There is a lot going on right now on so many exciting fronts. We at the OpenNet Initiative have released three major reports: An Asian regional overview, and country reports on China and Iran. We released these at the ONI Asia regional meeting in Penang Malaysia. Thanks to the ONI team for all of their hard work.

You can read about ONI Asia results here, and the Iran country report here

Second, we have been actively engaged in a campaign to allow Iranians to access the Internet freely via Psiphon, using Twitter and other outreach tools. The Globe and Mail has a report on it, among other media stories.

The OpenNet Initiative has released a bulletin entitled "China's Green Dam: The Implications of Government Control Encroaching on the Home PC." You can read more about it here

Executive Summary

A recent directive by the Chinese government requires the installation of a specific filtering software product, Green Dam, with the publicly stated intent of protecting children from harmful Internet content. The proposed implementation of software as reviewed in this report would in fact have an influence that extends beyond helping parents protect their children from age inappropriate material; the filtering options include blocking of political and religious content normally associated with the Great Firewall of China, China’s sophisticated national-level filtering system. If implemented as proposed, the effect would be to increase the reach of Internet censorship to the edges of the network, adding a new and powerful control mechanism to the existing filtering system.

As a policy decision, mandating the installation of a specific software product is both unprecedented and poorly conceived. In this specific instance, the mistake is compounded by requiring the use of a substandard software product that interferes with the performance of personal computers in an unpredictable way, killing browsers and applications without warning while opening up users to numerous serious security vulnerabilities. The level of parental control over the software is poor such that this software does not well serve parents that wish to the limit exposure of their children to Internet content.

The mandate requiring the installation of a specific product serves no useful purpose apart from extending the reach of government authorities. Given the resulting poor quality of the product, the large negative security and stability effects on the Chinese computing infrastructure and the intense backlash against the product mandate, the mandate may result in less government control.

President Obama announced the US Cybersecurity strategy yesterday, after a lengthy review. The report can be found here. I was asked, along with Bruce Shneier, James Bamford, Gus Hosein, Mykko Hoppenin, and Marjorie Blumenthal, to give feedback for the New York Times forum.

Dave Levine of Stanford University host's a regular radio show called Hearsay Culture. I was a guest a while back and the show is archived here.

Inspired by Google’s Summer of Code, this year, Psi-Lab - a joint project of the Citizen Lab and Psiphon Inc -- will organize the "Summer of Psi", which aims to establish a rich and highly interactive set of communication and archiving tools and accompanying documentation to enable community participation in Psiphon open source development. Expect to see a newly invigorated forum, documentation, development tasks, and other interactive features earmarked for the open source community. Citizen Lab research associate Jeremy Vernon is driving the summer of psi.

Follow the blog here.

Last night in Toronto, at the new Psiphon digs, we held our public launch of Psiphon Inc -- the first company to be spun out of the Citizen Lab. Although Psiphon is spinning out, its relationship with the Citizen Lab is stronger than ever. We have developed a strategic partnership with Psiphon around Psi-LAB -- which will be the home for research and development, red team threat modeling, and curation of all that is open source.

One of the most exciting aspects of the new Psiphon service is the "right2know" nodes, where denied content can be pushed to users in censored jursidictions and users, in turn, can sign up for the psiphon service, or simply use the right2know nodes for free without subscription. Find out more here.

Thanks to Rafal, Nart, Mike, Jane, Dirk, Rod, Adam, Jeremy, Jaymz, Greg, Eugene, Vlad, and everyone else involved in the psiphon project!

We were very pleased to hear that Psiphon was the recipient of the Economist New Media Award at the Index on Censorship 2009 Free Expression Award Ceremony in London yesterday.

Details here. Although we are proud to win the award, we feel that this award belongs to the others on the shortlist as well. In particular, it is noteworthy that nominee Hoder is still imprisoned in Iran for merely expressing his opinions.

Dear Friends and Colleagues

Please find below a link to Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network, the second major report from the Information Warfare Monitor -- a joint project of the SecDev Group (Ottawa) and the Citizen Lab (Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto).
Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network