Kill switch: reporting on and during internet shutdowns

What are internet shutdowns?

Internet shutdowns are a tool for information control. The practice of shutting down and censoring the internet is emerging as a key human rights issue, violating citizens’ freedom of expression, right to assembly and access to information. A 2021 report by Google’s Jigsaw project found that internet shutdowns are increasing at an ‘exponential’ rate, ‘threatening civil society’. But how do we define a shutdown?

According to Access Now, an international human rights organisation founded in 2009 as a response to the Iranian election that year, an internet shutdown is “an intentional disruption of internet or electronic communications, rendering them inaccessible or effectively unusable, for a specific population or within a location, often to exert control over the flow of information.” This can happen on a countrywide level, in specific regions or for specific networks. Shutdowns can happen for any period of time - a few hours, a couple of weeks , or even several months. The pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019 led to the Chinese government imposing a new national security law which gave them the power to shut down internet services in the city. This law also granted the government the power to censure online content and arrest individuals for posting or spreading "fake news" or "hate speech" on social media platforms and in the case of Tigray, Ethiopia, citizens have been experiencing an internet shutdown that has lasted more than two years, becoming one of the world’s longest and silencing the voices of over six million people.

“Things are kind of coming full circle unfortunately, but we were basically founded as an emergency response tool,” says Zach Rosson, Data Analyst for the #KeepItOn campaign at Access Now. Access Now’s #KeepItOn campaign is an international association of digital advocacy groups that reports on the digital rights of users at risk around the world. They have a 24/7 hotline where citizens, civil rights groups, activists and journalists can call in if they are experiencing an internet shutdown, as well as handbooks, digital safety tips and other resources to help people stay on top of their digital right to internet access. “Given how entrenched the internet is for increasingly larger percentages of the population around the world, there's a fundamental human rights aspect when it comes to shutting down the internet.”

However, when it comes to internet censorship, it is about the blocking of “specific websites and applications,” says Maria Xynou, internet censorship researcher & community lead at OONI (Open Observatory of Network Interference), a global community that has been measuring Internet censorship since 2012. “The main difference between shutdown and censorship is basically that with censorship, we're referring to the targeted shutdown of specific services.” (To learn more about internet censorship, OONI’s Maria Xynou has a free course online at Advocacy Assembly).

Understanding and measuring shutdowns, blocks and censorship

There are many ways for people to push back against internet blackouts and network disruptions, but journalists first need to begin to understand them in order to report on them. Because the internet is a network of networks - not a single one - there are many ways in which a shutdown can occur. In order to understand internet shutdowns, it’s important to first understand how the internet works in order to know how to measure it. “The internet was not made to be measured,” says Amanda Meng, Research Scientist at Georgia Tech. “I think that context is really helpful for people just to understand the kind of hairiness or complexity to it in the first instance.”

Meng is part of the research group for IODA (Internet Outage Detection and Analysis), a research group and tool that monitors Internet outages in near-real time. Her colleague, Zachary Bischof, a research scientist whose work focuses on geolocating and mapping internet outages, explains that even within these tools, it can be difficult to be specific, which is why getting the data is just the first step.

“[Regarding Ukraine], if there's damage to some infrastructure, we can say, oh, that connectivity is reduced to say 50% or something. That's a partial outage, but then it might level off there, and then maybe there's another drop later,” says Bischoff. He explains that it is sometimes difficult to pinpoint exactly when an outage has begun and stopped, or define whether it was government imposed or not, which is why journalists need to verify the information from other sources, too.

But there are ways to anticipate outages during certain events where governments may impose a shutdown. Shutdowns often happen during five types of events:

-Mass demonstrations -Military operations and coups -Elections -Communal violence -Religious holidays -School exams

All of these event types are incidents where governments want to restrict the flow of information, the ability to organise and freedom of speech.

There are many types of internet blocks (and depending on where you look they can be defined differently), but generally, there are 3 main forms of internet blocking:

• Full, blanket shutdown This is where governments have used the ‘kill switch’ to shut off all access to the internet in a country or region. This is the most drastic of tactics and can happen by completely shutting off network services, though the process is complicated. In cases like these, VPNs and other tools used to circumvent internet blocks cannot be used.

• Platform-specific blocking Often known as partial shutdowns, platform-blocking often targets specific sites and apps while the rest of the internet is fine to use. Often, these are usually social media apps (like Instagram, Telegram, WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook) that governments want to close off to derail people from sharing content and organising.

• Bandwidth throttling The deliberate slowing down of the internet so much it becomes unusable. Because bandwidth is defined as ‘the maximum amount of data transmitted over an internet connection in a given amount of time’,connections with higher bandwidths can send data faster than those with lower bandwidth. Bandwidth throttling is when the amount of data that can be sent is being limited, making the sending and receiving of data at very low speeds, particularly multimedia data such as photographs and videos that are usually wanting to be shared or live streamed at protests, for example. This can be instigated through Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Access Now has a handy report on the taxonomy behind network interference.

But there are so many other ways in which governments can create internet blocks of which are much more subtle and harder to verify:

• Mobile Data Shutoff This is when governments shut off mobile data so the internet cannot be accessed with portable devices. This is a common tactic for countries where people earn low-incomes and access to computers is limited but smartphone ownership is common. This often helps achieve a complete shutdown without the complications of killing the switch.

