A boy hasdied today (11 February) after being shot by security forces in Kashmir during protests against the execution of a separatist. Ubaid Mushtaq, said to be 12 or 13 years old by doctors, died in a Srinagar hospital from bullet wounds following the 10 February protests in the village of Watergam, in which paramilitary forces opened fire on demonstrators.
The news of Mohammed Afzal Guru’s death in a New Delhi prison on 9 February ignited fierce objection and protests in three areas of India administered Kashmir, surrounding claims the men accused had not been given a fair trial. The Kashmiri man was from a village close to Watergam, and had been convicted of helping to plot an attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 that left 14 people dead. Police said an inquiry has been launched into Mushtaq’s shooting.
Chinese authorities said Elton John dedicating his Beijing concert to Ai Weiwei was “disrespectful”
China has tightened its restrictions on foreign singers performing in the country after Elton John dedicated his Beijing concert toAi Weiwei in November. Chinese police questioned John after his Beijing performance last year, which he had dedicated “to the spirit and talent of Ai Weiwei”. Authorities then allegedly asked John to sign a statement saying that he had been inspired by Ai’s artistic achievements exclusively, rather than for his efforts to defend free speech. John was permitted to go ahead with his Guangzhou show in early December, but an editorial letter in the state-run Global Times said that the singer was “disrespectful” to include political sentiment in his performance, adding that authorities would think more carefully before inviting foreign artists to perform in future. Culture minister Cai Wu is now allegedly requesting degree certificates from international performers since John’s appearance, only allowing them entry into the country if they can prove they have been university-educated. Classical musicians have reportedly been required to submit proof of degrees when performing in the country since the start of the year.
A Hong Kong activist has been sentenced to nine months in prison on 7 February after burning a Chinese flag. Koo Sze-yiu was also discovered to have burned a Hong Kong flag, during two separate demonstrations against the government. In June 2012, Koo burned a Chinese flag outside the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government, in protest against the staged suicide of Chinese activist Li Wangyang, and on 1 January he was seen waving a Chinese and Hong kong flag with holes in both. He was charged with four counts of flag desecration. The maximum punishment for flag desecration is three years in prison and a fine of 50,000 HK dollars (approximately £4,000). Shortly after his arrest, a Chinese netizen was arrested for posting a picture of a defaced flag on to a social networking site.
A UK journalist isfighting a court application submitted by the police requiring him to hand over video footage of the English Defence League (EDL), it was reported today (11 February). Jason Parkinson has refused to hand over his footage, saying that journalists are “not evidence gatherers for the police”. He fought a similar case in 2011, where police attempted to seize his footage of the Dale Farm eviction of travellers in Essex. Greater Manchester police applied for a production order hearing on 18 February to view all published and unpublished footage obtained during an EDL and counter protest march by Unite Against Fascism in Bolton 20 March 2010. The National Union of Journalists intends to contest the application. Parkinson said that handing over the evidence “could overturn the incredibly important victory for press freedom” that was achieved during the Dale Farm eviction.
In Bangalore, India an artist was forced to remove his pantings from an art gallery on 5 February because they depicted Hindu deities in the nude. Anirudh Sainath Krishnamani was told by police that they received a complaint from a member of Hindu nationalist political group the Bharatiya Janata Party, claiming the paintings “hurt the sentiments of society”. Police threatened to shut down Krishnamani’s exhibition at Chitrakala Parishath gallery if he refused to remove the offending pieces, which police said were a potential law and order threat and could cause protests or an attack. The paintings removed included a picture of a nude goddess Kali as well as Shiva and Sati hugging each other. MN Krishnamani, Anirudh’s father and a senior supreme court advocate will contest the decision.
Even rainstorms can be sensitive in China. The recent storm in Beijing which killed at least 77 people caused the censors to come out in force, with newspapers told to can coverage and online accounts of the deluge snipped.
But with 500 million internet users, the obvious question is, how does China do it? What are the mechanics of China’s internet censorship?
