Yahoo! Fellow Evgeny Morozov On Authoritarian Governments and the Internet

By Ebele Okobi | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

Take a look at video of this fascinating panel discussion about authoritarian regimes and technology. Our Yahoo! Georgetown Fellow for 2010, Evgeny Morozov, is one of the panelists. He is joined by Rebecca MacKinnon, who is a journalist, blogger and scholar as well as a member of the GNI.  The other panelists are Alec Ross, of the Office of the Secretary of State, and Tim Wu of Slate Magazine and Columbia Law School, and the panel is moderated by James Fallows of Atlantic Monthly.

http://newamerica.net/events/2010/authority_meet_technology

Are China’s demands for Internet ‘self-discipline’ spreading to the West?

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Future Atlas

By Rebecca MacKinnon | McClatchy Washington Bureau

Every year in China, Internet executives are officially rewarded for their “patriotism.”

Last November in Beijing, I sat in a large auditorium festooned with red banners and watched Robin Li, the CEO of Google’s main competitor, Baidu, parade onstage with executives from 19 other companies to receive the 2009 “China Internet Self-Discipline Award.”

The rhetoric was all about the “strength and confidence of the Chinese Internet” and “harmonious and healthy Internet development.” The reality is: China’s annual “self discipline” award is for private sector censorship.

In English-language news reports about Chinese censorship, we hear a lot about the “Great Firewall,” the system that Chinese network operators use to block objectionable Web sites that are operated from overseas — and to render Twitter, Facebook and YouTube inaccessible to Chinese Internet users. You also may have read about the “Internet police” who keep tabs on what people say and do online.

You may not have heard about “self-discipline” requirements for Chinese Internet companies, however. For some reason, they get a lot less Western media coverage, despite the fact that the government delegates a large part of the censorship and surveillance on the Chinese Internet to private companies.

Here’s how it works: In China, all Internet and mobile companies are held responsible for everything their users post, transmit, or search for. The Chinese call it “self-discipline.” In Anglo-American legal parlance, it’s “intermediary liability,” which in China is taken to its logical extreme with no public accountability or due process.

“Intermediary liability” means that the intermediary, a service that acts as “intermediate” conduit for the transmission or publication of information, is held liable or legally responsible for everything its users do.

In China, if companies fail to track and remove content or block conversations that regulators deem violate laws or regulations (a court or judge is almost never involved), they risk heavy fines at best and permanent shutdown at worst.

Companies’ liability covers a gamut of content, all the way from porn, to pirated intellectual property, to defamation of powerful people, to exposes of corruption leading to poisoned baby formula, to treatises on democratic reform. Dozens of Chinese companies were shut down last year, and many more were fined or warned. Unlike Google, they couldn’t just leave China.

To operate in China, Google’s local search engine, Google.cn, had to meet these “self-discipline” requirements. When users typed words or phrases for sensitive subjects into the box and clicked “search,”

Google.cn was responsible for making sure that the results didn’t include forbidden content.

It’s much easier to force intermediary communications and Internet companies such as Google to police themselves and their users than the alternatives: sending cops after everybody who attempts a risque or politically sensitive search, getting parents and teachers to do their jobs, or chasing down the origin of every offending link. Or re-considering the logic and purpose of your entire system.

Intermediary liability enables the Chinese authorities to minimize the number of people they need to put in jail in order to stay in power and to maximize their control over what the Chinese people know and don’t know.

In its bombshell announcement on Jan. 12, Google cited massive cyber attacks against the Gmail accounts of human rights activists as the most urgent reason for re-evaluating its presence in China. However, the Chinese government’s demands for ever-increasing levels of censorship contributed to a toxic and unsustainable business environment.

Ever since Google.cn launched in 2006, I’ve occasionally run tests to see how its compares to its homegrown competitor Baidu. Google.cn consistently censored less than Baidu did. This is how Google executives justified the ethics of their presence in China: Chinese users, they argued, were still better off with Google.cn than without it.

Things changed for Google in 2009, however. Regulators demanded that it ramp its self-censorship up to Baidu’s level. The Chinese state-run media attacked Google numerous times for failing to protect youth from smutty Web sites when — horror of horrors — those innocent kids happened to type in smutty words and phrases.

