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March/April 1999
Screen Version
The Internet, Satellites, and Human Rights
By Michiel Hegener
mh@nrc.nl
If we are concerned about fostering human rights, if enemies of
human rights around the globe are worried about increasing numbers
of ordinary people having access to modern telecommunications
such as the Internet, if human rights happen to be violated most
often in areas with poor telecommunications infrastructure, and
if satellites offer--and will continue to offer for at least a
few decades to come--the quickest and cheapest way to link any
far-off place to the Internet, then the combined effect of Internet,
communication satellites, and human rights deserves some attention.
First, a few definitions: Communication satellites are relay stations
for radio signals orbiting the earth. The Internet is, well, the
Internet. But the question remains: exactly what are human rights?
It isn't easy to answer--in part because there is no internationally
accepted definition. The broadest definitions mention the right
to work, the right to be educated, the right to access to basic
amenities and health care, and the like. All of those are definitely
fostered by good telecommunications. Also very definitely, how
telecoms and those broad human rights interact is a subject far
too vast to be dealt with here. The usual benchmark is the United
Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which outlines
somewhat narrower principles, such as freedom of expression, assembly,
and religion. At an even more basic level--the level of our physical
existence, that is--the declaration states that all people in
all countries under all laws should be free of evils like torture
and arbitrary arrest.
Let's focus on the latter category first. Clearly, physical threats
are themselves threatened in a society in which people can communicate
freely. Disappearances, arrests, and violence can be reported
to the outside world--in particular, to organizations like Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch. Via the media and politics
in free countries, they can backfire at their perpetrators. Human
rights violations in Greece and Portugal in the 1970s reached
the rest of Europe thanks in large part to telephone density in
those countries that wasn't very supportive of dictatorships:
if you want to dictate, make sure your subjects can't communicate.
There is compelling evidence suggesting that dictatorial regimes
can survive only in countries with fewer than 20 telephone lines
per 100 inhabitants, and most Western countries now have well
above 40 lines per 100 inhabitants. Of course, the Internet--e-mail
in particular--must have a similar if not a stronger beneficial
influence on the most basic human rights. But no research or evidence
is needed to understand that the Internet is pivotal to the flourishing
of freedom of expression and--in a nongeographic sense--freedom
of assembly.
Interaction between the Internet, satellites, and human rights
is something new. Human rights violations are as old as mankind,
communication satellites have been around since the mid-60s, and
the Internet is of course a very recent phenomenon--especially
if we disregard its long period of gestation. However, it's the
satellites that are causing the current and, even more so, will
cause the future interaction. Despite its tender age and barring
unforeseen developments, the way the Internet works appears to
be far more stable than satellite technology. So let's take a
brief look at some of the main satellite developments as far as
they have a bearing on human rights and the Internet. Put simply,
communication satellites will be getting much closer to the earth
in the coming years, and they are becoming stronger all the time
so they can pick up weaker signals than before and can transmit
them back to the earth with so much power that simple receivers
will do. In addition, satellites are using ever-higher frequencies,
which means ever-smaller dish antennae for equipment on the ground.
Not quite accidentally, those trends converge: communication by
satellite is becoming easier and cheaper all the time.
Two-way satellite communication soon will become a mass product
for individual users around the globe, especially for accessing
the Internet. For instance, to link one PC--or a small network--from
anywhere to an Internet backbone a couple of years ago, using
a satellite for a simple point-to-point connection, you would
have had to spend $25,000 on equipment alone for one small earth
station with a dish of just a few meters. On the other side of
the link, in the country with the Internet backbone, the incoming
and outgoing signals usually travel via a dish antenna of up to
32 meters (630 feet) in diameter on an earth station that handles
many different signals simultaneously. Today the bill for the
same trick might be as low as $5,000, and it is expected to drop
to $1,000 or less within the next few years. The tariff per megabyte
sent or received may plummet to as little as one cent.
It's difficult to compare with the current situation. Today fixed
throughput is still predominant. When you lease 64 kilobits per
second for, say, $2,500 a month and use that slice of bandwidth
all the time in its entirety, the price per megabyte will be just
7 cents. But it can skyrocket to $83 per megabyte if one megabyte
is all you send or receive in one day. Demand-assigned bandwidth
and billing on a pay-as-you-go basis are already available here
and there and within certain limitations, but they will become
predominant in the future.
The effect of increased satellite power should be quite clear.
