Blocking the net: Corporations help governments shut
down the information superhighway
Fri Sep 16, 1:01 PM (Vermont Guardian)
Vietnam’s
communist government knows that it is impossible to monitor the
country’s 5,000 cyber cafes, so it’s forcing the cafe owners to be its
eyes and ears. Last July, a government directive informed cafe owners
that they will have to take a six-month course so that they can better
monitor their cyber customers. The Vietnamese government is justifying
its move for reasons of “national security and defense” — that is, to
protect itself against online journalists who, it says, “provide
sensationalist news and articles while others even publish reactionary
and libelous reports and a depraved culture.”
Reporters Without Borders (RWB), the Paris-based media watchdog group
that monitors press freedom worldwide, condemned the Vietnamese
government’s directive. “It is individual freedoms that will suffer
dramatically as a result of a law like this,” RWB warned in a press
release. “These measures are a complete negation of the free enterprise
principles espoused by the World Trade Organization (WTO), which Vietnam
is trying to join.”
But whether the WTO will consider Vietnam’s censorship move a strong
enough reason to deny Vietnam membership remains to be seen. The fact is
that many of the WTO’s members are erecting significant barriers to the
free flow of information and communication online.
Currently, there are 70 cyber prisoners worldwide who have run afoul of
the repressive rules set by certain governments, according to the RWB,
and these numbers will surely grow. In one incident last April, Tunisian
journalist Mohammed Abbou was sentenced to three-and-half-years in
prison by a Tunisian appeals court for publishing an article on a
website that compared the torture of political prisoners in Tunisia to
abuses committed by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. The Tunisian
government offered Abbou a deal: In exchange for your release, give us
an apology and request a pardon. Abbou responded by going on a hunger
strike.
The culprits involved in censoring the Internet include not only the
usual dictatorships but also Western countries that preach the virtues
of democracy, an informed citizenry, freedom of speech, and the other
platitudes we’ve been hearing lately from George Bush, Tony Blair, and
their allies. Moreover, some of the world’s biggest multinationals and
high tech companies are complicit in this trend.
First, let’s look at some of the usual dictatorships, or as RWB has
labeled them, “the habitual human rights violators.” They include small
fry like Cuba, Burma, the Ukraine, and Belarus, but the biggest
offenders in this category are China and Iran.
The Internet may seem like a medium that can democratize China, but the
Chinese authorities have developed effective ways to sabotage online
dissent. In fact, the RWB believes that “the way the Chinese government
has stifled online dissent offers a model for dictatorships in all
corners of the world.”
Moreover, the Chinese have help from the West to achieve their
repressive objectives. Several large multinationals, including
Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!, have been willing to allow China to
censor ideas and stifle free expression in exchange for profit. Last
June, Microsoft began blocking consumers of its new China-based Internet
protocol from using such “dangerous” words and phrases as “freedom,”
“democracy,” “human rights,” “demonstration,” and “Taiwan independence.”
Users who fail to comply get this message: “This item should not contain
forbidden speech, such as profanity.”
In a society as tightly controlled as China, Microsoft has become a
willing participant in sustaining one of the world’s most repressive
regimes. The newspaper USA Today eulogized about the bitter irony:
“What’s actually profane is a company that built its future on the
freedom provided by the American system helping a repressive regime
censor such ideas.”
Microsoft certainly has company. In 2002, Yahoo! China signed a pledge
not to allow the placement of “pernicious information that may
jeopardize state security,” while in 2004 Google launched a new search
engine in China that omitted sites the Chinese government didn’t like,
such as the BBC and Voice of America.
In an ominous sign for Internet users anywhere, Yahoo! seems
particularly eager to please the ruling class by providing information
about its customers. The RWB reports that Yahoo! supplied information to
the Chinese government regarding an IP address, which led to Hong Kong
journalist Shi Tao being sentenced to 10 years in prison this April. “We
already knew that Yahoo! collaborates enthusiastically that the Chinese
regime in questions of censorship, and now we know that it is a Chinese
police informant as well,” RWB said in a press release.
U.S.-based companies are also supplying commercial software to help
countries “filter” — that is, censor information. Last June, the OpenNet
Initiative (ONI) released a report titled “Internet Filtering in Iran,”
which documents how the Iranian government has used the commercial
filtering software SmartFilter to control every aspect of its citizens’
cyber experience, from websites and e-mail to blogs and online
discussion forums. Made by the U.S. based company Secure Computing, the
software is helping the Iranian government block internationally hosted
sites in English, as well as other sites hosted in local languages.
In its report, ONI accused Secure Computing of complicity in helping
Iran violate the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Ronald Deibert, one of
the report’s authors and directors of the Citizen Lab at the University
of Toronto, charged that the “thriving Internet censorship market —
spread like a virus from China to Iran to an increasing number of
countries worldwide — calls into question not only the trumpeted slogans
of high tech firms that the Internet represents ‘freedom’ and
‘connectivity’ but simplistic divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ as
well.”
As developments in Western countries show, the line between the “us” and
the “them” is blurring when it comes to censorship and the Internet. In
what is perhaps a first for a Western country, the British government
announced in August that it would outlaw the downloading or viewing of
violent sexual images on the Internet. For the British government,
offensive material will include “extreme pornographic material which is
graphic and sexually explicit and which contains actual scenes or
realistic depictions of serious violence, bestiality or necrophilia.”
Those convicted could receive three years in prison.
Chris Evans, a spokesman for the group Internet Freedom, summed up the
feelings of the opponents of the proposed legislation: “The idea that
you can prevent violent action by banning such images is nonsense.”
Meanwhile, in the United States, a series of congressional initiatives
threatens freedom of expression and what people will see, hear, and read
on the Internet. The strategy of the Internet censors is to apply the
FCC’s so-called “decency” standards to cyberspace. David Mason, a
republican Federal Election Commissioner, told the Washington Post last
March what it means: “We are almost certainly going to move from an
environment in which the Internet was per se not regulated to where it
is going to be regulated in some part. That shift has huge
significance.”
According to reports by CNET and the LA Weekly, the Federal Election
Commission (FEC) is even considering regulating political bloggers by
using the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law as its authority. In
response, bloggers have organized a group called the Internet Coalition,
which is petitioning the FEC to “grant blogs and online publications the
same consideration and protections as broadcast media, newspapers or
periodicals by clearly including them under the Federal Election
Commission’s media exemption rule.”
Given the current political climate, however, it is doubtful whether
anyone on Capitol Hill will listen, let alone act. The days of the free
and unfettered Internet may well be numbered.