Imagine a situation where the exam room is quiet, and
you’re on a roll. You’re performing some calculations like a pro
when suddenly—could it be? You forget the difference between a mean and a
median. You slip your phone out of your pocket and stealthily open
Google, but it won’t load. You glance at your neighbor and see the same
look of panic on her face and a blank screen on her phone, too. Is
Internet service down in the whole building?
If you’re
one of the many thousands of sixth-grade students taking a series of national
exams in Iraq this month, it’s not just the building. The Internet is
down in most of the country—and it’s because of the exams themselves.
The
arms race between cheaters and test administrators is nothing new, and
handheld devices that can connect to the Internet have tipped the scales
in favor of test-takers looking for a little help. But the Iraqi
government has taken the sledgehammer approach to the problem: This is
the second year in a row that it has ordered Iraqi telecom companies to
shut down to the Internet in order to prevent cheating, according to
human-rights groups. The research arm of Dyn, an Internet analytics
company, logged a pattern of three-hour long blackouts starting three days ago.
Last year’s shutdown during exam time drew rebukes from a group of digital-rights groups, who signed a letter
pressing the Iraqi government to lift the block on connectivity. “Now,
unfortunately, it’s the same story all over again,” said Deji Olukotun,
the senior global advocacy manager at Access Now, one of the groups that
signed last year’s letter.
“Given the security
situation in Iraq, it’s quite an extreme measure,” Olukotun said. “We
see this as really disproportionate to what they’re trying to achieve.”
Wholesale Internet blackouts impinge on citizens’ free-speech rights by
cutting off the country’s link to the external world, and can help
governments escape scrutiny in cases of abuse. Blackouts can also delay
and hinder emergency services, and have the potential to seriously harm a
country’s economy, Olukotun said.
Globally, this is the
twelfth government-mandated Internet blackout that Access Now has
recorded so far in 2016. But most of the time, blackouts or censorship
are connected to political or military events. Uganda blocked access to social-media apps
in February during elections, for example. Before last year’s
education-related shutdown, the only other time Iraq had blocked its
Internet was in June 2014, when ISIS forces overran Mosul, a major city
in the north of the country. It’s less frequent that a government takes
down the Internet to prevent cheating. Uzbekistan’s government shut down mobile internet during exams in 2014, and mobile data went down for the same reason just a few months ago in Gujarat, a state in the northwest of India.
Digital-rights groups are pressuring governments from all sides to stop
Internet shutdowns. Peter Micek, global policy and legal counsel at
Access Now, says groups are lobbying the United Nations Human Rights
Council to pass a resolution condemning them. At the same time, Access
Now works with telecom companies in countries with shutdown-happy
governments to improve reporting about outages and to organize pushback
against blackout orders. (In one success story, telecom companies in the
Central African Republic banded together in 2014 to resist requests for Internet and SMS bans.)
But it can be hard to
organize telecom companies that are under immense pressures from
authoritarian-leaning governments, and harder still to coordinate with
on-the-ground activists and watchdogs when the Internet actually does go
down.
Shutdowns aren’t always completely effective in
keeping Internet users away from the services and information they’re
looking for. Selective bans on social media, for example, can often be
circumvented with VPNs or Tor. And even when the government asks telecom
companies to shut down, officials may not be able to cut off an entire
country’s connectivity.
Dyn’s graph
of Internet traffic from Iraq shows that only two-thirds of networks
appear to go down during the shutdown periods. That’s because service in
Kurdistan—a portion of northern Iraq that has an independent regional
government—doesn’t seem to be affected, says Doug Madory, Dyn’s director
of Internet analysis.
Madory has studied shutdown patterns in the global Internet for years, and he saw a turning point
in Egypt’s 2011 Internet blackouts. The Egyptian government ordered
telecom companies to shut down access that January, just a few days
after massive protests began unfolding in Cairo and around the country.
The blackout didn’t keep President Hosni Mubarak from being swept from
power, but other countries in the region that came under pressure in
subsequent Arab Spring movements picked up Egypt’s tactics: Syria,
Libya, and Bahrain all used Internet blackouts to try and disrupt
anti-government protests. Since then, Madory says, Internet shutdowns
have become normalized.
Those blackouts were
authoritarian governments’ frantic attempts to head off life-or-death
crises. It’s hard to justify shutting off Internet access even in times
of political turmoil—that’s when blackouts are most likely to be used to
cover up human-rights abuses—but the reasoning behind Iraq’s rolling
Internet blackouts is even less sound.
“Given all that is
happening in Iraq (ISIS, massive corruption, impending summer heat,
etc.), it is hard to believe cheating is worth disconnecting the country
from the global Internet,” Madory wrote to me in an email. “It isn’t
hyperbole to say that the government of Iraq faces multiple immediate
existential threats—placement exams aren’t on that list, I would think.”What's your opinion about this? Is it right for the government to shut down internet just because of an exam and restrict the free flow of information and communication in a dicey period like this? Kindly make good use of the comment box to make your contributions on this issue
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