It is much harder to assess what the changing orbital altitudes
will bring about. Traditionally, the vast majority of communication
satellites have been following the geostationary orbit: eastbound
in the equatorial plane at 35,786 kilometers’ (22,187 miles’)
altitude, where they follow the rotation of the earth and appear
not to move. They are called GEOs. Higher up they would go slower
than the earth; lower, and they orbit in less than 23 hours and
56 minutes--the time needed for one revolution of the earth. As
a result, two or more transmitter/receivers can communicate with
each other if they have their dish antennas trained at the same
satellite.
Earth stations can be very far apart--more than 15,000 kilometers.
From their lofty positions, GEOs can see about 42 percent of the
earth. These footprints often are narrowed down in order to concentrate
signal power, but even then, GEOs cover huge areas. About 200–300
GEOs are operational right now, but just one is enough to establish
a link between an area where human rights are threatened and an
area where freedom abounds. A GEO also is excellent for datacasting--sending
large amounts of data to any number of cheap, receive-only terminals
within its footprint: half a continent or so. More about that
later.
The very high altitude of GEOs has, however, two big drawbacks:
To bridge the distance, you still need rather heavy and strong
equipment on the ground. And the signals need about a quarter
of a second to travel between two earth stations, which adversely
affects Internet protocol in some ways. We'll skip the latter
problem, because it has little to do with human rights. For further
discussion of the effects of this so-called latency, see "Internet Unwired" in OnTheInternet, Sept./Oct. 1997.
Both problems can be avoided by using satellites at much lower
altitudes--for instance, 700 or 1,400 kilometers above the earth.
Fixed dish antennas won't do anymore, because the satellite orbits
in an hour or two. So omnidirectional antennas or, in some cases,
tracking antennas are being used instead. And because a satellite
seen from a
given spot disappears behind the horizon some 15 or 30 minutes
after it rises, you need dozens of satellites to make sure another
one rises in time. Two of these low-earth-orbit (LEO) networks
are already available today: Iridium uses 66 satellites at 705
kilometers’ altitude--not counting on orbit spares--and Orbcomm
has 28 satellites at 755 kilometers. Both systems use handheld
communication sets of just a few hundred grams, something that
can't be done with today's GEOs. It can be done with much stronger
GEOs that sport very large antennae, which also is a trend of
the near future. The official term for all this is global mobile
personal communications by satellite, or GMPCS.
Iridium was designed especially for telephony in areas that lack
cellular coverage, and it also supports data traffic: 2,400 bits
per second uplink and 4,800 bits per second downlink. At about
$5 a minute, that means $5 just to download a piece the length
of this article. Orbcomm serves the market for short messages
either to or from anywhere and is excellent for tracking containers
as they move from point A to point B or for tracking e-mail messages.
Several other LEO systems will follow soon. Unlike Iridium and
Orbcomm, some of the new LEO networks--like Teledesic (288 satellites
at 1,400 kilometers) and Sky Bridge (80 satellites at 1,469 kilometers)--were
designed especially for Internet use.
In countries with suboptimal human rights situations--which is
putting it ridiculously mildly, considering more than a few cases--for
which the government can be held responsible, the government tends
to check or even block the free flow of information and hence
the unrestricted use of telecommunications. Severe restrictions
on the use of small earth stations to communicate with GEOs--so-called
VSATs, for very-small-aperture terminals--are invariably part
of the package. Satellite communication is a splendid instrument
to bypass the far-more-easy-to-tap local telecommunications infrastructure--cable
networks in particular--and all governments know that. A simple
VSAT--the lightest ones weigh about 10 kilograms (22 pounds)--can
bring full, almost-impossible-to-monitor Internet access and other
forms of communication to countries where people aren't free to
say or to e-mail or to surf what they want. Of course, a sheltered
place is needed to operate from: a single building with the dish
hidden on the roof--flat rooftops, as are often found in warm
and dry climates, are much better for this purpose than tilted
ones--or an area over which the national government has lost control.
An example is the northern, predominantly Kurdish part of Iraq,
where Inmarsat satellite phones--essentially VSATs, although not
officially recognized as such--are being used to access the Internet.
Part of the beauty of using VSATs to bypass restrictions on communication
lies in inability of satellite owners or operators to know where
the VSATs are located. And so they can't be held accountable by
the authorities whose rules are being trespassed. The VSAT user
still faces two problems, however: an old one and a new one. The
old problem: it isn't so easy to lease just a very small quantity
of satellite capacity--such as the amount needed for one VSAT--by
just going to the satellite owner. Plus, you also need a downlink
earth station somewhere as well as access from there to a cable
backbone--the Internet backbone, for instance.
