An Internet Heartbeat

Obtaining sound inferences over remote networks via active or passive measurements is difficult. Active measurement campaigns face challenges of load, coverage, and visibility. Passive measurements require a privileged vantage point. Even networks under our own control too often remain poorly understood and hard to diagnose. As a step toward the democratization of Internet measurement, we consider the inferential power possible were the network to include a constant and predictable stream of dedicated lightweight measurement traffic. We posit an Internet "heartbeat," which nodes periodically send to random destinations, and show how aggregating heartbeats facilitates introspection into parts of the network that are today generally obtuse. We explore the design space of an Internet heartbeat, potential use cases, incentives, and paths to deployment

Encore: Lightweight Measurement of Web Censorship with Cross-Origin Requests

Despite the pervasiveness of Internet censorship, we have scant data on its extent, mechanisms, and evolution. Measuring censorship is challenging: it requires continual measurement of reachability to many target sites from diverse vantage points. Amassing suitable vantage points for longitudinal measurement is difficult; existing systems have achieved only small, short-lived deployments. We observe, however, that most Internet users access content via Web browsers, and the very nature of Web site design allows browsers to make requests to domains with different origins than the main Web page. We present Encore, a system that harnesses cross-origin requests to measure Web filtering from a diverse set of vantage points without requiring users to install custom software, enabling longitudinal measurements from many vantage points. We explain how Encore induces Web clients to perform cross-origin requests that measure Web filtering, design a distributed platform for scheduling and collecting these measurements, show the feasibility of a global-scale deployment with a pilot study and an analysis of potentially censored Web content, identify several cases of filtering in six months of measurements, and discuss ethical concerns that would arise with widespread deployment

Reinventing Media Activism: Public Interest Advocacy in the Making of U.S. Communication-Information Policy, 1960-2002

This report is a long-term analysis of citizens' collective action to influence public policy toward communication and information. The work discusses in greater detail what is meant by communication and information policy (CIP) and why we think it is worthwhile to study it as a distinctive domain of public policy and citizen action. The report concentrates on citizen action in the United States and looks backwards, tracing the long-term evolutionary trajectory of communications-information advocacy in the USA since the 1960s. We focus on the concept of citizen collective action and explain its relevance to CIP.Research supported by the Ford Foundation's Knowledge, Creativity and Freedom Program. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, or the Ford Foundation

Is remote measurement a better assessment of internet censorship than expert analysis? Analyzing tradeoffs for international donors and advocacy organizations of current data and methodologies

Donor organizations and multilaterals require ways to measure progress toward the goals of creating an open internet, and condition assistance on recipient governments maintaining access to information online. Because the internet is increasingly becoming a leading tool for exchanging information, authoritarian governments around the world often seek methods to restrict citizens’ access. Two of the most common methods for restricting the internet are shutting down internet access entirely and filtering specific content. We conduct a systematic literature review of articles on the measurement of internet censorship and find that little work has been done comparing the tradeoffs of using different methods to measure censorship on a global scale. We compare the tradeoffs between measuring these phenomena using expert analysis (as measured by Freedom House and V-Dem) and remote measurement with manual oversight (as measured by Access Now and the OpenNet Initiative [ONI]) for donor organizations that want to incentivize and measure good internet governance. We find that remote measurement with manual oversight is less likely to include false positives, and therefore may be more preferable for donor organizations that value verifiability. We also find that expert analysis is less likely to include false negatives, particularly for very repressive regimes in the Middle East and Central Asia and therefore these data may be preferable for advocacy organizations that want to ensure very repressive regimes are not able to avoid accountability, or organizations working primarily in these areas

The Art of Repression: Digital Dissent and Power Consolidation in El-Sisi’s Egypt

Imprecise measurement tools impede the study of protest mobilization. Mobilization proxies, such as counting protesters and protest events, result in significant outliers and variance while ignoring sociocultural, cybernetic, economic, legal, and other features that relevant academic literature considers essential to understanding mobilization dynamics. Without accurate empirical models, researchers’ and policymakers’ investigations of autocratic repression have little explanatory power. This thesis proposes a methodological addition to the mobilization literature: Two three-level scales distinguish an event’s potential to attract an audience from the protest’s actual output relative to similar episodes. I employ the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project to demonstrate the measurement’s utility. Afterwards, I apply these models to conduct an impact assessment of recent Egyptian cyberregulatory laws. Controlling for the grievances of protesters and performing other robustness checks, the time series demonstrates a strong, statistically significant relationship between the policies and the reduction of low-level potential mobilizational capacity of Egyptian dissidents, but fails to identify an expected relationship between police pressure and the decline of mobilizational capacity. These findings contribute to the theoretical frameworks of mobilization scholars and policymaker discussions regarding the value of internet censorship tools for curtailing oppositional political action

