The Great Firewall of China

It’s hard to imagine a world where one cannot express thoughts and opinions, feel free to talk about politics, social problems or even find information on incidents that shaped the history of the nation. This is the suffocating reality for millions of denizens in the world whose basic right to freedom of speech and expression has been wrenched out of their hands for reasons varying from religious fanatism, extreme notions of governance or just vested interests.

French Human rights organization, Reporters without Borders has enlisted not less than thirteen countries, who have been identified as ‘Enemies of the Internet’ for their oppressive laws governing the Internet. Among the thirteen are Belarus, Burma, Cuba, Egypt, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam, while China and Iran are found to be the most notorious of the lot.

Iran has recently been in news for banning Google-owned video sharing website, YouTube, after an objectionable video clip of an Iranian actress was posted on the site. The government has blacklisted more than 15,000 websites, calling them ’non-Islamic’ while it has made it mandatory to every Internet Service Provider to adhere to both, the Telecommunication Company of Iran and the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmainejad’s government is now considered to be one of the most repressive Internet censorship regimes in the world.

Meanwhile, Chinese censorship has escalated to such an extent that the country’s oppressive stance on the Internet has prompted it to be called the ‘Great Firewall of China’.

The Chinese government has mobilized a force of close to 3000 officers to keep a close watch on internet forums, sites, bulletin boards, blogs or vlogs and major portals to check for ‘objectionable’ content and erase material within minutes of being published. The ‘Golden Shield Project’, which is the formal name for the ‘Great firewall of China’ is owned by the Ministry of Public Security of the People’s Republic of China which began functioning in November 2003. The project is designed to block content by preventing IP addresses from being routed through and consists of standard firewall and proxy servers at internet gateways.

With reference to China, censored material include websites belonging to outlawed groups such as Falun Gong, news sites which cover topics such as police brutality, the Tiananmen square student protest and the following massacre by the Chinese police, articles and information on the Dalai Lama, freedom of speech and expression, Marxist websites, Wikipedia entries and other information on Taiwanese independence. Some of the websites blocked or censored in China are Voice of America, BBC News and Yahoo! Hong Kong. (The administration regions of Hong Kong and Macau have their own legal systems, so Chinese censorship does not apply there.)

Some common methods used for censoring content online include IP address blocking, DNS filtering and redirection, URL filtering, Packet filtering and resetting internet connections in the country.

News and articles on the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, which give an account of the political turmoil between the government of the People’s Republic of China, and students, intellectuals and labor activists, are blocked or censored in the country. China could accomplish this with the help of IT giants like Google, whose Chinese version of the search engine drastically alters info and pictures of the incident, giving Chinese citizens, a skewed and incorrect version of historical facts. The political unrest had followed a period of corruption and repression which led to inflation and widespread unemployment in the country. In the subsequent clash, estimates of civilian deaths vary from 23 (as submitted by the Communist Party of China) to 400–800 (as submitted by Central Intelligence Agency), 2600 (according to the Chinese Red Cross). Injuries are generally held to have numbered from 7,000 to 10,000.

However, China is making sure not to let any of its citizens know what exactly happened there, why and how the student community was massacred.
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Human rights organizations, with support from multinational IT giants have shown interest in collaborating to form a joint alliance to combat oppression online, but these efforts have proved to be futile.

On November 7, 2005, an alliance of investors and researchers, representing twenty six companies in US, Europe and Australia with over US$21 billion in joint assets, announced that they were urging businesses to protect freedom of expression and pledged to monitor technology companies that do business in countries violating human rights, such as China. On December 21, 2005, the UN, OSCE and OAS special mandates on freedom of expression called on internet corporations to “work together to resist official attempts to control or restrict the use of the internet.”

However, no one knows what happened to the initiative, as censorship grew by leaps and bounds since then, and continues to do so.

A more recent attempt to overcome the problem is one by a diverse group of companies, academies, investors, technology leaders and human rights organizations who have pledged to seek solutions to the free expression and privacy challenges in countries.

In 2006, Google, Microsoft, Vodafone and Yahoo!, along with the Business for Social Responsibility and advice from the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School reportedly initiated a dialog to grasp a fuller understanding of freedom of expression. In January 2007, they issued a press release to let people know, that their project has benefited by dialog, research and policy expertise on internet filtering and surveillance practices from the OpenNet Consensus. The new combined group has announced that they aim to develop a framework of principle that ensures the right to freedom of speech and expression on the internet.

Other organizations associated with this project are Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Reporters without Borders.

