A Downward Spiral for Freedom of Expression in Ethiopia
June 17, 2012 | By Katrina Kaiser
Internet shutdowns, content filtering, arrests of bloggers, and online
surveillance in North Africa have been headline news for the past year and a
half, but internet issues in the rest of the African continent haven't
received quite as much press coverage. This silence is partly because there
is simply less internet penetration south of the Sahara, but there may also
be a paralyzing current of opinion whereby stories that highlight human
rights issues or a lack of democracy in the region are either dismissed as
old news or written off as paternalistic.
Ethiopia sometimes gets particularly little coverage in Western or
international media because the political situation there is not nearly as
dramatic as it is in other countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The government
is nominally structured as a parliamentary democracy and it has good
relations with the United States and Europe. Still, the ruling Ethiopian
People's Revolutionary Democratic Front tightly controls the country's
electoral politics and media representation.
Internet censorship and content filtering are
<
http://opennet.net/research/profiles/Ethiopia> well-established in
Ethiopia. The state owns and manages the country's sole Internet service
provider, Ethiopian Telecommunication Corporation (Ethio-Telcom). While
Ethiopian Internet penetration is only about 1%, there is still a vibrant,
tightly-knit community of bloggers whose websites, blogs, and Facebook pages
have been blocked by the government. The blocks themselves look innocuous to
Ethiopian Internet users, because the browser will simply notify users that
the server request has timed out.
This error-message block is similar to what users have experienced in
<
http://insidesearch.blogspot.tw/2012/05/better-search-in-mainland-china.htm
l> China when trying to access censored websites or use restricted search
terms. It figures, then, that the Ethiopian and Chinese governments have
conducted joint
<
http://www.eprdf.org.et/web/guest/news/-/asset_publisher/c0F7/content/3-jun
e-2012-26-2004> workshops on "mass media institution" management and
Internet management. Inexpensive Chinese technology has also replaced
American technology for building Ethiopian Internet infrastructure.
EFF recently reported on a new
<
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/05/week-internet-censorship-points-syste
m-weibo-activist-released-bahrain-censorship> Telecom Service Infringement
Law that includes explicit content-filtering provisions that protect
"national security." The law criminalizes online speech that may be
construed as defamatory or terrorist, and holds the website or account owner
liable even if the speech is posted as a comment by a third party on their
website. These speech-chilling stipulations are hidden deep within a
licensing bill that would, on the surface, seem to simply clarify
Ethio-Telecom's power to regulate Internet services such as VoIP.
Aggressive content regulation through secret filtering and legal
restrictions is just the beginning of Ethiopia's draconian Internet policy.
Ethio-Telecom has recently begun deep packet inspection of all Internet
traffic in the country. Engineers at the Tor Project
<
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/ethiopia-introduces-deep-packet-inspection
> discovered this when <https://www.torproject.org/about/overview> Tor
stopped working in Ethiopia weeks ago. They determined that the Internet
service provider had figured out how to fingerprint and subsequently block
Tor requests encrypted through TLS. Bridge-configuration, the ordinary way
to get around Tor blocks in other countries, failed to work in Ethiopia
until a workaround was subsequently developed. An engineer at Tor later
<
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/update-censorship-ethiopia> hypothesized,
"My guess is that they are only blocking Tor because whatever device
(probably from an outside firm) they have came with a block-Tor-plugin." At
this time, the only other countries that actively block access to Tor are
China and Iran.
Why does Ethiopia keep company with some of the most restrictive Internet
regimes in the world if the country has so little connectivity and few
users? The country's Internet policy continues to develop in the broader
context of an equally restrictive press freedom environment. During the last
general election in 2005, many journalists, election observers, and
opposition party leaders were detained. UNESCO hosted a World Press Freedom
Day event in Addis Ababa, the national capital, about a year ago.
Ironically, the government forcibly
<
https://www.cpj.org/2011/05/ethiopia-censors-unesco-world-press-freedom-day
-ev.php> replaced several independent journalists on the agenda with
pro-government speakers.
Like the former Soviet republics of Belarus, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan,
Tajikistan, Georgia and Kazakhstan, the Ethiopian government may be
ratcheting up its Internet censorship regime in response to fears sparked by
the Arab Spring. EFF will continue to keep a close eye on development as
politically sensitive milestones, such as the Ethiopia's general election,
near.
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Received on Sun Jun 17 2012 - 17:35:09 EDT
