Today the Choke Point Project and many other projects such as @torproject @GlobaLeaks  @OpenObservatory @Info_Activism are taking part in the EU Workshop on FIRE and the “No Disconnect Strategy” in Brussels. Here’s the official description:

Introduction

The Internet is now much more than it was ever envisaged to be. Rather than simply a  communication system, it has become the backbone of modern society. For many of us it is inconceivable to live life without being ‘connected’. New and unexpected applications and services are emerging from cutting-edge technological developments, paving the road for future ones.

The recent political and social changes in the Arab world, as a result of a new revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests (Arab Spring), have repre-sented one of the most striking socio-economic and political developments worldwide. The use of the Internet in these crucial events has dramatically contributed to the spreading out of the protests by bridging the gaps of information between citizens and stimulating a better coordination in terms of actions.

The “No Disconnect Strategy” (NDS), launched in December 2011 by Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission for the Digital Agenda, is one of the actions of the European Commission which recognizes the important role of the Internet and the ICT in the wider strategy for the promotion of Human Rights across the globe.

It aims at providing citizens living in non-democratic regimes with the technological tools they need to shield them from indiscriminate surveillance or bypass disproportionate restrictions on their freedom to communicate.

Testing the possible tools and paradigms which may contribute to the goals of the NDS represents an interesting use case for the FIRE facilities, most of which are now planning their next open calls.

 

Objectives

This workshop is meant to create mutual awareness and effective synergies between these two EC initiatives, FIRE and the NDS.

The main objectives are:

• to introduce the FIRE landscape to those stakeholders which have been working exten-sively to use Internet and other electronic com-munications technologies to promote human rights, but are not necessarily well aware of rele-vant research and experimentation opportunities available in the European Union;
• to ensure that FIRE project partners and stakeholders understand the needs and priorities of stakeholders which are operating in an im-portant social and political dimension of Internet developments;
• to discuss how the available FIRE large-scale experimental platform can be used by stakeholders who are active in the NDS realm to test their technological solutions before putting them to a broader use, especially considering that for many of such solutions, design or implementation bugs can lead to serious personal risks for their users;
• to create awareness within both the FIRE and the NDS communities of the next

The ChokePoint Project are excited to be participating in the Rio de Janeiro Human Rights and Technology Conference:

The Rio de Janeiro Human Rights and Technology Conference (RightsCon: Rio), hosted by Access in partnership with the Fundação Getulio Vargas’ Center for Technology & Society, will examine and explore how the information and communications technology (ICT) industry can better plan for and manage the human rights implications of their technologies. Intended as an outcome-oriented event, the conference will be centered on a mix of private roundtables and public panel discussions, bringing entrepreneurs, executives, and engineers together with policy analysts, government representatives, human rights advocates, and technologists.

RightsCon: Rio is designed to continue and expand the conversations initiated at the 2011 Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference in San Francisco.

See you there?

We have applied for funding from the Knight Foundation to build a Global Censorship Monitoring System.

We have an urgent request of your help to get this project through to the second round, but there are only 7 days left!

Please click on this link and click on the “like” button and repost where possible.
Help make our bid ! Stay safe and get informed. Thank you.

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

We’ve spent the week at the 28C3, the 28th Chaos Communication Congress, in Berlin,  meeting inspiring people, discovering projects and looking for information, advice and help. The 28C3 is the perfect place to do this as it is:

an annual four-day conference on technology, society and utopia. The Congress offers lectures and workshops on a multitude of topics including (but not limited to) information technology and generally a critical-creative attitude towards technology and the discussion about the effects of technological advances on society.

 

We’ve attended workshops as well as lectures, had a lot of meetings and made some great contacts, all of which will be reflected in the ChokePoint Project both on technical and contextual levels and through the better framing of what we are trying to achieve. Today Ruben will be presenting the project in a lecture called “ChokePoint Project – Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Aggregating and Visualizing (lack of) Transparancy Data in near-realtime”. It will be streamed live at 14:00 CET and later we’ll post the video here. Below is the description of the talk:

The goals of the project are as follows:

1. Provide a global early warning system against governmental or commercial abuse of internetworking systems in regards to civil and human rights.
2. Enforce transparency by aggregating commercial ownership information.
3. Enforce transparency by aggregating legislative information, including voting histories.
4. Enable lobbyist to influence legislators by providing reliable, verifiable data.
5. Provide a public database with near real-time network monitoring data for general use.
6. Provide up to date circumvention methodologies, their relative legal status and their potential risks.