• DNS Interference When governments try to derail specific websites, the domain name system (DNS) that you are trying to access either goes to the wrong site or shows an error message.

• Denial of Service This is when governments send so many requests to specific websites or apps so that it slows down or crashes. VPNs requesting from another country may work in this case.

• IP Blocking Devices and servers connected to the internet have unique keys called IP Addresses. Internet Service Providers can use these IP addresses to very precisely shut them down in specific regions, whilst others remain intact.

Reporting during a shutdown

Internet shutdowns can happen anywhere, and are not unheard of in the western world either. The first known instance of a government-instigated internet outage in the US happened on August 11, 2011 during the protest of a police shooting of an unarmed passenger. The government agency in charge of San Francisco’s subway system, shut down mobile service at four stations to suppress the protests.

But what is it like to report during a shutdown? In 2021, India had the world’s highest number of internet shutdowns for four years straight, with a particularly dangerous shutdown during the coronavirus pandemic. Safina Nabi, a freelance multimedia journalist based in the Indian part of Kashmir, explains what it was like to report from there during an internet shutdown by the Indian government over several months from August 4, 2019 to March 4, 2020 in what was deemed ‘the longest internet shutdown on record in a democracy’.

“I was among few women journalists on ground who were reporting and it was really difficult because initially we didn't know what was happening,” says Nabi. “Nothing was working.” There was also no transportation, so Nabi and other journalists at the time would walk to their sources, colleagues to report.

Then shutdown was a response to anticipated unrest from a decision by India to revoke the special status of its portion of Kashmir, known as Jammu and Kashmir and fully integrate its only Muslim-majority region with the rest of the country. The initial shutdown was not just limited to the internet but mobile phone networks, landlines, cable and television channels. For 72 days, the people in India Kashmir were completely disconnected from all communications (telephone lines were reinstated again).

The internet was later turned on, but at such slow speeds and with limited access. It was only until February 5, 2021, when 4G mobile data services were reinstated. Before then, many journalists were making weekly trips to their offices in Delhi to deliver their reports. But as a freelance journalist, Nabi did not have the resources to fly to Delhi each week to hand in her stories. She would visit the airport in Kashmir, try to find someone travelling out, hand them a USB drive with her stories and request that they email the documents on it once they land in a place connected to the internet. “It was not easy, but there were lots of strangers willing to help each other,” says Nabi. “It’s not like they were putting a communication bar on me - they were putting a communication bar on 4 million people, and those 4 million people were against India and India's concept of democracy.”

After some weeks, international pressure meant that some communications were reinstated. A media centre was later opened, with - according to Nabi - five or six desktop computers running on a 2G network serving approximately 300 journalists, of which Nabi was just one of around eight women journalists. It was crowded, and each journalist usually only had a 10 minute window to use the computer and the internet to submit their stories. “Journalists would wait in line for hours,” says Nabi.

Despite 2G internet connections being reinstated, connection generally was very slow, so citizens started using VPNs (virtual private networks) as all the major social media sites were blocked. “Once the government authorities were using VPNs to share their feelings, they announced that anybody who is using a VPN will be jailed for six months straight without bail.” In Iran, citizens have been using tools such as Snowflake - a Google Chrome extension that lets users bypass censorship.

The shutdown in Kashmir also coincided with the coronavirus crisis, which heavily relied on internet communications about the disease. “We were pushed into a black hole where we had no access to information. Information that could have saved you or killed you,” says Nabi. “As journalists we have to advocate for internet access. When the government shuts down the internet, they are shutting down a person's basic human right to reach out to another person.”

Collaboration and educating citizens

More and more, we are also seeing shutdowns spill over borders, which inevitably require journalists to lean on their colleagues in neighbouring countries which can be a great way to collaborate and verify stories.

Shutdowns can also spread, showing that the actions of one country often don’t just cause impact there. Global interconnectedness means that internet shutdowns can have huge ripple effects in all areas of life.

Access Now published a guide to the countries that hit the kill switch most often in 2021 as well as an annual Election Watch. Considering that shutdowns are becoming an increasingly common tactic for governments, journalists reporting on and in these countries need to understand how they work and how they will be key to their reporting in 2023.

But should journalists offer more ways for citizens to understand internet shutdowns? “I think journalists play a very, very critical role in informing the public about internet censorship and increasing awareness that this is an issue that almost every country in the world experiences,” says Xynou. She explains that internet shutdowns and censorship also changes over time, not only in how the blocks are implemented but who the blocks impact, too. “That governments around the world have the ability to censor and control what is accessed on the internet in itself is concerning, because in order to ensure that what they're censoring doesn't impact human rights and doesn't impact independent journalism, there needs to be transparency.”

Xynou believes it’s key that journalists stay on top of what is being censored and relay that to the public, because many blocks - particularly those that impact vulnerable communities - are often completely missed.” The internet is part of our world, so I believe it is a journalist's responsibility to monitor what governments control on the internet, just as they feel that they have to have responsibility to monitor how governments exercise control of society.”