On November 19, when Junaid Ahmed Palak, Bangladesh’s State Minister for Information and Communication Technology, posted a picture on his official Facebook profile from an event in Dhaka, it became official (in an ironic way) that nobody cares about the government ban on Facebook, other social media or messaging apps.
Bangladesh government had blocked Facebook, Messenger, Viber, WhatsApp, Line and Tango for an indefinite period after the country’s highest court upheld death penalties on November 18 against two top opposition leaders for crimes committed during the Liberation War. Similar rulings have triggered deadly protests in the past.
But that ban is apparently just the tip of the iceberg of the whole scenario. If a lawmaker himself uses Facebook bypassing the government ban, it pretty much makes it apparent that no one obeys any law in this country. The reason for such widespread usages of Facebook and other banned messaging apps through virtual private network (VPN) or proxy servers, bypassing the legal getaway services is simple. It’s not easy to control the data traffic through the Internet and only a very few government bodies have succeeded in doing so.
How does the ban take place?
Hasib Muammar Rashid, a Malaysia-based Bangladeshi online security expert who provides web security consultancy to different commercial banks explains the difficulty in controlling the web traffic. “In Bangladesh the Internet data enters through the lone submarine cable SEA-ME-WE-4 in Cox’s Bazar and through the landing station of six International Terrestrial Cable (ITC) licensees - NovoCom Limited, One Asia AHLJV, BD Link Communication Limited, Mango Teleservices Limited, Summit Communication Limited and Fibre at Home Limited,” he explains.
Aside from the submarine cable and the six ITCs, there are five VSAT providers with hub licensees, 12 VSAT provider licensees and 44 VSAT user licensees in Bangladesh. Explaining VSAT, Rashid says that VSATs are two-way satellite ground stations used primarily for uninterrupted Internet, data, LAN, voice/fax communication by different organisations.
“So basically, it means the bulk of the Internet data, around 70% enters into the country through the submarine cable and the rest through ITCs and VSATs. Now the government regulator which in Bangladesh’s case is the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) has the regulatory power to control the Internet data as it is armed with the amended Information and Communication Technology (ICT) act of 2013”.
A regulatory power, not a technological one
It means the ICT Act gave the government the power to block certain websites if it feels that access to those websites hamper the national security. “But that’s just the regulatory power. Technologically, it’s not possible to block any website in the world as there will always be numerous backdoor routes to access the websites. If all the Internet data enters into a country through a single gateway (suppose the submarine cable), the government could have controlled the web traffic through multi-layered port switches.”
Explaining how these port switches work, Rashid says that it’s like several tiers of security gates in a single entry port of the country where rigorous check posts inspect and control what comes in and what goes out. “It’s present in China. The Chinese central government has two main ways of controlling what its citizens see on the web: the Great Firewall, as it is called by foreigners, which is a system of limiting access to foreign websites which started in the late 1990s, and the Golden Shield, a system for domestic surveillance set up in 1998 by the Ministry of Public Security.”
The irony is even in China, albeit this multi-layered checking system of Internet traffic, bypassing the great firewall and accessing the banned websites are common practices. “This is because; controlling Internet traffic is almost an impossible thing.”
Bypassing the government restriction
He said that there are various ways to access banned websites bypassing government restrictions. “You just can connect to a VPN like ‘privateinternetaccess’ or ‘tunnelbear,’ and all traffic coming from your computer will be redirected over that VPN. In other words, if you’re connected to a VPN located in Iceland, all your network traffic will be redirected to Iceland before it emerges. Replies will be sending to the server in Iceland, which will forward them back to you,” Rashid clarifies.
He said, all Internet traffic in VPN happens over an encrypted connection. “All your ISP, network operator, or even your country’s government can see is that you’re making an encrypted VPN connection and sending data over the connection. If they want to block you, they’d have to block VPN connections which are hard because there are thousands available and blocking each one of them is not possible.”
“You can also use Tor. Tor allows you to browse anonymously. It does this by routing your web browsing over an encrypted network before they emerge at an endpoint, which will most likely be in an uncensored, unfiltered location. You shouldn’t use Tor to access sensitive, unencrypted data, but Tor will let you access blocked websites through any connection.”
Rashid said that the blocked sites can also be accessed using a standard proxy. System-wide (or browser-wide) proxies generally function similarly to VPNs. But they’re not very reliable. For example, “They only work with certain programmes, not every programme on your computer. However, if you want to quickly access a blocked website, you can try using a web-based proxy. There are many available proxy sites, including the widely known ‘Hide My Ass.’ Plug a website’s address into the box of ‘Hide My Ass’ and you can access it via the proxy.”
“These are just a few known ways. Any decent programmer with networking knowledge can even create their own port to get connected with the Internet traffic and access websites, let alone the fact that hundreds of VPN or proxy servers are already available free of cost,” according to Rashid.
