There are two primary “filters” the colour media coverage on Internet censorship in China: the “1984″ and the “technoptimist”. I wrote about this a while back
Recently there’s been a cluster of “technoptimist” articles:
As the Olympics draw near, the tone will likely shift.
UPDATED (28 Mar 07)
BBC:
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on building what is known as the Great Firewall Of China – a network of state-licensed internet access providers, and around 30,000 internet police censors who filter sites between China and the rest of the world.
Nearly two years after the “30,000″ myth was exposed it is still being repeated by reputable news media.
I searched LexisNexis (and Googled) and collected articles that discussed Internet police in China and those that specifically stated the magic 30,000 number. The earliest reference I can find (if you have an earlier one, please send it to me) is an Ethan Gutmann article in The Weekly Standard 02/15/2002
Although it was widely rumored in Beijing that up to 30,000 state security employees were monitoring the Internet in that city alone, the monitoring was also laughed at.
Note that it states it is a rumor and that it was in Beijing, not all of China. Following that, on the 27th of February 2002, Amnesty International releases a report which states:
30,000 state security personnel are reportedly monitoring websites, chat rooms and private e-mail messages.
Rumored has turned in to reportedly, but at least there is a qualifier. But by the 25th of August 2002 the LA Times dropped the modifier:
More than 30,000 state security employees are currently conducting surveillance of Web sites, chat rooms and private e-mail messages–including those sent from home computers.
On November 7, 2002 the Washinton Post decides to leave out the “rumored” and “laughed at” part:
But Beijing, with 30,000 “Internet police,” has acted swiftly to clamp down on dissent through the ethers.
And so it begins. Rumor turned into fact. Some publications have and continue to include references to “rumored” or “estimated” along with the 30,000 figure. (An interesting sidenote is that publications continue to reference 30,000 (no change since 2002) despite a huge rise in China’s number of Internet users). However, the New York times has upped the number to 50,000 and dropped all qualifiers:
Stern instructions like those are in keeping with a trend aimed at assigning greater responsibility to Internet providers to assist the government and its army of as many as 50,000 Internet police, who enforce limits on what can be seen and said. — New York Times, March 4, 2005
I guess there were some massive firing because in 2006 the number was back down to 30,000. This time however, USA Today claims that China Internet Network Information Center is the source of the number (I cannot find it on their website, email me if you can). But the part that gets me is the “shadowy force” — so shadowy that they have their own websites? Why yes, try www.cyberpolice.cn or any of the numerous local sites.
Even with an estimated 30,000 internet police, he said it was difficult to monitor bulletin boards. “The technology hasn’t reached a level that will allow us to control them…” — The Guardian February 14, 2006
China has roughly 30,000 Internet police who use Internet Detective and other tools to monitor Web users, according to the China Internet Network Information Center, an arm of China’s Ministry of Information Industry. Officials at the Ministry of Public Security declined interview requests for details of this shadowy force. — USA Today 4/3/2006
This is an analysis from EastSouthWestNorth:
Here is a myth: there are 30,000 Internet police in China who sit around all day looking for harmful information. 30,000 is a big number, since it could fill a soccer stadium. But with respect to 100 million Internet users, 30,000 is woefully inadequate to patrol all possible Internet content material (that is, one Internet police officer has to keep an eye on 3,333 users at the same time, or less than 10 seconds per user per day).
In any case, one has to ask just how well trained these 30,000 Internet police are. A fair bet is that when they come across a website with pictures of naked people, they will take action. But if they come across a copy of Anti’s blog post (see Comment 200601#029) or the scholarly article History Textbooks in China, they would not have a clue what to think.
In the scheme of things, I don’t think these 30,000 Internet police form the front line. Rather, it is the Internet unit administrators (such as BBS forum masters) who do the active work because they have domain knowledge. The Internet police are only there to catch the periodic leak so as to hold the Internet unit adminstrators accountable for negligence and/or sabotage. If you are a vigilant forum master that has everything under control (e.g. wiping every mention of Beijing News immediately), then you will rarely come into contact with the Internet police; if you are a progressive forum master, you will get phone calls every day and eventually you will be dismissed and your website may even be disappeared like the Yannan forum. That is why it was no surprise that nothing was found on this day by the reporter who played Internet police.
