When your internet connection dies the cause isn't likely to be a government-issued blackout. But that's the reality for people living in Iraq.
Earlier this week, Iraq's government turned off all broadband and mobile broadband connections, effectively cutting the entire country off from the rest of the world. The reason? So students didn't cheat on their exams. Each block, according to the Social Media Exchange, took place between 5am and 8am, dictated by the Ministry of Communications across "all regions of Iraq".
The UN has recently passed a resolution for the "promotion, protection and enjoyment of human rights on the internet".
The resolution, which is non-binding, states the importance of "applying a comprehensive human rights-based approach when providing and expanding access to the internet and for the internet to be open, accessible and nurtured".
It follows the freedom of expression resolutions found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Iraq is an old hand when it comes to internet censorship, with 15 reported shutdowns in 2015 alone. At around the same time last year, officials in Iraq halted web services for the same exam-based reason. Other web blackouts took place in 2014 and included specific blocks on social media in an attempt to stop the spread of Islamic State propaganda.
But what makes the most recent case different to most – and worries civil liberties groups – is the scale and ease with which the network can be turned off.
"They've taken this very blunt approach, which is to ban or block all internet traffic, and that's certainly not how most censorship works," Oliver Farnan, a researcher at the University of Oxford's Internet Institute, tells WIRED.
"Most censorship is targeted by IP addresses or DNS, or it could be targeted by keywords on websites, but with this they have literally just blocked everything."
For Iraq, turning the internet off is relatively straightforward. The government owns the majority of the country's communications network. At the very least it can order Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to shutdown networks, at most it has the potential to employ more extreme measures.
"Connecting the major cities there's a fibre optic backbone, and that is essentially owned by the government and run by the Iraqi Telecommunications and Post Company (ITPC)," explains Doug Madory, a director of internet analysis at Dyn. In 2006, ITPC paid network communication company Nortel $20 million to create a 5,000km "nationwide optical backbone" to deliver data to 35 of Iraq's major cities,. The network added to the country's 'south ring' fibre network, which was constructed following the fall of dictator Saddam Hussein.
Madory explains that ITPC, which is run by the communications ministry, sells bandwidth to ISPs who use the country's "backbone" to "communicate to the outside world and within the country". This, he says, is a "single point of failure" that the government can use to turn the internet off with impunity.
According to David Belson, a senior director at networking firm Akamai, there are a number of ways that Iraqi officials could have turned the internet off in the country during the exam period. The most basic, but also unlikely, Belson says, would be to physically disconnect it. "The router or routers – there's probably a small number of them – used for the international connectivity could be powered down or [they could] unplug the fibre cables," Belson said.
Having a small number of routers control an entire nation's internet connection is not unprecedented. According to Edward Snowden, the NSA once accidentally knocked out the internet for the whole of Syria by remotely causing a router to malfunction.
A more likely method, according to Belson, would be to reroute traffic so that it cannot find an endpoint. "My computer, that is connected to whatever, which is connected to the government controlled network provider is going to be looking for a route to Facebook and the routers that are government controlled are ultimately going to say there's no route," says Belson.
And such techniques can go awry. In February 2008, Pakistan blocked YouTube from the entire world when it incorrectly tried to reroute internal traffic to stop people from seeing an anti-Islamic film.
The blocks in Iraq even included mobile data networks; one worker for Amnesty International tweeted that the Korek network provider sent a text to inform of the shutdown. Madory says Iraq's control of communication networks would have allowed it to order individual providers to shut down data connections, although local calls would still have been allowed.
Despite the outages, there is still an internal complication in Iraq's control of the internet. Kurdistan, an autonomous region in the north of the country, controls much of the the internet traffic leaving Iraq. According to Reuters, the region has control of up to 75 per cent of Iraqi networks.
Dyn says this means that Kurdish ISPs have a "central role" in connecting the country to the global internet and has strong connection links through Turkey and Iran.
For Iraq's 4.8 million internet users, a figure that represents just 11 per cent of the population (although, this has grown from 0.1 per cent in 2001), the outages are likely to continue. "There's no other country on Earth", says Madory, that's blocked internet connections while exams are taking place. "It seems pretty disproportionate," he concludes.
While ethical concerns remain, Farnan says that when trying to stop people cheating on exams a total internet block makes more sense than targeted censorship. "They kind of need to block everything," he says. "It is not just blocking something that they deem politically seditious, they want to block all information. Really, a blunt approach like this is the only way they can handle it."
Targeted censorship, using DNS or IP address blocking, remains the more popular approach outside Iraq. In the UK ISPs have been ordered to block dozens of piracy websites since 2012, while the government has also introduced "family friendly" internet filters to block some adult content.
But a country-wide internet blackout in the UK or US would be incredibly unlikely, according to Belson. "Most of those countries are going to have more autonomous type networks, multiple network providers, a number of international transit connections," he says
For Iraqis, so long as the government controls the communication networks, widespread internet shutdowns aren't likely to stop anytime soon.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
