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New Web Censorship Laws for China
Published June 7th, 2005Tagged: china | law | uk
The Chinese government has just announced a new system of web censorship which aims to require all domestic websites and blogs to register with the government or face being shut down. [just to make sure that the enemies of the people can’t write anti-government propoganda!]. This ties in to an earlier post I wrote.
I’m not one of these diehard internet-freedom-of-speech advocates but I do feel that this move is not only misguided but will ultimately prove unsustainable. Once the legislation has gone through it will be left to police on the ground to enforce this. This will almost certainly not work.
Consider Intellectual Property rights in China. They are widely considered to be of an international standard, but the widespread nature of the piracy and the lack of competent police continues to make it very difficult to enforce these effective anti-piracy laws. The result is that despite the legislation most fakes that arrive in the UK hail from the friendly PRC pirate ship.
It will be easy enough to enforce these control against large content providers (although I’m sure neither they, their customers, or the general populace will like it) who host hundreds of sites/blogs in one place but creates much more of a problem for monitoring people who are running their own host over a broadband connection or on a smaller community host.
Quite apart from this there is an obvious futility of this action. You can block as much content as you like in the domestic sphere but there is nothing to stop someone hosting the same content overseas and there is nothing you can do about it. At the same time, it should be remembered that Chinese is the second most used language on the internet.In this particular instance I would expect good chunks of the content that Beijing is trying to eradicate is already located on foreign servers thus avoided Beijing’s heavy-hand retaliatory action.
The whole misguided scheme reminds me of Australian attempts to regulate the domestic internet. This will just not work!!! If states decide that regulation is really the way to go then it will only work through mass adoption. In the same way that the US is the biggest single polluter in the world it also has the most web users and the most internet content. Hence, like the Kyoto protocol, any internet regulation would require the US to participate and that is never going to happen, at least not unless they prune their freedom of speech provisions from their constitution.
People (where people means people trying to control content) seem to forget that, given a simple secure connection, of ANY kind, just about ANY information can be sent. Assuming public key cryptography really is secure (and we have no reason to believe it is not), then anyone can channel anything over a secure tunnel, and noone has any way of telling what sort of information it is. So, unless China plan to block all secure connections entirely (and even then, this is difficult - consider sending secure traffic over normal HTTP protocol), there’s no way they can stop it leaving the country.
And like you say, once it’s out, it’s out. I wouldn’t be surprised if companies start springing up outside of China offering secure connections for hosting blogs and the like to people inside China. Hmm, maybe I should do that…
However, “…would require the US to participate and that is never going to happen, at least not unless they prune their freedom of speech provisions from their constitution…” - they seem to be trying fairly hard to do this anyway, so maybe China will just have to leave the US to its own devices for a couple of years before they push for international regulation ;-)
Having said that don’t forget we are talking about a country that was determined enough to install a universal firewall that tries (but fails) to block “unsuitable” content from abroad…
Although the BBC isn’t blocked anymore (at least not last time I tried) however, I’m led to believe that certain pages on the BBC site are blocked.
Further to the last paragraph in my earlier comment, I found this comment on the Yahoo discussion board:
Those Amateurs…
by: sector_tracker (20/M/CA) 06/07/05 12:36 pm
Msg: 1 of 1
If you are going to censor, do it like the experts.
Look at how USA does it for example. First Amendment guarantees free speech, but for those who publicly express views contrary to the government, here is what you do, with each step in escalation
1) Send the FBI’s to interview the person and his/her friends/family. The beauty of this is that no one can decry anything illegal but yet you are able to make those who know him/her cast suspicion about him/her.
2) Attack the person’s integrity. If that doesn’t work, attack the person’s spouse integrity. For example, if the person’s spouse is a spy, expose the spouse. However, make sure you use “anonymous sources” when doing it so that you can’t be traced.
3) Put the person on “no fly list”. The beauty is that the accountability cannot be traced back and that the person has no way to remove him/her!
4) Label the person as a terrorist and put him/her in prison. Person can be imprisoned indefinteily on the pretense that s/he is a terrorist. However, this only works if the person is found in the Middle East. I think a secret operation to make the person mysteriously show up in Middle East is needed.
The BBC have now published an article on on this topic