Meanwhile in the Western democratic world, the idea of strengthening intermediary liability is becoming increasingly popular in government agencies and parliaments. From France to Italy to the United Kingdom, the idea of holding carriers and services liable for what their customers do is seen as the cheapest and easiest solution to the law enforcement and social problems that have gotten tougher in the digital age — from child porn to copyright protection to cyber-bullying and libel.

I’m not equating Western democracy with Chinese authoritarianism — that would be ludicrous. However, I am concerned about the direction we’re taking without considering the full global context of free expression and censorship.

The Obama administration is negotiating a trade agreement with 34 other countries — the text of which it refuses to make public, citing national security concerns — that according to leaked reports would include increased liability for content hosting companies and service providers. The goal is to combat the global piracy of movies and music.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t fight crime or enforce the law. Of course we should, assuming that the laws reflect the consent of the governed. But let’s make sure that we don’t throw the baby of democracy and free speech out with the bathwater, as we do the necessary work of adjusting legal systems and economies to the Internet age.

Rebecca MacKinnon is a fellow with the Open Society Institute. From 1998-2001, she was CNN’s Beijing Bureau Chief. She’s writing a book about the future of freedom in the Internet age.

Internet censorship in China

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | McKay Savage

By Tania Branigan | Guardian

The creep of internet censorship in China: a timeline of the last 12 months

January

China launches a crackdown on “vulgar” websites including Google that it says have failed to censor inappropriate content.
As the drive intensifies, observers warn it is affecting politically sensitive content too.
Later in the month, Chinese media censors the inauguration speech of the US president, Barack Obama: state TV cuts away from the live feed after a reference to communism and leading websites remove the word from translated texts.

March

China blocks YouTube after denouncing as “a lie” footage appearing to show security forces beating Tibetans in Lhasa last year.
June

China blocks Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail days ahead of the 20th anniversary on the bloody military crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.
Later in the month it blocks Google services, with search functions and Gmail inaccessible for over an hour.
The biggest news of all is the massive outcry as the government orders PC makers to install its controversial censorship software, Green Dam.
Following complaints from internet users, businesses and foreign governments the authorities back down, saying it will not be compulsory.
July
Internet access is cut across the entire north-western region, home to more than 19 million people, after deadly ethnic riots in its capital.
Some sites are later restored but as of January 2010 access remains extremely restricted.
Facebook reports access problems and remains inaccessible from China as of January 2010.
Later in the month the government says it plans to implement a five-year programme advocating clean online games, starting in 2010. It bans websites featuring or publicising online games that “glamorise mafia gangs”.
August
The government drops its plan to install the controversial Green Dam software on every new computer sold in China, despite official comments the previous month that it would go ahead after all.
September
It emerges that news websites in China have begun requiring new users to register their true identities before allowing them to post comments.
November
Obama criticises internet controls during his visit to China, describing himself as “a big supporter of non-censorship”.
December
The government says its campaign against pornography on the web and through mobile Wap sites will continue until May 2010.
It later emerges China has issued new internet regulations, including what some interpret as an attempt to create a “whitelist” of approved websites that could potentially place much of the internet off-limits to Chinese readers, and ordering domain management institutions and internet service providers to tighten controls over domain name registration.
At the end of the month police say the crackdown on internet porn has brought 5,394 arrests and 4,186 criminal case investigations during 2009.

Internet gives Chinese a platform but regime wary: experts

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | McKaySavage

By Francois Bougon | Agence France Presse

The Internet has given hundreds of millions of Chinese an outlet for free expression, but Beijing’s unrelenting surveillance only highlights state fears about the power of the web, observers say.

In the nation of 1.3 billion people, where the flow of information has been tightly controlled by the ruling Communist Party for 60 years, the Internet has emerged as a primary means for people to vent social and political discontent.

Google this week threatened to halt its operations in China after a series of cyberattacks against the Internet giant, and also said it would no longer filter its Internet search results as required by the Beijing government.

Experts say the authorities are most concerned about the so-called Web 2.0 — social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, which have been used in other countries to fuel popular protest movements.

“Web 2.0 websites turn around the information flux — that means the citizen can get information faster than the government,” Michael Anti, one of China’s most well-known bloggers, told AFP.

“They see Web 2.0 websites as a real threat.”

China has employed a virtual army of censors to patrol the Internet for material deemed unhealthy — a vast system known as the “Great Firewall of China”, which most often is used to weed out politically sensitive information.