The normal scenario is to contact an intermediary telecommunications
organization that offers both services at the same time. In either
case, the party that offers satellite capacity to a suspect user
may well run into trouble. A fine example, though not two-way,
is offered by Kurdish satellite TV station MED TV. Uplinking from
an earth station in Great Britain, MED TV has been broadcasting
since 1995 to eastern Turkey and adjoining regions. The Turkish
government is less than pleased with the content and therefore
has been putting both diplomatic and economic pressure on those
Eutelsat member states that made the mistake of subleasing a small
bit of their Eutelsat capacity to MED TV. Eutelsat has a beam
on the Middle East that also covers Europe--and can be uplinked
from there--which made it an obvious choice for MED TV. Spain,
France, Germany, Portugal, and Poland--in that order--all helped
MED TV and quickly disassociated themselves from the Kurdish TV
station after Turkish intervention. Understandably, MED TV chooses
not to disclose whose capacity it is currently using--on an Intelsat
satellite.
Although it would like to venture into two-way communications
and accommodate Internet use, MED TV does not expect it to happen
within the next few years due to limited funds and limited Internet
use in the Kurdish mountains. However, that's the direction many
GEO owners are going. Today their focus still is heavily on one-way
traffic in satellite TV while they shift from analog to digital.
But all of the big players want to offer their customers interactive
use within a few years. The technology isn't much of a problem;
it already exists and is being used. The focus is on making it
cheaper in order to reach mass markets: $500–$1,000 for user equipment.
Doesn't that prospect seem splendid? Internet access for all the
hundreds of millions of people in hundreds of thousands of unwired
villages around the globe! Problem: the track record of dealings
between big satellite TV companies--broadcasters, satellite owners,
or combinations of the two--and countries with suboptimal human
rights records is rather worrying.
Most satellite TV companies like to receive more money than they
spend--a lot of money, in other words. For that they need the
consent and cooperation of the governments that are ruling over
the footprints of their satellites--or at least the vast majority
of those governments. Here's why. If they scramble their signals
and let their viewers pay by renting descramblers, that's very
easy to control of course: get caught while selling or buying
a descrambler, and you'll be viewing prison walls instead of satellite
TV. So a satellite TV company that relies on such revenues usually
makes sure its programs are more or less in tune with the ideas
of those in power on the ground, especially if those powers have
a habit of dealing with dissenters in unpleasant ways or, rather,
of dealing with them at all. However, most satellite TV companies
that are broadcasting to areas with adverse human rights conditions
are sending unscrambled signals. Relying on ads is far easier
to organize. But even then, the same problem may arise: advertising
companies must have access to the footprint areas in order to
sell their products, and most of them don't like to be associated
with government-unfriendly TV stations.
The bearing of all of this on Internet access via GEOs may seem
limited. After all, TV is altogether different from the Internet.
But part of the difference is to the disadvantage of the latter.
The dish antenna you need for receiving analog unscrambled TV
satellite signals can well be welded locally. Scores of bicycle
repairmen in developing countries and presumably some hairdressers,
too, know pretty well how to do it. And if the signals are in
the often used 12- to 14-gigahertz Ku-band range, an antenna of
less than a meter is enough if you are not too far from the edge
of the footprint. But for Internet use, you need digital decoding
equipment, which definitely cannot be made locally. The user equipment
must be imported and sold in shops. Plus, the party offering the
Internet service via satellite wants to send out bills to users
and wants the bills paid. In all, there are plenty of ways for
local authorities to keep tabs on the Internet via satellite.
They are in a position to dictate demands--like having access
to who has been viewing which site; telling which sites must be
altogether blocked; knowing who's been e-mailing what to whom;
and dictating which spot beams on the satellites must be switched
off entirely in order to allow others to be used.
Spot beams: we haven't discussed them yet, and that brings us
to a new problem facing unofficial VSAT users, now that we've
discussed the old one to some extent. The new problem is the trend
toward equipping satellites with many spot beams, each of them
covering a round area of as little as 200 kilometers across. The
reason is that the same frequencies can be used by more than one
VSAT at the same time as long as the VSATs are not located in
overlapping beams. And it's easy to tell from which footprint
an illegal VSAT is operating, which can be a footprint that reaches
a rebel-held area in a certain country. The satellite owner may
not care about the illegal use as long as the bills are being
paid, which can well be done by supporters in the West. However,
by not caring, they might lose favor with a government that controls
the largest part of the (potential) market in the country concerned.
