Kazakhstan's move to control Internet prompts censorship, surveillance concerns - Committee to Protect Journalists

AKIPRESS.COM - A state-controlled Internet service provider in Kazakhstan is requiring at least some of its subscribers to submit to having their Internet traffic intercepted when they use specific websites, including social media sites, email and messaging services, and Google News, according to research published this week by Censored Planet, a project at the University of Michigan, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported.
A new opening for censorship and surveillance is cause for concern in Kazakhstan, where CPJ has documented the authoritarian government censoring the media and jailing journalists. By utilizing its influence over local ISPs to degrade security online, Kazakhstan is provoking a global debate about the signals we rely on to assess whether websites can be trusted.
The interception "breaks the end-to-end encryption and enables the Kazakhstan government to have complete visibility [of] users' traffic," according to an email to CPJ from Roya Ensafi, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, and one of the researchers behind the Censored Planet report. Kazakhstan's Ministry of Digital Development, Innovation, and Aerospace Industry did not reply to CPJ's emailed request for comment on July 22, or a subsequent follow-up.
The interception affected "a fraction" of the traffic passing through the country's largest ISP, Kazakhtelecom, according to the research, which was carried out between July 17 and 20. But it targeted connections to 37 domains, the report found, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as well as email and messaging tools and Google services including Docs, Hangouts, and News. "Users cannot access affected sites at all if they do not ... allow interception," the report said.