Last year, it shut down tens of thousands of websites and arrested thousands of people in connection with what it said was an anti-pornography drive.

It also blocked social networking sites — Google’s video-sharing site YouTube in March; Twitter and Facebook in July after unrest in Xinjiang. Citizens can only gain access to such sites by using proxy servers.

In far-western Xinjiang, where nearly 200 people were killed in the worst ethnic violence the country has seen in decades, the Internet was simply shut off. Service was only minimally restored in late December.

“This demonstrates the link the government makes between the Internet and the risk of social unrest,” said Renaud de Spens, an expert on the use of new media in China.

According to a recent report released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), a government think-tank, the subjects most discussed on the Internet last year were “protection of the rights of citizens, supervision of public use of force, preservation of public order and promotion of public morality”.

Chinese researchers Zhu Huaxin, Shan Xuegang and Hu Jiangchun — who contributed to the report — wrote of the emergence of a “new class of people offering their opinions”.

“When a story erupts, this new class shows more and more its immense power over public opinion,” the CASS researchers said.

China’s 360 million Internet users — the world’s largest online community — have already exercised their moral authority a few times to positive effect.

Last year, a young woman tried for murdering a local official who she said had tried to force himself on her walked free after web users latched onto her story, decrying what they say was a corrupt and overbearing bureaucracy.

“They (authorities) can control the majority of the population, the majority of Chinese netizens — most people cannot use VPNs or proxies to get access to free websites,” Anti explained.

“But it doesn’t work with opinion leaders, like journalists, lawyers, and human rights activists — it’s very easy to run across the Great Firewall to access information.”

Internet analyst Jeremy Goldkorn points out that a vast majority of web users are “not really aware of the censorship — that’s why it works so well”.

In early December, Public Security Minister Meng Jianzhu said the Internet had become a means for “hostile forces” to spread panic and damage the nation, adding that security forces had to police the net to preserve social stability.

But Beijing faces a huge task — according to official statistics, the number of web users grew by 40 million in a six-month period last year.

“Censorship will work on some issues, but it will not hold back the wave, and Internet users will test the limits,” said de Spens.

“If there are too many fish, they cannot all be drowned.”

Google Gets on the Right Side of History

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Tomislavmedak

By Rebecca Mackinnon | The Wall Street Journal

One night in the mid-1990s when I was working as a journalist in Beijing, I went out to dinner with some Chinese friends. I had just finished reading a book called “The File” by the British historian Timothy Garton Ash. It’s about what happened in East Berlin after the Berlin Wall came down and everybody could see the files the Stasi had been keeping all those years. People discovered who had been ratting on whom — in some cases neighbors and co-workers, but also lovers, spouses and even children. After I described the book to my Chinese dinner companions — a hip and artsy intellectual crowd — one friend declared: “Some day the same thing will happen in China, then I’ll know who my real friends are.”

The table went silent.

China today is very different from Soviet-era Eastern Europe. It’s unlikely that its current political system — or its system for blocking foreign Web sites known widely as the “great firewall” — will crumble like the Berlin Wall any time soon. Both are supported and enabled by the current geopolitical, commercial and investment climate in ways that Soviet-era Eastern Europe and the Iron Curtain never were.

I do believe, however, that in my lifetime the Chinese people may learn more about some of the conversations that have taken place over the past decade between Internet company executives and Chinese authorities. When that happens, they will know who sold them out and who was most eager to help the Chinese Communist Party in building a blinkered cocoon of disinformation around their lives — and in some cases deaths.

This censored environment makes it easier for the Chinese government to lie to its people, steal from them, turn a blind eye when they are poisoned with tainted foodstuffs, and cover up their children’s deaths due to substandard building codes. It is a constant struggle, and sometimes literally a crime, for people to share information about such matters or to use the Internet to mobilize against corruption and malfeasance.

That is the information environment that China’s business elites, many of whom have gotten rich running Internet and telecommunications companies, are responsible for helping to build and maintain. For now they are national heroes, having made great (and lucrative) efforts on behalf of China’s economic growth and global competitiveness, making China a force to be reckoned with on the global stage. But if history takes some unexpected turns — and that’s the one thing you can count on Chinese history doing — it won’t always be on their side.

