controls in Indonesia in the context of their role as host of the IGF.

An Indonesian translation of this post is available here.

Terjemahan dalam bahasa Indonesia dari halaman ini tersedia disini.

The Targeted Threat Index is a metric for assigning an overall threat ranking score to email messages that deliver malware to a victim’s computer. The TTI metric was first introduced at SecTor 2013 as part of the talk “RATastrophe: Monitoring a Malware Menagerie” by Katie Kleemola, Seth Hardy, and Greg Wiseman.

Cyber Steward partner Bytes for All (B4A) has launched “Access Is My Right” — an advocacy campaign to engage Pakistani citizens on Internet censorship, privacy, and freedom of expression in the country. The campaign calls on citizens to raise awareness of information controls by sharing campaign visuals across the Internet, especially on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

In June 2013, news broke out in media outlets around the world of a secret program operated by the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) regarding the collection of information directly from several major U.S. Internet companies. The program, referred to as “PRISM”, involves data collection on a large scale from phones, streams of Internet traffic, and content stored by Internet companies. Despite denials by major Internet companies of their complicity with the NSA regarding this program, leaked reports have also indicated the agency paid millions of dollars to major technology companies to cover the costs of the program.

Recent research from The Citizen Lab has detected the presence of devices capable of surveillance on networks operated by Nigerian Internet service providers. In January 2013, Citizen Lab researchers found installations of Blue Coat Systems’ PacketShaper device on netblocks associated with IPNX ISP and Cobranet. In April 2013, Citizen Lab released “For Their Eyes Only: The Commercialization of Digital Spying,” in which researchers identified FinFisher servers on a network operated by Suburban Telecom.