Evaluating Citizen e-Satisfaction from e-Government Services: A Case of Pakistan

Citizen satisfaction is a critical and decisive factor for persistent use of e-Government services as it can substantially impact on failure or success of e-Government projects. Main hurdle for e-government planners and practitioners in Pakistan is to find out the key determinants of e-satisfaction of their citizens. This article actually tries to identify the major factors that drive Pakistani citizen’s e-Satisfaction while using Punjab Province Portal (http://www.punjab.gov.pk/) in Pakistan. After extensive relevant literature review we formulated 7 hypotheses and distinguished 7 different determinants namely trust, accessibility, awareness of e-services, quality of e-services, computer anxiety, customer expectations and security/privacy. A sample of survey data from 200 employees in 8 universities in different cities of Punjab Province of Pakistan was gathered to perform data analysis. Several key outcomes based on multiple linear regression and factor analysis were exhibited. These final results would help to understand the degree of satisfaction of Pakistani citizens. E-governmental policy-makers and practitioners both would be benefitted by this analysis and results of these determinants of e-satisfaction. Some recommendations and implications of our findings were also addressed at the end

Twitter content curation as an antidote to hybrid warfare during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

Concern regarding information disorders has been magnified by the proliferation of social networks. Since its occupation of Crimea in 2014, Russia has been spewing disinformation both inside and outside its borders, giving rise to a hybrid conflict, which since 24 February 2022 has become an invasion. Faced with this flood of malicious information on social networks, fact-checkers assume the role of content curators, relying on contextualization, verification, and literacy improvement to reduce such noise. This work studies the Twitter activity of three Spanish fact-checkers (Newtral, EFE Verifica, and Maldito Bulo), to fight this new epidemic of disinformation. The sample (n = 397) was subjected to content analysis to study the evolution of the verifications and their reaction capacity, the purpose of their activity, the formats in which the content is presented, and their distribution and interaction as revealed by reactions on Twitter. The results reveal a rapid, albeit repetitive, response of the fact-checkers to the invasion, support from them to end the internationalization of hoaxes, a reliance on denials and contextualization rather than literacy improvement, unattractive formats, and a distribution and impact that demonstrate a greater reaction to sensational and emotive content.

State of the art 2015: a literature review of social media intelligence capabilities for counter-terrorism

Overview This paper is a review of how information and insight can be drawn from open social media sources. It focuses on the specific research techniques that have emerged, the capabilities they provide, the possible insights they offer, and the ethical and legal questions they raise. These techniques are considered relevant and valuable in so far as they can help to maintain public safety by preventing terrorism, preparing for it, protecting the public from it and pursuing its perpetrators. The report also considers how far this can be achieved against the backdrop of radically changing technology and public attitudes towards surveillance. This is an updated version of a 2013 report paper on the same subject, State of the Art. Since 2013, there have been significant changes in social media, how it is used by terrorist groups, and the methods being developed to make sense of it.  The paper is structured as follows: Part 1 is an overview of social media use, focused on how it is used by groups of interest to those involved in counter-terrorism. This includes new sections on trends of social media platforms; and a new section on Islamic State (IS). Part 2 provides an introduction to the key approaches of social media intelligence (henceforth ‘SOCMINT’) for counter-terrorism. Part 3 sets out a series of SOCMINT techniques. For each technique a series of capabilities and insights are considered, the validity and reliability of the method is considered, and how they might be applied to counter-terrorism work explored. Part 4 outlines a number of important legal, ethical and practical considerations when undertaking SOCMINT work

Future Research of Science Parks and Incubators: overall analyses

Problems with the extant literature on science parks and incubators are examined in terms of four levels of analysis: the science parks and incubators themselves, the enterprises located upon science parks and incubators, the entrepreneurs and teams of entrepreneurs involved in these enterprises and at the systemic level. We suggest there is no systematic framework to understand science parks and incubators, that there is a failure to understand their dynamic nature as well as that of the companies located on them, that there is a lack of clarity regarding the performance of science parks and incubators which is associated with problems in identifying the nature of performance. We review briefly the papers contained in this special issue and demonstrate how each sheds light on an unexplored dimension of this emerging literature. In the concluding section, we synthesize the findings of the papers and outline a broader research agenda