By announcing it will no longer censor its Chinese search engine and will reconsider its presence in China, Google has taken a bold step onto the right side of history.

Four years ago when Google entered the Chinese market and launched Google.cn, Chinese bloggers called it the “neutered Google.” At the time, Google executives said the decision to bow to the Chinese government’s censorship demands had been made after heated internal debates. They said they had weighed the positives and negatives and concluded Chinese Internet users were better off with the neutered Google than with no Google. They drew a red line under search and said they would not bring any other Google products containing users’ personal information — including email and blogging — into China. They held to that line.

Over the past four years I tested Google.cn from time to time and compared its search results with the Chinese market leader, Baidu. I found that Google.cn tended to censor search results somewhat less than Baidu. This supported Google’s argument that it at least gave Chinese Internet users more information than the domestic alternatives.

Google executives also pointed out that a notice appeared at the bottom of every page of censored results on Google.cn, informing users that some information was being hidden from them at the behest of Chinese authorities. In this way, the logic went, they were at least being honest with the Chinese public about the fact that Google was helping their government put blinkers on them.

The company’s effort to walk a fine line between Chinese regulators and free speech critics ended up being unsustainable. Anticensorship activists still viewed its compromise as contributing to the spread of censorship around the world. On the other hand, the compromise was also unacceptable to Chinese authorities, who were unhappy that Google wasn’t censoring as heavily as Baidu. Last year Google came under a series of attacks in the state-run media for failing to censor porn adequately when users — horror of horrors — typed smutty phrases into the search box.

As Google considers exactly what it will do next now that it has refused to censor, some Chinese users are expressing support and sending flowers, others are upset, and others are thumbing their noses, good riddance. Competitors are gloating. Google is in for a rough few months ahead. In the longer run, history will reveal to the Chinese people who their real friends have been.

Chinese Censorship May Force Google to Shut Down Site

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | McKay Savage

By Brian Womack and Ari Levy | Bloomberg

China is unlikely to allow Google Inc. to provide uncensored Internet search results, potentially forcing the company to close its operations in the country, two people familiar with the matter said.

Google is planning to talk with Chinese authorities in the next few weeks about how it operates in China. Those discussions may result in Google pulling out of the country shortly after that, one of the people said. There is still a chance that Google will strike an agreement with China, the person said.

By leaving China, Google would be giving up access to the world’s largest Internet market. Google will make about $600 million of its revenue in China this year, according to Imran Khan, an analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York. Analysts predict the company will have sales of $20.4 billion in 2010, according to a Bloomberg survey.

“There is a high probability that Google.cn will not be allowed to operate in China without its search results being censored,” Khan said in a note to clients. “If Google is not allowed to operate in China, beyond the immediate revenue loss, this could potentially have a far-reaching impact on the company’s overall long-term growth rate.”

Google, owner of the most-used search engine, said yesterday that it would end self-censorship of its product in China after attacks on e-mail accounts of human-rights activists. The Mountain View, California-based company said the move may lead to it closing offices in the country. The series of “highly sophisticated” attacks on Google and at least 20 other companies last month, as well as limits on free speech, led to the decision, Google said in a statement on its blog.

Yahoo! Inc., the second-ranked U.S. search engine, was one of the other companies targeted by the attack in China, according to a person familiar with the matter. Yahoo, which said yesterday that it “stands aligned” with Google in condemning Chinese cyber attacks on users, said today that it doesn’t generally disclose attacks on its computer systems.

“We take appropriate action in the event of any kind of breach,” Yahoo said in a statement.

Matt Furman, a spokesman for Google, declined to comment on Google’s plans for China beyond the statement yesterday. Google said in an e-mailed statement today that it isn’t commenting on specific companies involved in the attack.

Google has trailed Baidu Inc. in China since releasing a censored version of its search engine four years ago. Google would continue to operate at a disadvantage in China because the government favors local competitors, said Clay Moran, an analyst at Benchmark Co. in Boca Raton, Florida.

“The Chinese market is always going to be a struggle for Google,” said Moran, who estimates Google made about 1 percent to 2 percent of its revenue last year from China. “We’re not overly concerned with the potential diminished growth prospects because we felt the market would always pose a significant challenge.”

Google fell $3.39 to $587.09 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The stock has declined 5.3 percent this year. Baidu’s American depositary receipts rose $52.99, or 14 percent, to $439.48. They have added 6.9 percent this year.