It makes things simpler if we divide the censorship first into two camps: censoring the web outside China and censoring domestic sites.
American journalist James Fallows very readable account of how China censors the outside web explains: “Depending on how you look at it, the Chinese government’s attempt to rein in the internet is crude and slapdash or ingenious and well crafted.”
Briefly, this is what happens.
Censoring incoming web pages
The public security ministry is the main government body which oversees censorship of the outside Internet through its Golden Shield Project.
The key to their control is the fact that unlike many other countries, China is only connected to the outside internet through three links (or choke points as Fallows calls them) — one via Japan in the Beijing-Tianjin-Qingdao area, one also via Japan in Shanghai and one in Guangzhou via Hong Kong. At each one of these choke points there is something called a “tapper” which copies each website request and incoming web page and sends it to a surveillance computer for checking. This means that browsing non-local websites in China can sometimes be frustratingly slow.
There are four ways for a surveillance computer to block your request.
The DNS (Domain Name System) block: When you enter a web page, the DNS looks up the address of that page in computer language (the IP address). China has a list of IP addresses it blocks, if your web page is on that IP address, the DNS is instructed to give back a bad address and you will get a “site not found” error message.
Connection Reset: Another the way the government prevents you seeing one of its blacklisted sites is not to return a bad address but to constantly reset the request, which is slightly more insidious since this kind of error can occur naturally. If it happened outside China you could press reset and the chances are the next time you would be successful. But in China the reset is intentional and however many times you resend the request you will get a “The connection has reset.”
URL keyword block: To cast its net even wider, the tappers also check the web address. If it contains any banned words, say “Falun Gong” or “Dalai Lama” the request is sent into an infinite loop, you never reach the site and your connection times out.
Content filtering: In this technique the content of web pages is scanned for banned words, with the connection timing out if any blacklisted words are found. This could for example, allow you to browse the Guardian website, but not access some of the new stories.
Censorship technology is continuously becoming more sophisticated, and words and IP addresses go on and off the blacklists.
Index contacted Jed Crandall, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of New Mexico and whose research has focused on Chinese internet censorship, to ask him if there had been much change to the above in the four years since Fallows’s article. Here’s what he said:
“It seems like filtering the content of the web pages using internet routers was not working well for the censors, and they even seemed to be devoting less resources to it over time as we did our experiments,” he told Index by email interview. “They still block IP addresses, DNS addresses, and do keyword filtering on GET requests [URL keyword block].”
Censoring domestic websites
Far more of a challenge to the Chinese government is keeping its homegrown internet in check. And this it does mostly by making sure the private companies that run most of the Chinese web self-censor by issuing threats, “vaguely-worded” laws and, in the case of emergency breaking stories, day-to-day directives.
Censoring professional content
Web companies self-censor in many different ways. Content which they produce themselves is “cleansed” first by the writer and then by editors if necessary. There are few specific censorship guidelines; it is more of an acquired habit of knowing where to draw the line based on fear of punishment. American scholar Perry Link wrote an eloquent essay back in 2003 — read it here — about how Chinese censorship is like an anaconda in the chandelier ready to pounce if someone oversteps that line:
The Chinese government’s censorial authority in recent times has resembled not so much a man-eating tiger or fire-snorting dragon as a giant anaconda coiled in an overhead chandelier. Normally the great snake doesn’t move. It doesn’t have to. It feels no need to be clear about its prohibitions. Its constant silent message is ‘You yourself decide,’ after which, more often than not, everyone in its shadow makes his or her large and small adjustments–all quite ‘naturally.’
Censoring user-produced content
This is where it gets really interesting.
“Social media is more dynamic and fluid than traditional online content, so the censors have to be creative in how they control social media,” says Crandall.
Banned topics and sensitive terms are deleted by hand by armies (literally) of paid internet “police”. This, from a paper published here in June by a team of researchers at Harvard University:
The size and sophistication of the Chinese government’s program to selectively censor the expressed views of the Chinese people is unprecedented in recorded world history. Unlike in the US, where social media is centralized through a few providers, in China it is fractured across hundreds of local sites, with each individual site employing up to 1,000 censors. Additionally, approximately 20,000–50,000 Internet police and an estimated 250,000–300,000 “50 cent party members” (wumao dang) are employed by the central government.
