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Editors Note: Richard Fontaine, a Senior Advisor at the Center for a New American Security, is the co-author of Internet Freedom: A Foreign Policy Imperative in the Digital Age. Follow him @rhfontaine.

In its new Enemies of the Internet report, the international watchdog group Reporters Without Borders depicts an Internet under unprecedented pressure from the worlds autocratic regimes. The study lists twelve such enemies, including Iran, North Korea, China and Saudi Arabia, and observes that an increasing number of governments are not content merely to take domestic steps to control online space. Freedom of expression on the Internet, the study notes, is no longer the sole preserve of dissidents, geeks and censors. Diplomats have followed in their wake. Internet freedom has become a foreign policy issue.

The report documents the ways in which the twelve countries and others have established a broad approach to online control. Internet and mobile phone shutdowns have become more commonplace in recent years, famously in Egypt during the Arab Spring but also in countries like Kazakhstan and parts of China. Internet filtering and deep packet inspection is on the rise, and government surveillance of users activity both online and offline is increasing. Governments hack dissident websites, spread propaganda on the web, and sometimes simply arrest problematic bloggers and online activists.

It is clear what many autocratic regimes want in the Internet: a controlled space, one that ideally permits their citizens to use online tools for economic activity and basic communication, but that will not permit the kinds of expression that might undermine government authority. The effort to build such a controlled space is no longer restricted to domestic measures, and for several nations it now comprises a significant diplomatic effort.

Indeed, there are several diplomatic avenues through which Internet freedom may become restricted. FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell recently warned that dozens of countries are pursuing a new treaty to establish, in the words of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, international control over the Internet. The treaty would give governments new power to regulate the Internet via the UNs International Telecommunications Union. If successful, McDowell warns, this effort could upend the bottom-up, private-sector-driven model of the Internet and give way to greater government control over its structure.

In addition, diplomats are wrestling over definitions of terms such as online freedom and security in ways that impact freedom of expression. At an April 2008 U.N. conference that sought to clarify what represents aggression online, for instance, a senior Russian official argued that any time a government promotes ideas on the Internet with the goal of subverting another countrys government even in the name of democratic reform it should qualify as aggression.

Similarly, the six-member Shanghai Cooperation Organization which includes Russia and China in 2009 adopted an accord that reportedly defined information war, in part, as an effort by a state to undermine anothers political, economic and social systems.

There is push back. A key United Nations official last year issued a major report emphasizing the right of all individuals freely to use the Internet, and earlier this month, the United Nations Human Rights Council held a Swedish-led discussion among member states on online freedom. These instances follow on initiatives by the United States and others to push in various international forums for an expansive definition of the right to online expression.

The United States and likeminded countries will need to become even more active on this front. Developing international norms in favor of Internet freedom is a long-term, global objective. Some countries that currently repress the Internet like China and Iran are unlikely to be moved by any of these diplomatic efforts; statements at the United Nations and policy declarations supporting Internet freedom are highly unlikely to change their current policies.

But promoting Internet freedom is not only a near-term challenge, and current efforts may pay off in the longer run. In addition, many countries have not yet fully developed their own Internet policies or thought through all of the implications of Internet freedom and repression even in the short run including states in Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Shaping the behavior of those states should be an important goal of the United States and its partners.

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Internet Freedom: Diplomats Join The Dissidents, Geeks And Censors

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The recent New Democratic Party convention in Toronto may have done more than just select Thomas Mulcair as the partys new leader. It may have also buried the prospect of online voting in Canada for the foreseeable future.

While Internet-based voting supporters have consistently maintained that the technology is safe and secure, the NDPs experience in which a denial of service attack resulted in long delays and inaccessible websites demonstrates that turning to Internet voting in an election involving millions of voters would be irresponsible and risky.

As voter turnout has steadily declined in recent years, Elections Canada has focused on increasing participation by studying Internet-based voting alternatives. The appeal of online voting is obvious. Canadians bank online, take education courses online, watch movies online, share their life experiences through social networks online, and access government information and services online. Given the integral role the Internet plays in our daily lives, why not vote online as well?

The NDP experience provides a compelling answer.

Democracy depends upon a fair, accurate, and transparent electoral process with independent verification of the results. Conventional voting may typically require heading down to the polling station, but doing so accomplishes many of these goals. Private polling stations enable citizens to cast their votes anonymously, election day scrutineers provide oversight, and paper-based ballots can be recounted if needed.

There are ways to build anonymity and oversight into an online election process, but as the NDP experienced, there is no way to guarantee it will be disruption-free. In the NDPs case, 10,000 computers were used in a distributed denial-of-service attack designed to overwhelm the online voting system and effectively render it unusable for authorized voters.