The chokepointproject currently consists of two elements :

1. A frontend and public database,
2. An intended globally distributed network monitoring data collection system.

The frontend intends to provide an easily understandable visualisation of aggregated and processed data-sources. The data-sources intend to provide the following information:

1. A per country detailed description of: 1a. Network ownership (by IP block and route) 1b. Legislative information such as Which relevant laws are currently active. Who has voted for them (supposing voting was a part of the process). Which relevant laws are currently under review or being proposed. Who are proposing/drafting these laws. 1c. What circumvention methods are currently available for specific problems.
2. Near real-time network status vitalisations such as, but not restricted to 2a. Connectivity of geographic clusters,
   2b. Manipulation of connectivity such as: 2b.1. Traffic shaping, 2b.2. Content filtering, 2b.3. Blackouts.

The intended globally distributed network monitoring data collection system would provide an independent and publicly available dataset. I do not intend to discuss this in depth. The focus of this lecture is supposed to be the front-end and the aggregation of already publicly available data sources, and the supposed benefit to improving civil rights everywhere and protecting them in those places where their functional effectiveness is under threat

Finally, a release!

Above is a screenshot of our first, very beta release of euhackathon.chokepointproject.net

It was put together for the 1st EUhackathon held in Brussels on November 8th & 9th 2011. It’s a prototype, a proof of concept. Here’s the ‘About’ from the release site:

What we did:

We built this test version of a planned larger platform using broadband statistics provided by Measurement Lab (M-Lab) and the Transparency Reports published by Google. The former contains continuous information about the Internet speed at various locations in the world. By analyzing this data, we can estimate the Internet connectivity status for the countries and cities covered by the data.

Our main aim has been working to build a platform to give people a tool to know what’s happening in their country now and over the historical period, augmented with information on law and lobbying activities. We created a branch of our application for the hackathon and this is the result of 1,5 days work.

Some use of dummy data:

The landing page of this example app is displaying dummy data for the current incidents listed under the map. It’s there to give you an idea of what this application could become. Obviously getting radar jamming data is  completely different from monitoring internet traffic.

We need more data:

If you know of relevant data sets either historical or dynamic that you think would benefit this project, please let us know. Real-time, yes, we know that will kinda of important, don’t you think?

Team for the hackday: Chris Pinchen, Ruben Bloemgarten, James Burke, Simon Funke, Florian Rathgeber, Javier Arturo Rodríguez

 

Release notes

This release has two objectives: to visualise the M-Lab & Google Transparency data and to show what we are working towards with the ChokePoint Project.

Drilling down

On opening euhackathon.chokepointproject.net the visitor will see the map with clickable red “incident” indicators, a link to info about the country they are viewing from, and dummy data for the current incidents listed under the map (see the image above). Clicking on the “What’s the state of the Internet in (viewers country)?” or the red indicators on the map will open a page for that place.

The page by default opens with the Transparency data visible. Clicking the pointer next to each incident will reveal more information about that incident.  Clicking on the pointer next to the Connectivy Status category will open  a drop down where the M-Lab data can be explored.

James will be in Rio de Janeiro on December 2nd presenting ChokePoint Project as part of the CulturaDigital.Br Festival

Meanwhile the development team are hard at work on the website and workshops and Ruben is preparing his presentation for the 28C3 in Berlin at the end of December.

We’ll be presenting ChokePoint Project at nits digitals ’11 in Vic, Catalonia, Spain on  Thursday, November 17th at 22:00. Entrance is free.

Now in its 11 year, nits digitals is a festival of digital expression and after the ChokePoint presentation there will be live music. Hope to see you there

geeks in the EU parliament!                                                          At the Google office in Brussels

so with bleary eyes we’re getting down to #h4t EUhackathon day 2…

Yesterday the participants in the first #h4t EUhackathon came together in the European Parliament for the inauguration session beginning with some short statements by supporting MEP’s, before people from MLab, Google Transparency Project, Herdict & Sam Knows outlined the challenges of the Hackathon.

Then it was off to the Google office to get on with the event itself. After some brief technical presentations, the team got down to analysing the provided data sets and finding the best way to incorpororate it into the ChokePoint Project, resulting in an intense night of designing, debating & coding. Now we’re implementing that data and will be presenting the work in progress this afternoon…