|
Is China the only censoring government? kwc Let a Thousand Filters Bloom By Anne Applebaum,
Washington Post, Wednesday, July 20, 2005; A23 See http://www.anneapplebaum.com/ In 1949, when George
Orwell wrote his dystopian novel "1984," he gave its hero, Winston, a
job at the Ministry of Truth. All day long, Winston clips politically
unacceptable facts, stuffs them into little pneumatic tubes, and then pushes
the tubes down a chute. Beside him sits a woman in charge of finding and
erasing the names of people who have been "vaporized." And their
office, Orwell wrote, "with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one
sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records
Department." It's odd to read
"1984" in 2005, because the politics of Orwell's vision aren't
outdated. There are still plenty of governments in the world that go to
extraordinary lengths to shape what their citizens read, think and say, just
like Orwell's Big Brother. But the technology envisioned in "1984" is
so -- well, 1980s. Paper? Pneumatic tubes? Workers in cubicles? Nowadays, none
of that is necessary: It can all be done electronically, especially if, like
the Chinese government, you seek the cooperation of large American companies. Without question,
China's Internet filtering regime is "the most sophisticated effort of its
kind in the world," in the words of a recent report by Harvard Law
School's Berkman
Center for Internet and Society. The system involves the censorship of Web logs, search
engines, chat rooms and e-mail by "thousands of public and private
personnel." It also involves Microsoft Inc., as Chinese bloggers discovered last month. Since early
June, Chinese bloggers who post messages containing a forbidden word --
"Dalai Lama," for example, or "democracy" -- receive a
warning: "This message contains a banned _expression_, please delete."
It seems Microsoft
has altered the Chinese version of its blog tool, MSN Spaces, at the behest of Chinese government. Bill Gates, so eloquent on the subject
of African poverty, is less worried about Chinese free speech. But he isn't alone: Because Yahoo Inc. is one of several
companies that have signed a "public pledge on self-discipline," a Yahoo search in China doesn't
turn up all of the (politically sensitive) results. Cisco Systems Inc., another
U.S. company, has also sold hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment to
China, including technology that blocks traffic not only to banned Web sites,
but even to particular pages within an otherwise accessible site. Until now, most of
these companies have defended themselves on the grounds that there are side
benefits -- a Microsoft spokesman has said that "we're helping millions of
people communicate, share stories, share photographs and build
relationships" -- or on the grounds that they can't control technology
anyway. A Cisco spokesman told me that this is the "same equipment
technology that your local library uses to block pornography," and
besides, "we're not doing anything illegal." But as U.S. companies
become more deeply involved in China, and as technology itself progresses, those lines may begin to sound weaker.
Over the past couple of years, Harry Wu, a Chinese human rights activist and
former political prisoner, has carefully tracked Western corporate cooperation
with Chinese police and internal security, and in particular with a Chinese
project called "Golden
Shield," a high-tech surveillance system that has been under construction
for the past five years.
Although the company won't confirm it, Wu says, Cisco representatives in China
have told him that the company has contracts to provide technology to the
police departments of at least 31 provinces. Some of that technology may be
similar to what the writer and former businessman Ethan Gutmann describes in
his recent book, "Losing the New China:
A Story of American Commerce, Desire
and Betrayal." Gutmann -- whose account is also bitterly
disputed by Cisco ("He's getting a lot of press out of this,"
complained the spokesman) -- claims to have visited a Shanghai trade fair where
Cisco was advertising its ability to "integrate judicial networks, border security, and
vertical police networks"
and more generally its willingness to build Golden Shield. If this isn't illegal,
maybe it should be. After
the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the United States passed a law
prohibiting U.S. firms from selling "crime control and detection"
equipment to the Chinese. But in 1989, the definition of police equipment ran
to truncheons, handcuffs and riot gear. Has it been updated? We may soon find
out: A few days
ago, Rep. Dan Burton of the House Foreign Relations Committee wrote a letter to
the Commerce Department asking exactly that. In any case, it's time to have
this debate again. There could be other solutions -- such as flooding the
Chinese Internet with filter-breaking technology. Beyond legality, of
course, there's morality. And here the judgment of history will prove more
important than whatever Congress does or does not do today. Sixty years after the end of World War II,
IBM is still battling lawsuits from plaintiffs who accuse the company of
providing the "enabling technologies" that facilitated the Holocaust.
Sixty years from now, will Microsoft, Cisco and Yahoo be doing the same? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/19/AR2005071901556.html?nav=hcmodule |
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
