Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace is the latest report from the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), which is a collaboration of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto; the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University; and the SecDev Group (Canada). The country profiles and regional overviews provided in this volume have been substantially updated and revised to reflect recent events since our last publication, Access Denied. In addition, Access Controlled includes six newly authored thematic chapters that analyze the themes of our investigations and grapple with the theoretical and public policy implications.
With Access Controlled, we take on new themes emerging from our research and concentrate on the countries that make up the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), as it is there, primarily, where some of the most important techniques of next-generation Internet controls are emerging and a normative terrain is being set. While the Access Controlled volume focuses on the OSCE region as an important locus of norms and emerging techniques, the ONI conducted tests in more than 65 countries over the last year and a half. We have included a selection of these regional overviews and country profiles in this volume on the basis of two criteria: first, we included countries that either border on or have strategic significance to the OSCE region; second, we included countries that are significant stories in and of themselves and on which we wanted to report. China and Iran are included in both categories, for example, but we also included Egypt, Tunisia, and South Korea (which are OSCE “partner in cooperation” states), as well as Australia and New Zealand, and all our regional overviews. As with Access Denied, all our country profiles and regional overviews are accessible in full on our Web site: http://opennet.net/, as well as the thematic chapters of this book.
Ronald Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski