Firewall Strategies: How Countries Use Technology for Surveillance and Control

A firewall is a commonly used tool to monitor and control the Internet and supervise the population. In the past, there were different ways to accomplish this task. However, with the rise of social media and its perils. The govt. Agencies are also adopting new ways to get a glimpse of the usage. A firewall is a piece of hardware or software installed to control incoming and outgoing traffic. Therefore, it is normally implemented on the periphery’s backbone/ISP (Internet Service Provider). 

A firewall serves two purposes; security and censorship. In the form of security, it can protect against cyber threats, prevent intrusion, and control access. For censorship, it can filter the content, and monitor the regulation of the information flow over the nation. The Great Firewall of China is a prime example of the national firewall. Corporate and educational institutions are also bound to use this firewall for enhanced security.

Firewall technology has been in use since the 1980s and early 1990s. However, these days, the focus is being shifted from security to censorship. In the early days, the firewall was known as packet filters. Then comes the proxy firewalls.

With the growing influence of the Internet, the need to control and monitor internet access has grown significantly. Pakistan is among the top countries listed, where the national firewall is being installed. A light glimpse of bottlenecks and heavy throttling can be seen in July and August this year. These tools inspect packets deeply and apply keyword blocking to regulate internet access.

Advancement in the firewalls can also be seen which is commonly referred to as Next Generation Firewalls (NGFWs). The NGFWs can access application awareness, intrusion prevention, and integrated threat intelligence.

Let’s take the example of the Chinese firewall, which is commonly known as the Golden Shield Project. This is used as access control of the Internet for the nationals of China and its nationals. It has sophisticated censorship capabilities that use the features of Domain Name Server (DNS) filtering, Internet Protocol (IP) blocking, Deep Packet Inspection (DPS), and keyword filtering. By incorporating these methods undesirable content can be restricted. This not only limits Internet freedom but also enforces the state’s policies. In this way, the public perception is fostered and the government-approved narratives are embedded into the people’s minds.

Firewalls can be of different types which mainly lie in the following three broad categories. Firstly, packet filtering examines packet headers based on predefined rules. Secondly, stateful inspection that tracks the state of active connections. Finally, application gateways or proxy firewalls operate at the application layer, filtering traffic based on particular protocols. Moreover, Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) is used to analyze the content within the packet. It is significantly used to monitor and collect the data over the internet. Excessive usage of DPI raises concerns about privacy among users. These days, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are being adopted in cybersecurity. This can enhance the response time, analyze large volumes of data, and provide better insights.