China’s Internet authorities are seeking more information about Google’s intentions, the official Xinhua news agency said, citing an unnamed “high-ranking” official with the State Council Information Office. Wang Lijian, a Beijing-based spokesman for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said he couldn’t comment as he was unaware of the situation. China’s foreign ministry declined to comment.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the Chinese government should respond to Google’s “serious” allegations.

Separately, Google said today that it boosted security on its Gmail e-mail service. The company said it will encrypt e- mail as it travels between Web browsers and its servers by default. Previously, users had to opt into that service.

Google’s decision to stop self-censorship “lays down the gauntlet to other Internet companies operating in China: to be transparent about what filtering and censorship the government requires them to do,” Kate Allen, Amnesty International U.K. director, said in a statement.

Companies in industries ranging from finance to technology, media and chemicals had been targeted by hackers, Google said. The attacks went after 34 companies, most of them from California’s Silicon Valley, the New York Times reported, citing unidentified people familiar with Google’s investigation.

“Western companies such as Google face a dilemma in China,” said Norbert Pohlmann, a professor and head of the Internet-security research at the University of Applied Sciences in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. “On the one hand, they’re eager to benefit from China’s dramatic economic growth. On the other, they have to deal with local laws and values that are different from the West. Especially for media companies, it’s a tricky issue as China has a different definition of privacy and human- rights.”

Google said it’s notifying other companies that were attacked and is working with U.S. authorities. Adobe Systems Inc., the world’s biggest maker of graphic-design programs, said a “sophisticated, coordinated” attack targeted network systems it managed.

Google said the attack on its corporate infrastructure originated from China and resulted in the theft of intellectual property. The attackers’ main goal was to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists, the company said.

Gmail users who are advocates of human-rights in the U.S., China and Europe have also had their accounts accessed, most likely through phishing scams or malware on the users’ computers, Google said.

“The Chinese have long censored the Web, but this is the first time they have targeted accounts overseas,” Arvind Ganesan, head of Human Rights Watch’s business and human-rights program, said in an interview from Geneva. “If this wasn’t done by the security services, then it was certainly done by a proxy for them.”

With phishing scams, hackers pretending to be legitimate Web sites ask users to divulge confidential information. Malware, meanwhile, includes programs that record users’ keystrokes as they type in passwords.

A departure by Google from China would follow years of clashes over censorship and highlight the challenges global companies face operating in a one-party state that controls the flow of information.

Google and Yahoo were among companies that were criticized by U.S. lawmakers in 2006 for complying with the Chinese government’s restrictions on the Internet. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang said in 2005 that a court order obliged the Sunnyvale, California-based company to hand over user records that led to the conviction of a Chinese journalist.

Google is still censoring search results on Google.cn, its Chinese search engine, Courtney Hohne, a Singapore-based spokeswoman, said in an e-mail. “Nothing has changed at all,” she said.

Baidu accounted for 58.4 percent of China’s Internet search market in the fourth quarter, compared with 35.6 percent for Google, according to researcher Analysys International. Baidu declined to comment on Google’s decision.

Google’s plan to stop censoring on its Chinese site “sets a great example” for other companies, New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement.

Access to Google’s YouTube video site was blocked in China after Tibet’s government-in-exile released a video on March 20 that it said showed Chinese police beating protesters. The video was described by China’s official Xinhua News Agency as a fabrication.

Last year, China pushed personal-computer makers to install filtering software on their machines. The government backed away from that requirement in June, though it later said it would require the software on computers in schools and Internet cafes.

2009 Unprecedented Year For Online Repression

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Zensursala

by Clothilde le Coz, Reporters Without Borders

2009 was an unprecedented year for online repression.

For the first time since the Internet emerged as a tool for public use, there are currently 100 bloggers and cyber-dissidents imprisoned worldwide as a result of posting their opinions online in 2009, according to Reporters Without Borders. This figure is indicative of the severity of the crackdowns being carried out in roughly 10 countries around the world. (In one example, Burma handed out long prison sentences to online dissidents.)

The number of countries pursuing online censorship doubled in the past year — a disturbing trend that suggests governments seek to increase their control over new media. In total, 151 bloggers and cyber-dissidents were arrested in 2009, and 61 were physically assaulted.