Postscript: Oh, by the way, they obviously don’t read overseas English-language blogs …
EastSouthWestNorth touches on a very interesting point. Media reports seem to merge together the self-censorship practices by forums, portals, blog hosting companies and so forth with the Internet police.
An old article in The Guardian I missed earlier does discuss this issue:
Better still is scaring users into censoring themselves. No one I spoke to could tell me where the figure of 30,000 internet policemen originated. But researchers pointed out that it was in Beijing’s interests to persuade its citizens that Big Brother lurks in every cafe. Similarly, arrest a few people and you frighten many more into compliance.
There are Internet police in China, they have websites, lots of them. They engage in law enforcement duties. They also investigate websites. It is also, in my view, safe to assume that they investigate and arrest dissidents. In fact the Beijing cyberpolice accept reports (appears to be via SMS) from the public against persons who want to split the nation, or attack the party and the government, and people with “wrong doctrines opinion”/ falungong. (babelfish). Seems quite clear to me that the cyber police’s mandate is to investigate reports of people who criticize the government or belong to falun gong — it is right in their incident report form.
However, its the manufactured number and the near godlike capabilities assigned to China’s Internet police and filtering/monitoring technology in most news reports that infuriates me. There is definitely a lot going on in this area in China, there is a lot left to investigate. However, reporting rumor as fact is not the way to go about this. It doesn’t help people better understand what is really going on in China, but it does re-enforce a climate of self-censorship in China.
Please, stop repeating the “30,000″ myth.
FT has recently run a series of articles on internet censorship. Each touches on an interesting theme.
TOR can be used for both anonymity and censorship circumvention, but while “anonymous” proxies can be used for censorship circumvention they not really anonymous. A “proxy” may sheild your identity from the website you are visiting but it does not hide you or anything you are doing from the owner of the proxy. And if the proxy is not encrypted — most of the “open” proxies are not — then anyone monitoring Internet traffic can also see everything you do through the proxy. TOR, on the other hand, encrypts your traffic and hides what you are doing from the TOR network itself, it is hardly comparable to “open” proxies. I have not looked closely at GPass, but it appears to be an encrypted Socks proxy, and if so, is not anonymous — all traffic through it can be viewed by the owners of GPass. (And you don’t have to use Swedish Google, Google just redirects you to the localized version, you can always click the google.com link and use google.com).
It is not only “repressive” governments that are increasing their level of filtering and employing new techniques (new techniques for the country, not for filtering in general), countries such as India and Thailand are filtering as well. There is a tendency to analyze all regulations and restriction in particular countries, such as China and Iran, out of context. For example, there is a tendency to think of China’s Internte cafe’s as places teeming with cyberdissdents and therefore when China closed many and instituted restrictions after a deadly fire in an unlicensed cafe many interpretted it as a crackdown on free expression. I think that the Iranian bandwidth limitation story may prove to go this way as well — it’s more likely to do with porn than with politics. But, hey, I could be wrong.
Human rights groups and NGO’s worldwide have long protested that they are often the victims of state surveillance, computer breakins and denial of service attacks. ONI has documented an attack on Kyrgyz opposition newspaper websites during that countries elections in 2005 and there have been reports of such Denial of Service attacks during elections in Belarus as well. What is new is not the technique but the correlation between the target — important opposition website — and the time period — during an election. Denial of Service disrupts access to a website for everyone — as opposed to filtering which would only block it from the affected location. It also provides deniability on the part of the government. In the Kyrgyz case, the attacks appear to have been conducted by a “botnet for hire” leaving the conection to the government circumstantial. This is a trend we will probably see more of especially in countries that don’t have a national filtering system (or officially filter very little content).
A good article about the forthcoming ONI study, however, some instances listed as “new censorship techniques” are not really new at all. They may be new to certain countries, but they are standard filtering techniques. And there is not yet evidence that Zimbabwe is censoring the Internet, let alone using the same techniques as China. I have heard reports about this, but even if they are true, it has not been implemented.
