[chapter-delegates] Censorship & the Internet

[Andreu Vea']

Irwan,

You were talking about China today... Read this it maybe of your interest.

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Chinese control Internet by sophisticated means The Associated Press Friday,
April 15, 2005
 
Filters block political dissent, report finds 
 
NEW YORK The Chinese government has become increasingly sophisticated at
controlling the Internet, taking a multilayered approach that contributes to
precision in blocking political dissent, according to a report released
Thursday. 
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The precision means that China's filters can block just specific references
to Tibetan independence without blocking all references to Tibet. Likewise,
the government is effective at limiting discussion about Falun Gong, the
Dalai Lama, Tiananmen Square and other topics deemed sensitive, the study
from the OpenNet Initiative found. 
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Numerous government agencies and thousands of public and private employees
are involved at all levels, from the main pipelines, or backbones, hauling
data over long distances, to the cybercafés where many citizens gain access
to the Internet. 
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That breadth, the study found, allows the filtering tools to adapt to
emerging forms of communication, like Web journals, or blogs. 
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"China has been more successful than any other country in the world to
manage to filter the Internet despite the fast changes in technology," 
said John Palfrey, one of the study's principal investigators and executive
director of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. 
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Saudi Arabia, for example, largely controls the Internet by having all
traffic flow through a central agency, where it can be monitored. 
Visitors trying to view a banned site get a message saying it has been
blocked, Palfrey said. 
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"China is much more subtle than that," Palfrey said. "You don't know what
you don't know. It's more effective than if you see it but know you can't
access it." 
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With filters at multiple points, including some search engines, content is
simply removed rather than replaced with a notice, he said. 
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Google has acknowledged that its Chinese-language news service - introduced
on a test basis last autumn - leaves out results from government-banned
sites, though the company says that is done so users will not end up
clicking on links that lead nowhere because of the Chinese filters. 
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China, which has the world's second-largest population of Internet users
behind the United States, promotes Internet use for business and education,
while trying to curb access to political dissent, pornography and other
topics the Communist government deems sensitive. 
Many users do find ways around the controls - for instance, using "proxy"
servers that mask a site's true origin. 
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It is through similar proxy servers and long-distance calls that researchers
outside China managed to test what users inside China see. 
The researchers also employed volunteers inside the country to conduct more
extensive testing. 
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The researchers deployed software and physical equipment called packet
sniffers to monitor the flow of traffic and try to gauge where content gets
dropped. 
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Financed by George Soros's Open Society Institute, the OpenNet Initiative is
a collaboration of researchers at Harvard, the University of Cambridge and
the University of Toronto working on issues of Internet censorship and
surveillance. 
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Their testing determined, in part, that filtering tends to be triggered by
the appearance of certain keywords, rather than a visit to a specific domain
name or numeric Internet address. 
.

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Jose Luis Delgado Guitart
mailxmail.com
delgadoguitart at telefonica.net
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