The crackdown on bloggers and ordinary citizens who express themselves online comes at the same time that social networking and interactive websites have become extremely popular, not to mention powerful vehicles for free expression.

China Still Leads in Online Censorship

China was once again the leading Internet censor in 2009. Countries such as Iran, Tunisia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Uzbekistan also blocked websites and blogs, and engaged in surveillance of online expression. In Turkmenistan, for example, the Internet remains under total state control. Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer is still in jail, while the famous Burmese comedian Zarganar still has 34 years left on his prison sentence. These are but a few examples.

The list of approximately 120 victims of Internet censorship in 2009 also includes leading figures in the defense of online free speech, such as China’s Hu Jia and Liu Xiaobo, and Vietnam’s Nguyen Trung and Dieu Cay.

People are usually targeted because they speak out on political matters, but the global financial crisis is also on the list of subjects likely to provoke online censorship. In South Korea, a blogger was wrongfully detained for commenting on the country’s disastrous economic situation. Roughly six people in Thailand were arrested or harassed just for making a connection between the king’s health and a fall in the Bangkok stock exchange. Censorship was slapped on media in Dubai when it came time for them to report on the country’s debt repayment problems.

Overall, wars and elections constituted the chief threats to journalists and bloggers in 2009. It is becoming more risky to cover wars because journalists themselves are being targeted for murder and kidnappings. It’s also just as dangerous for reporters in some countries to do their job at election time. Journalists have ended up in prison or in a hospital thanks to their election reporting. Violence before and after elections was particularly prevalent in 2009 inside countries with poor democratic credentials.

Iran Election Crackdown

Iran saw the most violence, censorship and arrests due to an election. Its elections this past summer saw more than 100 arrests, and many prison sentences handed down. The country, which is on the Reporters Without Borders list of “Enemies of the Internet,” has also deployed a sophisticated system of Internet filtering and monitoring, especially in recent months. The country’s main ISPs depend on the Telecommunication Company of Iran, which recently came under control of the Revolutionary Guard, and does not hesitate to flout international treaties or to restrict the free flow of information.

Within hours of the announcement of President Mahmoud Ahmadinedjad’s election “victory,” journalists were being arrested by the intelligence ministry, Revolutionary Guard, and other security services. Most were taken to Tehran’s Evin prison. At least 100 journalists and bloggers have been arrested since June, and 27 are still being held. Today, Iran is one of the world’s five biggest imprisoners of journalists.

Since the election, national and international media in Iran have been subject to massive and systematic censorship that is without precedent. For the first time since the 1979 revolution, the security services are vetting the content of newspapers before they’re published.

The Iranian regime’s offensive against online free expression took a new direction in December after Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dowlatabadi announced he was going to prosecute two conservative websites for “insulting” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Meanwhile, several Internet service providers cut access to prevent political opponents from disseminating information during opposition demonstrations on December 27. After the demonstrations, the intelligence ministry and Revolutionary Guard began rounding up government opponents and journalists, arresting an estimated 20 people in the latest wave. Those targeted included a dozen or so journalists and cyber-dissidents. Alireza Behshtipour Shirazi, the editor of Kaleme.org (opposition leader Mirhossein Moussavi’s official website), was arrested at his Tehran home and taken to an unknown place of detention.

Trouble in Democratic Countries

Democratic countries have also enacted online censorship. Several European nations are working on new steps to control the Internet in what they say is a campaign against child porn and illegal downloads. Australia is also planning to set up a compulsory filtering system that poses a threat to freedom of expression.

Communications minister Stephen Conroy announced in December that, after a year of testing in partnership with Australian Internet service providers, the government will introduce legislation imposing mandatory filtering of websites with pornographic, pedophilic or particularly violent content.

Google Australia’s head of policy, Iarla Flynn, raised concerns, saying, “Moving to a mandatory ISP filtering regime with a scope that goes well beyond such material is heavy-handed and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information.” In a Fairfax Media poll of 20,000 Australians, 96 percent strongly opposed a mandatory Internet filtering system.

Yet that proposal — as well as many others around the world — continues to move ahead. Hopefully, 2010 will be a better year for free speech online.

China’s Lonely Dissidents

By BHRP

by Jaroslaw Adamowski

The Guardian

Should anyone still doubt that history always repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, second time as farce, an incident that took place last Wednesday in Prague might very well change his or her mind.