Racheal Whetstone, European director of communications and Public Affairs says, “Google’s Mission is to offer net access to as many people globally, as possible. Since a third of the world’s population is in China, it is important that we offer accessibility to people there. Google’s Chinese version offers net accessibility to 99% of users in the country, while the universal version is much slower and unreliable. That’s one reason why we agreed to a Chinese version of Google in the country. We had a choice to make, so we chose to reach out to more people with the Chinese version.”

Also, Google is the only site that clearly mentions that certain parts of the search results have been censored to laws in China. This means, Chinese users are aware that the results displayed are not complete."

She also said that Google will continue to invest in the nations known as ‘Internet Blackholes’ with the hope that politicians, who are the main drivers of information and education in the country, will realize the importance of freedom of speech and expression and allow the free flow of information.
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Technical solutions have proven to be more effective, at least in the case of China. Some efforts in this arena include anonymous browsers and search engines, developed by human rights organizations, NGOs or individuals, committed to the cause of right to freedom of speech and expression, on the internet.

One such example is Psiphon, an open source, anonymous software program that works as a censorship circumvention tool, developed to allow access to blocked sites in countries where there is excessive censorship. The free software, which has been available on the internet for download since December 2006, turns a PC into a personal encrypted server, which can retrieve and display web pages in any part of the world.

In technical terms, Psiphon acts as a web proxy ad operates through a network of trust. Psiphon providers install and administer a Psiphon server, called Psiphonode, in an uncensored country, to enable psiphon users to log in and access the server from a country that censors the internet.

Another tool used in China, to dodge the law is UltraSurf 8 software, which implements a complex proxy, promising transparency and a high level of encryption on Microsoft Internet Explorer platform. The software claims to enable users to browse any website freely on IE, while it automatically searches the highest speed proxy servers in the background.

UltraSurf 8 claims to implement almost all browser functions based on HTTP and user needs such as browsing websites, login and posting on web forums, using web mail, uploading and downloading data files and real time multimedia programs. Moreover, the developers of the software, UltraReach Internet Corp, have invented a technology platform called the GIFT System, which claims to offer guaranteed connection and reconnection service, censor behavior detection and counter blocking and capability of serving a large number of users with affordable resources.

Other popular tools include Elgoog, a mirror image of Google, which was a search engine that displayed results in reverse. Developed by a group called AllTooFat the site had nothing to do with Google, but on September 6, 2006, it made headlines when it surpassed the Chinese firewall.

Freenet is another free software which lets users publish and obtain information on the internet, via a decentralized network. The Freenet file sharing network stores documents and allows them to be retrieved later, by an associated key, with protocols such as HTTP. The stored info is encrypted and replicated across participating computers around the world, which are anonimized. Created by Ian Clarke, Freenet is designed to act more like an Internet, within the Internet. It can be used for publishing websites or freesites, communicating via message boards and for content distribution.

In addition to the above, numerous other websites, software and search engines crop up ever so often, to defend the right to freedom of speech and expression of fellow- netizens.
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Chronology of Chinese oppression on the internet:

•The first Internet block in China, spanned June 2 to June 24, 2004, when access to Chinese Wikipedia from Beijing was blocked on the 15th anniversary of the Tianamen Square protest of 1989. Subsequently, all Wikimedia sites were banned from Mainland China.

•In April 2005, People’s Republic of China purchased over 200 routes from Cisco Systems, to give the government, a more advanced technological technical ability.

•There was a discussion on a self-censored version of Wikipedia to be made available to users in Mainland China, meanwhile, Wikipedia continues to be blocked, as of October 18, 2005.

•In February 2006, Google succumbed to government pressure, by blocking websites which were objectionable, according to the Chinese government.

•Chinese users begin to face problems accessing their emails, via Microsoft Hotmail service, in May 2006. Users also reported having trouble with POP mailboxes and in the last week of May, Google and many of its services became unreachable for internet users in China.

•On May 30,2006, NGO Amnesty International launched a website called irrepressible.info which aimed to spread awareness about different ways in which the Internet is being censored by governments.

•On January 24, 2007, Chinese state media reported that Hu Jintao had vowed to “purify” the Internet. Hu apparently made no specific mention of censorship, saying China needed to “strengthen administration and development of our country’s Internet culture.

• February 24, 2007: The Chinese government launches a nation-wide campaign to cure its young ‘internet addicts’ with treatments that included mild electric Shocks.

•In March 2007, access to the LiveJournal blogging service and Xanga blogging service from within China, are blocked. Also, the Government bans the opening of new Internet cafes this year while it enforces strict censorship and control of blogs in the country.

•On March 30, 2007, Amnesty International released its report on China titled “Undermining freedom of expression in China - the role of Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google terror” that stated that the IT giants have been collaborating with the Chinese authorities to curtail freedom of expression.