As part of CBC’s “Censor This!” series I’ll be talking on CBC radio about Internet censorship. Here are the times rolling across the country:
6:00 Corner Brook
6:20 Ottawa
6:40 Quebec
6:50 Sydney
7:15 Thunder Bay
7:30 Yellowknife
7:50 Whitehorse
8:00 Edmonton
8:15 P.George/P.Rupert
8:30 Victoria
8:40 Regina
9:00 Kelowna
The Citizen Lab was recently featured in the Toronto Star. Just to be clear, I do go to the gym and do not wear flip flops :). Seriously though, I’ve received many emails and read through some of the Slashdot comments and would like to make a few points.
More… »
In a very interesting article in the New York Times it becomes increasingly clear that “self discipline” is the major driving force of censorship in China. Clive Thompson reports that companies — not the government of China — are deciding what specific content to block.
American Internet firms typically arrive in China expecting the government to hand them an official blacklist of sites and words they must censor. They quickly discover that no master list exists. Instead, the government simply insists the firms interpret the vague regulations themselves. The companies must do a sort of political mind reading and intuit in advance what the government won’t like. Last year, a list circulated online purporting to be a blacklist of words the government gives to Chinese blogging firms, including “democracy” and “human rights.” In reality, the list had been cobbled together by a young executive at a Chinese blog company. Every time he received a request to take down a posting, he noted which phrase the government had objected to, and after a while he developed his own list simply to help his company avoid future hassles.
I have wondering for sometime how Google, for example, decides what sites to remove from google.cn. Does Google select the sites or are they given a list of what to block?
Brin’s team had one more challenge to confront: how to determine which sites to block? The Chinese government wouldn’t give them a list. So Google’s engineers hit on a high-tech solution. They set up a computer inside China and programmed it to try to access Web sites outside the country, one after another. If a site was blocked by the firewall, it meant the government regarded it as illicit — so it became part of Google’s blacklist.
Interesting. The implementation of censorship does even require the government to provide lists of sites or key words to block. Many people think that there are “30,000″ Internet police searching out content to block when in fact the companies involved in providing Internet content, services and access are doing it themselves. Certainly, there is pressure from the government and to do business in China it is understood that one must self-censor but what is the formal mechanism?
There is a lot of talk about “local laws” but if the requirement to censor is merely implied, if it is companies rather than the government that are deciding what specific content to block then what is the true legal status of censorship in China? What laws or regulations are Google/Yahoo et al complying with? Are they just making it up as they go along?
The Atlantic has created a censorship map based on ONI data. (I’ve archived a local mirror of the map and the accompanying article).
The accompanying article is a bit overzealous in its description of China but I liked that fact that the article specifically highlighted that Internet filtering is not exclusive to China but is spreading — essentially becoming the “norm” — worldwide. In terms of targetted content, porn is defintely targetted but the numbers are skewed by the fact that the use of commercial lists (there are open source lists too) allow countries to block a lot of porn easily. But in terms of significance porn is, in my opinion, of rather low importance. the blocking of several key sources of local language alternative information or an social movement group is much more important. The sgnificance of the content rather than the total number of sites blocked in category seems, to me, to be of more importance but is much harder to measure.
Wired also made a graphical representation of ONI data a while back.
The graphical representations are quite nice, it gets the concept across, but it is tough to make cross-country comparisons. The categories here are from our “global list” — a list that we test in all countries. As you can see countries that use commercial filtering products score higher because they block pre-defined categopries such as porn or gambling. They key sites though, not represented in this graphic , that countries target are local language, country or issue specific web sites. That said, this is a great effort in the right direction and we have some ideas for better cross-country comparison, so stay tuned.
Well its been a crazy couple of weeks with the media. The Globe and Mail put our efforts against censroship on the Front Page, USA Today upgraded me to Professor at University of Toronto (I am not a Professor :) ) and the Toronto Sun made me Head Hacker. All in all I like the positive coverage of hacktivism!
- U.S. technology has been used to block, censor Net for years – USA Today
- Cracks In the Wall – Forbes
- Google loses lustre in China – NOW
- Scaling the firewall of digital censorship – Globe and Mail
- The Hacker Prof investigates web misdeeds – Toronto Sun
- Beating censorship on the Internet – Boston Globe
Ron Deibert, along with Timothy Wu of Columbia University Law School and Julien Pain of Reporters Without Borders, spoke on NPR’s On Point radio show on Internet censorship and surveillance worldwide. Listen to it here.