Summing it up, the idea of selling satellite communication as
a trick to bypass the local infrastructure or whatever regulatory
limitations a government imposes has become obsolete during the
past few years. Under the stewardship of the International Telecommunication
Union (ITU) in Geneva, all major satellite companies and representatives
of about 130 of the 183 ITU member states--including countries
with awful human rights records--have had lengthy, fruitful discussions
during the past few years, reaching wide agreement about friendly
cooperation. Officially, the issue was financial: poor countries
feared loss of telecommunications revenue from introduction of
the new satellite systems, with their light, cheap, easy-to-smuggle-in
user equipment. They wanted a slice of the pie; that's what some
rich countries wanted too, and the ITU was quite right in using
its position to address that problem. But by solving it, the human-rights-boosting
potential of the GMPCS and the Internet satellite systems suffered
more than a bit. Today and tomorrow the big satellite operators
are and will be very keen on pleasing the powers that be. It is--or,
rather, was--only the great width of their beams that allowed
them to leave questions about illegal use unanswered and yet keep
their bigger customers more or less satisfied. To sum it up: the
trend is toward many narrow beams on GEOs and hence slimming chances
for satellite use without the consent of the government.
The LEOs offer a hardly brighter prospect. As they move around
the globe, rather simple on-board Doppler devices enable them
to locate any user within a range of 10s of kilometers, kilometers
even. So far, all LEO fleet owners follow the policy of blocking
any use of their satellites to or from any country with which
they don't have an agreement. When Orbcomm became operational
in November 1998, it had full or provisional licenses in only
21 countries, although its 28 satellites covered the entire earth.
Orbcomm and Iridium are fine for checking your e-mail, but because
they are slow and rather expensive, neither is very useful for
surfing the Web. But Teledesic and Sky Bridge are. Due to become
operational in about 2003, both will offer extremely high speeds
and the lowest tariffs anywhere on the planet--but not in countries
whose governments don't like their citizens to have unchecked
Internet access. These and other LEO systems simply will not work
in those parts of the world. It remains to be seen what will happen
if a country allows usage only in certain areas. What if China
allows Teledesic, but not in Tibet? What if Sky Bridge is allowed
to operate only in the northern half of Sudan? What if Indonesia
kindly requests that Space Way or Cyber Star or Astro Link or
any other of the new Internet-by-GEO systems switch off their
spot beams covering Aceh--the rebellious northern tip of Sumatra--or
the spot beam that reaches Irian Jaya (formerly Eastern Timor)?
Now for some good news. There will continue to be regular, old-fashioned
GEOs--with beams so wide that no one can tell where the user is--for
quite a while to come, if only because almost all of the ones
on orbit now and most of the ones currently being built still
have those human-rights-friendly wide beams. GEO life expectancies
of 10–15 years are quite normal nowadays, so, yes, there will
be plenty of opportunity for illegal VSAT use till 2020 at least.
In the meanwhile, as pointed out before, VSATs are getting smaller
and cheaper all the time. The problem of leasing a bit of satellite
capacity remains, but can always be negotiated if you really want
to and you can pull a few strings in countries where they don't
care who is sending what.
Then there is datacasting: using just half of one uncompressed
channel of a TV satellite--one or two megabits per second--GEOs
can shower entire continents with Internet files and other data,
including all sorts of information that can enhance the human
rights situation. Datacasting may not increase freedom of expression,
but access to lots of sensitive information also is a very good
thing. The broadcasting of daily additions to all Internet newsgroups
in an area stretching from, say, Tibet to Irian Jaya is peanuts
for a modern TV satellite. Supporters of such programs in the
West should make sure, however, that analog is being used.
Digital TV signals cannot be received without sophisticated decoders,
which can hardly be traded and installed without the consent of
local authorities. Even so, but less difficult, special cards
for PCs need to be smuggled in to process the data flow and store
on the hard disk only those bits--newsgroups, for instance--that
interest the PC user. For the rest it's just a matter of an extra
cable, from the dish antenna to the PC. In a strict sense, datacasting
isn't an Internet application of satellites: the data flow won't
be using TCP/IP, of course--because packet reception cannot be
acknowledged--and the data sent will typically reach stand-alone
PCs. But it is excellent to give volume to intranet applications
on LANs. Datacasting, as opposed to two-way communication, has
the big advantage that the end user doesn't have to send: that
makes it a lot cheaper, and it is much more difficult to locate
users in areas under government control.