On 6 January 1977, Václav Havel, then a leading Czech dissident as well as a playwright banned by the communist regime, was arrested along with Pavel Landovský and Ludvík Vaculík for writing a petition that called for the democratisation of the regime and publishing it in a samizdat version. Their arrest contributed to the cause – the Charter 77 manifesto reached the west apace and at some point was even more widely discussed abroad than in Czechoslovakia. Ultimately, 12 years after the dissident movement’s emergence, the Velvet Revolution wiped out the oppressive regime and Havel was soon to become the country’s president.

Thirty-three years later, history’s ironic pen writes a rather peculiar postscript to the democratic outbreak of 1989. On 6 January 2010, Havel showed up with fellow communist-era dissidents at China’s embassy in Prague with a new petition, this time calling for the liberation of Liu Xiaobo, a leading Chinese dissident. Sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment last December, Xiaobo was convicted on charges of subversion, which, in the language of the human-rights-allergic regime, stands for the crucial role that he had played in drawing up and distributing the Chinese version of the Czech manifesto, entitled Charter 08.

As the Velvet Revolution’s veterans arrived at the embassy, a literally closed-door reception was awaiting them. Nobody, let alone the ambassador himself, bothered to take the open letter from Havel’s hand, a rather unusual situation considering that he had been first Czechoslovakia’s, and then the Czech Republic’s president for almost 13 years. In the end, the protesters were forced to leave the petition in the embassy’s letterbox. All of this on the 33rd anniversary of the Charter’s emergence. Ignored by one communist regime as a dissident, as an ex-president, Havel would still be ignored by another.

Without a shred of doubt, this incident is part of a bigger picture. Beijing’s gradually increasing contempt for Europe’s human-rights discourse, already apparent during Akmal Shaikh’s disgraceful trial, is becoming more pronounced as the west’s economic leverage over China has been replaced by China’s leverage over the west. What possible sanctions could the west, let alone the UK, launch in order to force respect of basic human rights on China? The Chinese regime has a very precise sense of balance, and it is no coincidence that Shaikh’s execution took place now; he was the first European citizen to be put to death in China in more than half a century.

Were Václav Havel to be reborn as a Chinese dissident 20 years after 1989, his voice would certainly be crushed not only by China, but also by shabby smartphone manufacturers. It seems that nowadays, every single tech company expanding to the Chinese market would block the Charter 77 app in advance before anyone could download it. Beijing’s grip on the internet will only tighten, and even though an oppressive government quashing the voice of dissent is no new phenomenon, western corporations’ complicity in persecuting the dissidents surely is. And we are all getting used to it.

Hence, Liu Xiaobo’s oppression in 2010 is more severe than that faced in 1989 by Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia, Lech Wałęsa in Poland or other dissidents from behind the Iron Curtain. Despite the internet, Twitter, Facebook, mobile phones and all that technology has to offer, modern dissidents are in no better situation than their predecessors were 33 years ago. On the contrary, the likes of Xiaobo seem to be more on their own than the 1989 revolutionaries were. Perhaps it is time to dust off the good old samizdat.

The Battle for Press Freedom Moves Online

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | James Buck

From Tibet to Tehran, more and more front-line reporting is being carried out by freelancers and published online. But the revolution in newsgathering—brought about by new technology and the downsizing of traditional media outlets—has a down side. For the first time, half of all journalists jailed around the world worked online as bloggers, reporters, or Web editors. Most of them are freelancers with little or no institutional support.

These are the key findings of a report released Dec. 8 by the Committee To Protect Journalists. The annual census of imprisoned journalists was conducted on Dec. 1 and includes every journalist who was in jail on that day. All told, there are 136 journalists on the list, an increase of 11 from the previous year. Sixty-eight of them worked online, the vast majority of them freelancers.

For the 11th year in a row, China is the world’s leading jailer of journalists, with 24 behind bars. It is followed closely by Iran, where 23 journalists remain in jail, out of dozens rounded up in the aftermath of the disputed June 12 election. Cuba, Eritrea, and Burma round out the top five.

A closer look at the numbers in China reveals just how dramatically the Internet has transformed both newsgathering and the dissemination of critical commentary in repressive societies.