More evidence for the lack of a hardcopy list of banned topics is that different online companies seem to censor different things.
Crandall adds:
One thing we’ve noticed in our research is that what various companies censor seems to vary widely from company to company, and there doesn’t seem to be any obvious ‘master list’ of what companies are supposed to censor. They seem to make up their own lists based on what they think their liabilities would be if the government had to intervene.
For example, censoring in Tibet and Qinghai (a largely Tibetan province) is much stricter than in eastern parts of the country.
Latest trends
Recent reports on Chinese internet censorship have offered some surprising results. First, the Harvard paper referred to above analysed Chinese-language blogs and found that censors were targeting material that could have incited protests or others types of mass action, leaving material critical of the government uncensored.
A recent University of Hong Kong study on Weibo (China’s wildly popular version of Twitter) posts found that the list of words was changing constantly.
“What we are finding is a constantly morphing list of keywords, a cat-and-mouse contest between people and censors,” King-wa Fu, one of the study’s researchers, told the Economist last month.
There might be more to it than a simple catch-up. According to Crandall, censorship can be used as a sophisticated tool to control the news. In a paper titled Whiskey, Weed, and Wukan on the World Wide Web: On Measuring Censors’ Resources and Motivations, when a news story reflects badly on the government, posts on it are censored, but when that news story has been turned around to a good story, the word is unblocked.
“It appears that censorship was applied only long enough for the news about Wukan to change from sensitive news to a story of successful government intervention to reach a peaceful resolution to the problem,” the paper’s authors write.
(Wukan is the name of a village in southern China where huge clashes between the police and locals occurred over illegal land grabs late last year. The government eventually caved into the villagers’ demands and then turned the story in one of a provincial government victory.)
The Future
Chinese censorship has to move with the times, particularly now there are 500 million Chinese online, many of whom are ardent microbloggers.
Crandall believes that the government is looking into how to manipulate social media to influence the news.
I think what the future of internet censorship holds is more emphasis on control and less emphasis on blocking content. It’s very difficult to block some specific topic, but if you can slow down spread of news of the topic at some times and speed up spread of news about the topic at other times you can use that to your advantage to control how issues play out in the news cycles.
MORE ON THIS STORY:
Blogger Wen Yunchao wrote for Index on Censorship magazine in 2010 about the art of Chinese censorship. Read his article here.
Also writing for our magazine, Southern Weekend columnist Xiao Shu discusses the repressive and chaotic nature of China’s internet censorship here.
Read Chinese author and blogger Han Han’s essay about publishing and censorship in China here.
The $600m sale of Next Media, one of Taiwan’s most popular media companies, has raised the spectre of a media monopoly that could be disastrous for press freedom on the island. Ching-Yi Liu and Weiping Li report (more…)
WCIT 12: Milton Mueller asks if governments are turning their backs on the global internet? A push to change the business model that delivers online content could stifle innovation and make the net an instrument of sovereignty, stuck behind national walled gardens
At the end of the 20th century, an incredible revolution took place. Barriers to the free flow of information were knocked down and a powerful cycle of technological innovation was set in motion, transforming the economy, first in the United States and then around the world.
No, I am not talking about the internet.
I am referring to the liberalisation of the telecommunications industry, which led to a huge economic revolution in the 1980s and 1990s. It started with a big bang: the breakup of the AT&T monopoly. As early as the mid- 1960s, policy-makers knew they didn’t want the emerging information services industry to be dominated and stifled by an enormous monopoly. The US Federal Communications Commission created a regulatory distinction between ‘basic’ and ‘enhanced’ services, ‘enhanced’ being defined as any transmission that included ‘information processing’. Information services would be unregulated and the market left wide open. This process began in the US and was followed by the largest economies in Europe and Asia. Technical standards escaped from the control of national governments and a huge number of new competitors entered the market. With global free trade agreements in place for IT equipment and telecommunication services, in 1995 and 1997 respectively, economic liberalisation of the industry was complete.
