From porn to “politically sensitive” subject matter, China has more sophisticated ways – including a combination of government agencies and thousands of government and nongovernment workers – to keep its citizens from seeing what the communist government doesn’t want them to see in cyberspace, according to researchers from Harvard University, the University of Toronto, and Cambridge University.
And according to one of the researchers, Harvard Law School’s John Palfrey, who directs the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Chinese government’s growing such sophistication could spell censorship inspiration elsewhere among comparably repressive governments.
"While China seeks to grow its economy through new technologies, the state's actions suggest at the same time a deep-seated fear of the effect of free and open communications made possible by the Internet," Palfrey told reporters when the new study was released this week. "This fear has led the Chinese government to create what we found to be the world's most sophisticated Internet filtering regime.
"China's advanced filtering regime presents a model for other countries with similar interests in censorship to follow," he continued. "Importantly, China now acts as a regional Internet access provider for neighboring states, North Korea, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, for instance. Through this important role as a gatekeeper to the Internet for other neighboring states, China may be able to export its filtering technologies."
Palfrey and the other researchers on the China project are also said to be performing similar research on similar Internet issues in Vietnam, Iran, Yemen, and Singapore.
China launched a crackdown on Internet porn in early-to-mid 2004, with hundreds of arrests and cyber cafe closures, but the government also blocks citizens “routinely” from websites discussing such subjects as Taiwan independence, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, the dissident Falun Gong movement, and the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989, the Harvard, Toronto, and Cambridge researchers determined.
Net-blocking tactics include blocking certain keywords and whole websites as well as demanding those cyber cafes not closed in recent crackdowns keep tabs on their users and the websites they visit with filtering – largely with American-made hardware and software – placed on “the main backbone networks that carry Internet traffic,” the researchers concluded
That has already caused a few headaches for American firms like Cisco Systems and Google, which have been accused of supporting Chinese censorship by tailoring some products for Chinese sale to the Chinese government’s needs or even demands. “I am deeply concerned,” U.S. Rep. Dan Burton (R-Indiana) has said, “when I see U.S. firms apparently facilitating Chinese censorship,” an accusation that both Cisco and Google deny.
But American federal lawmakers are now working at thwarting Chinese Net-blocking efforts, including a possible imposition of tighter export controls and promoting new technology that can break or circumvent Chinese Net controls. One of those is the only known Chinese-American in the U.S. House.
"It came to my attention,” said Rep. David Wu (D-Oregon), “that there are individuals and companies here in the United States which are in the business of cracking the Chinese security systems, and while we should not forget the possibility of impeding the export of control technologies, it may be a much better bang for the buck to invest in those companies that are specifically trying to crack various security systems."