Even better good news: individual access to the Internet via satellite
will become so cheap and common in the next 5 or 10 years that
it will infiltrate into areas where it's not allowed. Consider,
for instance, the fact that Internet access has become a top priority
for expatriates--Western expatriates in particular--wherever they
live. If a country wants to attract foreign business--and that's
what all countries want--then offering good, cheap Internet access
may well help it reach that goal. And if the normal infrastructure
doesn't support fast, reliable Internet use--except maybe in some
of the bigger towns--pressure may mount to allow systems that
are capable of delivering exactly that. Especially Teledesic can
connect any area very quickly because it has intersatellite links,
so the satellite with which you exchange signals doesn't have
to have a ground station in view. Not having intersatellite links,
an additional ground station may be needed to make Sky Bridge
accessible from a given area. In the case of GEOs, it depends
on whether they have spot beams trained on the area; if they don't,
there is little to switch on, and adding a beam antenna to a satellite
in orbit is not an option. So in all likelihood, all Internet
satellite systems will, after they've been launched, experience
an increase in the number of areas where they're allowed to operate.
Any country that continues to block all of these satellite systems
may have a problem if its neighbors allow the systems to be used
freely. Bear in mind that satellite communication is especially
useful in places where there are no cables--which goes for many
border areas because country borders often go through rugged terrain.
Now a number of villages on the border get full-blown Internet
access via Space Way or Teledesic or Astro Link.
Would that leave the inhabitants on the less fortunate side of
the border completely unaffected given the difficulty to patrol
such borders?
One may ask how the kind of poor, often not-so-literate societies
we are talking about will get access to the Internet, even if
it is allowed, and how they can possibly afford it. Well, they
can't afford it--individually, that is. But together they can,
and it's as simple as that. Personal computers in most developing
countries, irrespective of the human rights situation, are almost
invariably collective computers. One reason the Internet is spreading
like a prairie fire across a continent as poor as Africa lies
in the spread of telecenters--also known, among other names, as
teleshops or Internet cafés: A local entrepreneur invests in connectivity
and hardware and opens a shop. Anyone can walk in and send e-mail
or surf the Net. Incoming mail is printed and kept until you drop
in or it is stored in your own password-protected directory.
Most telecenters can be found where the best telecommunications
infrastructure, the highest degree of literacy, and the greatest
spending power can be found: in towns. But with the aid of big
organizations like the ITU and UNESCO, more and more telecenters
are being set up in poor rural areas, almost invariably using
satellite communication to link to backbones. The best telecenters
have staff who sensitize the local population about using telecommunications
to their personal advantage. At a more basic level, Starlight
Telecommunications in Kampala, Uganda, simply turned custom-made
truck containers into small telecenters--including a power generator
and a VSAT--and brought them to small towns deep in the Ugandan
countryside--by truck, of course.
Telecenters clearly can't exist without consent of government,
which might justify the question that asks what relevance they
have in areas of very bad human rights conditions. The government
just won't allow them or will check every message and person that
goes in or out. The answer is that governments are not the only
violators of human rights. Wherever human rights violations occur,
the government and its agents--like police, secret services, and
armed forces--are the usual suspects. As a consequence, countries
without any government--like Somalia--should be human rights heavens.
That not being the case at all, we must accept the rather more
confusing idea that any society, any part of a society, or even
any group with the means, the motive, and the opportunity can
and probably will violate human rights. One example on a grand
scale is female circumcision, which is not endorsed by the governments
of the African countries where it happens; some governments are
even fighting it. Another example is religious intolerance--like
threats, even death threats--against individuals who choose to
disassociate themselves from religions they once belonged to.
This is important when we consider the Internet, satellites, and
human rights, because it is invariably governments that are the
entities that have the means, the right, and even the obligation
to regulate wireless communications. To narrow it down and be
precise, nongovernmental human rights violators must fear Internet
via satellite most--even more than governments fear it--especially
when it becomes as cheap, ubiquitous, and common as satellite
TV is today. That time isn't far away.
For more information on satellite systems and telecenters, see
http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/constellations/overview.html
http://home.inreach.com/cisler/telecenters.html
Join the Internet Society today: http://www.isoc.org/welcome/