Deregulation had profound consequences. The same infrastructure was used for both the transmission of information services (such as early emails, and data-sharing) and telephone calls, but businesses delivering information services were exempt from the entry restrictions and gatekeeping regulations levied on telephone companies. In the late 1980s, the US pried open space for what was then a largely experimental market, pushing for trade rules to internationalise these reforms. In that pre-internet period, countries such as Japan, the UK and Hong Kong saw no harm in opening up what was a tiny market. Little did those early negotiators know that they were clearing a path for the spread of the internet. Considered an ‘information service’ because it was essentially software run by computers, the internet spread over global telecommunications networks like wildfire. After 20 years, it would swallow up the massive telephone market and transform newspapers, television, radio, publishing and practically every other mode of communication.
The economic roots of internet freedom
Much of the freedom and openness we associate with the internet is not a product of its technology. Many respected scholars have promoted the notion that there is something about the internet’s ‘architecture’ or ‘design’ that magically makes information free. True, the internet’s design made it cheaper and easier to interconnect thousands of different networks and devices. But its technical potential could never have been realised without an open, liberal industry. Without the deregulation of information services, without the market economy in telecommunications, without diversity and competition among providers and free trade agreements that enable content and investment from anywhere in the world, there would be no internet freedom. Internet technology – TCP/IP protocols – can be installed in computers in North Korea, but it won’t make communications in that country free. If a repressive government owns and operates the telecommunications infrastructure, blocks trade in computer and telecom equipment, does not allow a free market for access, devices or services to develop, censors or jails dissident publishers and forces new online businesses to obtain permission to trade online, it’s easy to contain and control the internet.
A counter-revolution in the making?
The internet now dominates our communications environment. But older communication laws, regulations and policies have begun to haunt it. There is a tendency to try to make the internet like the old media, so that governments and interest groups can recreate the kinds of controls they once had. In particular, there are widespread attempts to reassert nation-state authority. In December 2012, the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) will take place in Dubai. The UN meeting will revise the International Telecommunication Union’s International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), a binding treaty intended to ‘facilitat[e] global interconnection and interoperability of telecommunications facilities’. The ITRs were established in 1988 – years before the internet had become a mainstream medium and just as telecommunications liberalisation was in full swing.
The world has changed dramatically in the 25 years since the current ITRs were drafted. Since 1988, the internet’s technical standards community has used open working groups to develop or revise hundreds of new standards and make them available online for free. The ITU’s telecommunication standards development activities, in contrast, have shrunk and its revenue model, based on high membership fees granting exclusive access to official standards documents, has become unpopular. New private sector institutions, such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and regional internet registries, allow open public participation and set policy for infrastructure. In the ITU, in contrast, decisions are based on a one-country, one-vote calculus and ordinary internet users, digital rights advocates and civil society are not well represented. The
Dubai conference represents a crossroads for the future of telecommunications: the ITU must update its treaty to take account of the internet or risk slipping into historical irrelevance. It’s as if the internet is now being visited by the ghosts of telecommunications past.
Some alarmists have claimed that proposed revisions to the treaty threaten internet freedom, presenting it as a ‘takeover’ plot by authoritarian governments in the ITU, a premeditated attempt to subjugate the internet to states once and for all. Although these fears have gained an enormous amount of publicity, they are largely unfounded. Aside from polarising the dialogue, they tend to divert attention from the real issues.
The ITU is in no position to assert control over the internet’s domain name or addressing systems or its open standard-setting processes. The ITRs cannot really impose global content regulation. The ITU has no enforcement or policing capabilities; it relies entirely on member states to apply and enforce its rules. No democratic governments will agree to impose Chinese-style censorship on their local internet users simply because of an ITU regulation or guideline. Besides, as the case of China makes clear, national governments already have the authority to censor and regulate internet users if they want to.
