China's internet censorship spreads
Pastor Dale Morgan
China's internet censorship spreads
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By Richard Spencer in Beijing
Last Updated: 1:21pm BST 06/06/2007
Dozens of countries are copying China's methods of censoring of the
internet, Amnesty International has warned.
In advance of a live webcast to discuss internet freedom, Amnesty warned
that censorship was a “virus” that was infecting countries round the world.
"The virus of internet repression is spreading,” said Tim Hancock,
Amnesty's international campaigns director.
“The 'Chinese model' of an Internet that allows economic growth but not
free speech or privacy is growing in popularity, from a handful of
countries five years ago to dozens of governments today who block sites
and arrest bloggers.”
China's 144 million internet users face the most sophisticated controls
in the world.
Software filters hundreds of millions of emails, web-pages, and mobile
phones text messages for key words that trigger either automatic blocks
or further investigation by censors.
In addition, internet companies in China, including overseas firms, have
to operate systems of self-censorship.
The Chinese government claims that rules are in line with international
norms of countering crime such as pornography, but does not deny that
they also cover political activity.
Technology has also been used to track down authors, and China has the
highest number of internet journalists in jail of any country.
Shi Tao, a reporter on a central Chinese newspaper who was honoured with
a Golden Pen of Freedom award by the World Association of Newspapers
this week, is serving ten years in jail for sending details of one
censorship order to Human Rights in China by email.
His details were handed over to police by the American internet firm
Yahoo!, which drew attention to the agreements given by companies such
as Google and Microsoft to comply with Chinese censorship laws, and to
the filtering technology sold to China by companies like Cisco.
Amnesty said such practices could change the internet “beyond all
recognition” as they are taken up by other countries.
It cited research by an academic study group, the Open Net Initiative,
that at least 25 national governments employed filtering technology for
censorship.
They included Iran, Burma, and Saudi Arabia but also western-oriented
democracies such as India and South Korea.
It also highlighted the fate of Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman, a
22-year-old Egyptian blogger, who was sentenced to four years
imprisonment in February.
"More and more governments are realising the utility of controlling what
people see online,” Mr Hancock said.
“Major Internet companies, in an attempt to expand their markets, are
colluding in these attempts.
"At the moment, we turn on our computer and assume we can see all that
there is online. The fear is that we will only be able to access what
someone wants us to see.”
The webcast discussion will feature the dotcom entrepreneur Martha
Lane-Fox and Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, the internet
encyclopaedia, which is one of thousands of sites permanently blocked in
China.