A decade ago, when China first topped the list, most of those jailed were print reporters for mainstream media outlets who had gone too far in their criticism of government officials. The Chinese media are much more open today, but there are still clear limits, and journalists who displease the authorities face consequences. The difference is that they are more likely to be fired than thrown in jail.

But online journalists can’t be fired, blacklisted, or, in most cases, bought off precisely because most work independently. They don’t have employers who can be pressured. Chinese authorities have few options when it comes to reining in online critics—censor them, intimidate them, or throw them in jail. This explains why 18 of the 24 journalists imprisoned in China worked online.

In Iran, there’s a similar dynamic. The 23 reporters jailed there fall roughly into two camps—those who worked for print media outlets allied with opposition candidates and those who worked independently online. Under the reformist presidency of Mohammed Khatami, 1997-2005, the Tehran intelligentsia famously spent hours in cafes perusing dozens of newspapers and magazines, reformist and conservative. A crackdown on the print media that accelerated under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad closed many newspapers and forced top journalists and commentators online, fueling the rise of the Farsi blogosphere. Today, many of these journalists are in jail or in exile.

Unquestionably, the rise of Web-based reporting provides exciting new opportunities. An adventurous young freelancer can head out to cover the world armed with a laptop and a digital camera. Government critics from Burma to Vietnam are able to circumvent the censors and get their views out to the world.

But the sharp increase in the number of imprisoned online journalists highlights new vulnerabilities. They are utterly alone when authorities knock on the door to take them away. Freelancers face jail without legal assistance or the backing of an employer who can provide support for their families.

Even more alarming is the vulnerability of the Internet itself. The utopian notion that the Internet is impossible to censor or control has given way to a new reality. Even as new formal and informal news organizations emerge on the Web, traditional media—text and broadcast, public and private, partisan and nonpartisan, for-profit and nonprofit—are all converging online. The convergence creates an “information chokepoint” that repressive governments can shut down when a story gets out of control. Whereas governments used to have to close dozens of newspapers and shut down individual radio stations, now they can simply halt the circulation of information by pulling the plug on the Web.

In China, for example, the government shut down the Internet and even the cell phone network when riots broke out in Xinjiang province earlier this year. In Iran, citizen journalists’ reports about the post-election violence were eventually silenced as the mullahs shut down Internet communication and began rounding up critical bloggers. On Saturday, Iranian authorities did it again, shutting down the Internet and the cell system to disrupt planning for student protests held Monday. The shutdown was also intended to limit coverage of the events through the Web and social media sites.

This is why the battle for press freedom around the world has moved online. It’s no longer about keeping the presses running and unblocking the airwaves. Ensuring that people around the world have access to diverse news and information means keeping the Internet free.

In order to defend press freedom in this new environment, press freedom groups like CPJ need to change tactics. Traditional advocacy—protest letters to heads of state, detailed reports chronicling government crackdowns—will continue to be relevant, but there will also be a technological component to our advocacy that involves navigating around firewalls, circumventing censorship, and outflanking government efforts to control the Web. In order to better carry out this kind of advocacy, CPJ is adding a new specialized program dedicated to the defense of online journalists.

But technology has its limits, and the freedom to express ideas and disseminate information through the Internet cannot be taken for granted. Like all freedoms, it must be actively defended. While there are highly effective organizations like the OpenNet Initiative and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, media companies and journalists are just beginning to understand that they have a huge stake in preserving Internet freedom.

Internet and technology companies also need to do more. So far, they have a mixed record. It’s true that people in repressive societies benefit from access to the Internet, but not when companies collaborate in censoring content or exposing government critics, as Yahoo did when it turned over to Chinese authorities information used to arrest journalist Shi Tao in 2004.

Fortunately, these companies are taking steps to address the issue. CPJ is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, an organization of human rights groups, academics, socially responsible investors, and Internet leaders such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. These companies have agreed to a set of principles that will help them push back against censorship.

Traditional media companies and Internet service providers have complex commercial arrangements that make them partners in some realms and competitors in others. But they should be natural allies as the battle for press freedom enters this new phase. We need to form a united front to push back against government censorship, confront repressive regimes, blend traditional advocacy with technological innovation, and stand up publicly for journalists of all kinds who seek to report the news online.

Joel Simon is the executive director of the Committee To Protect Journalists.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2237675/