The potential dangers emerging from WCIT negotiations are more subtle. Decisions taken during the conference could undermine the economic liberalism of the communications sector. One of the most progressive and important parts of the 1988 regulations was Article 9, a short annex entitled ‘Special Arrangements’. It allowed companies to privately negotiate how ‘special telecommunication networks, systems, and services’ operate. Most agreements concerning internet connections are made possible under this provision. Revised regulations could pull web interconnections into a more burdensome regulatory regime. Some governments and telecom companies (many of which are still monopolies and/or state-owned) want to turn national telecom operators into gatekeepers of internet services, applications and content, which could lead to fragmentation of the internet. Some telephone companies are trying to apply old charging models to internet traffic, as if requesting a web page or video was like making an international telephone call. This could make the internet more expensive for users or stifle business models based on different charging models. It could open the door to charging schemes designed to subsidise national operators at the expense of service providers that rely on the telecommunications infrastructure but do not own it, such as YouTube or Skype.
A more progressive approach would emphasise the gains of liberalisation. Countries should be encouraged to permit multiple, competing service providers and allow them to freely negotiate traffic exchange and content distribution deals. New regulations should affirm the basic principles underlying the World Trade Organisation’s free trade agreements and eliminate all forms of protectionism and national filtering of legitimate information services.
Cyberspace and national security
The Dubai conference will also consider proposals to include cybersecurity in the ITRs. Of course, security problems online are real and do need to be addressed. But it’s questionable whether effective solutions can be included in the new regulations and whether the ITU is the best authority to come up with them.
At best, proposals to address security concerns are unfocused and a bit naïve. Member states are asked to ‘stop spam’, ‘protect data and network integrity’, ‘ensure internet security and stability’ or ‘supervise enterprises operating in their territory’. These proposals reveal the basic disconnect between the security problems of the internet and the ITRs. Cybercrime, spam, and cybersecurity issues involve not just network operations and standards but a complex interaction of hardware standards, software engineering, content and human behaviour. Cybersecurity also relates, of course, to the military, so problems relating to it go far beyond the ITU’s remit and capabilities. Attempts to regulate cybersecurity would vastly expand the scope of the ITU and erase the boundary between information services and telecommunications – with very little likelihood of being effective.
At worst, proposals to deal with cybersecurity reveal nostalgia for the nationally-controlled telecommunications of the pre-internet era. Some proposals would try to prevent international communications that ‘interfere in [states’] internal affairs’ or that undermine ‘sovereignty, national security or territorial integrity’. These proposals have little support, and even if passed could not really shield states from ‘subversive content’ as long as the current liberal information services regime holds in most of the world. But underlying these proposals is an apparent belief that the borderless information flow of the internet is inconsistent with traditional approaches to national sovereignty and security. Even in the US, where the WCIT delegation defends the internet model, the increasingly popular notions of ‘critical infrastructure protection’ and the pursuit of superior cyber warfare capabilities threaten to militarise the internet and push communications back into national walled gardens.
The internet flourished precisely because it was allowed to develop outside a state-dominated political environment where information and communications were seen as instruments of sovereignty, surveillance and power. The new communications and information sector was an instrument of global commerce, free trade, innovation and open culture. Internet freedom advocates must understand and support the economic institutions that made the internet revolution possible. The most important negotiations at WCIT will not be about censoring content or taking over domain registration. They will be about whether the telecommunications revolution will be allowed to continue, or whether it will be pushed in the opposite direction.
Milton Mueller is professor at Syracuse University School of Information Studies and the author of Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance (MIT Press) revolution in crisis
What can you do?
Index and many other civil society organisations that fight for free speech and internet freedom oppose moves to give the ITU authority over the internet. Join more than 33,000 other citizens from 166 nations and sign here to ask your nation’s leaders to protect global internet freedom
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The $600m sale of Next Media, one of Taiwan’s most popular media companies, has raised the spectre of a media monopoly that could be disastrous for press freedom on the island. Ching-Yi Liu and Weiping Li report 