The only real surprise about the attack is that it took anyone by surprise. Not only is a denial-of-service attack typically cited as the most likely security disruption, the NDP experienced much the same thing at its last leadership convention in 2003. Reports from that convention which only involved a single ballot to elect Jack Layton as the new party leader indicate that there was a denial-of-service attack that similarly delayed the voting process.

Online voting threats are not limited to denial-of-service attacks. Security experts point to the danger of counterfeit websites, phishing attacks, hacks into the election system, or the insertion of computer viruses that tamper with election results as real world threats to an Internet-based voting system.

While several Canadian municipalities have successfully used Internet voting, those elections were unlikely to be viewed as targets for attack since groups seeking to disrupt an online election will likely prefer to take aim at high profile events that offer maximum exposure.

Douglas Jones and Barbara Simons, the authors of the forthcoming book Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count, note that people running pilots are likely to declare success, in spite of any problems that might crop up. However, it is dangerous to draw conclusions from what appears to be a successful Internet voting pilot. If the election is insignificant, there is little to no motivation to sabotage the election.

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Internet voting carries risk as show by NDP experience

Published: March. 31, 2012 at 8:50 PM

MAINZ, Germany, March 31 (UPI) -- Internet-based therapy was as effective as group therapy sessions for people with tinnitus, researchers in Germany and Sweden found.

Dr. Maria Kleinstauber of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and colleagues at the Linkoping University in Sweden divided patients with moderate to severe tinnitus into three categories: those receiving group therapy, those receiving Internet-based therapy and a control group that only participated in an online discussion forum.

The German Tinnitus League said 2 percent of the population have moderate to unbearable tinnitus, but the symptoms can be successfully managed by cognitive behavioral therapy. However, the study found not everyone has the opportunity or the desire to take a course of psychotherapy.

For the purposes of the study, the training program developed in Sweden was adapted so that it could be used for German patients and then be evaluated for its effectiveness.

The study showed that distress measured using the Tinnitus Handicap Inventory was reduced on average from moderate 40 points to mild 29 points in participants who completed the Internet-based training course.

The results for subjects in the cognitive behavioral therapy group were also very good, with distress levels being reduced from 44 to 29 points, but there was hardly any change in this respect in the control group subjects.

Tinnitus is a ringing or other annoying constant or intermittent noise in the ears -- a symptom of an underlying condition, such as age-related hearing loss, ear injury or a circulatory system disorder. It is also linked to stress and depression.

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Internet-based therapy reduces tinnitus

BEIJING After weeks of Internet-fueled rumors suggesting fissures in the top leadership ranks, Chinese authorities struck back this weekend, closing 16 Web sites and arresting at least six people in a broad crackdown on the freewheeling world of cyberspace.

Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, said in a dispatch late Friday that the Web sites were closed, and the unnamed individuals detained, for fabricating or disseminating online rumors. For the past two weeks, the Internet has been filled with rumors of an internal power struggle after the largely unexplained March 15 ouster of the popular provincial Communist Party chief Bo Xilai.

Xinhua also said Saturday that the two most popular Twitter-like microblogging sites, weibo.com run by Sina and t. qq run by Tencent, had suspended their comment functions, after they were punished for allowing rumors to spread. The suspension of the user comments function was said to last until next Tuesday.

The State Council Information Office, which announced the new moves, said it took action against the sites for spreading rumors of military vehicles entering Beijing and something wrong going on in Beijing.

The unsubstantiated rumors included reports of a coup in Beijing, and gunshots being fired near the Zhongnanhai leadership compound. They were quickly dismissed as fabricated but still spread rapidly in the absence of much official information. Chinas censorship authorities immediately began blocking certain search terms, such as coup and gunshots. But this weekends actions suggested that a broader effort was now underway to rein in the Internet.

Also on Saturday, the government announced that since mid-February, 1,065 people had been arrested, and 3,177 Web sites shut down, in a sweeping Internet crackdown called Spring Breeze that it said was aimed at stopping Internet-based crime such as counterfeiting, smuggling and identify theft.

The government said about 208,000 harmful online messages had been deleted, and 70 Internet companies had received administrative punishment, including some it did not say how many that had been shut down.

Xinhua referred to the crackdown as an effort to cleanse cyberspace.

In the past two years, the microblogging sites have emerged as an explosively-popular new free speech platform in China, surpassing the heavily censored traditional media as the main source of news and indeed rumors for tens of millions of Internet users, called Netizens.

The Communist authorities have alternately tried to co-opt the new technology with government departments and party chiefs setting up their own microblogging accounts while also seeking to suppress the relatively open discussion of topics once considered taboo.

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Amid rumors of unrest, China cracks down on the Internet