Chinese censorship sucks big d**k

[mjairlax]

With engineering help from half a dozen Western firms, the Chinese Communist Party has erected a huge apparatus to censor free speech. A ragtag crew of hacker dissidents may succeed in tearing it down.

In a windowless room in New York City, a computer engineer with owlish glasses--call her “Jenny Chen”--peers at a color-coded bar graph on her PC screen. Her group is launching attacks on the Chinese wall of censorship that blocks access to sites discussing verboten topics like civil rights and democracy. The graph displays how many Chinese that month evaded the country’s censorship to condemn the Chinese Communist Party.

Chen, a Beijing-born woman of about 40, runs her own it businesses. Her group, and like-minded “hacktivists” (as they call themselves) spread around the globe, are chipping away at the Golden Shield, the term that describes the filtering system that censors the Internet and e-mail of China’s 110 million Internet users. The invaders slip contraband words and ideas in and out of the country via such means as mass e-mails, proxy servers that aren’t yet blacked out and code words that aren’t yet on government blacklists.

Arrayed in battle against the hackers are the Chinese Communist Party and an assortment of Western firms that provide the hardware, software and search services that make the Chinese Internet run: Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, Sun Microsystems and Yahoo. These companies are in a bind. They cannot do business in China except on terms dictated by the Chinese authorities, and that means zapping Web traffic that strays too far from the party line. But if they comply they become, in the eyes of Chinese dissidents, collaborators with an oppressive regime.

The Internet firms will get a chance to squirm in public on Feb. 15, the day Representative Christopher Smith’s (R–N.J.) invitees are to appear before his Global Human Rights subcommittee to answer questions about their operations in China. Given their public statements to date, the U.S. firms are likely to say something like this: We must comply with local laws; we think it’s better for Chinese citizens to be getting filtered access to the Web than none at all; and we hope for more openness in the future.

Sure to come up: the case of Shi Tao, a reporter for the Dangdai Shang Bao (Contemporary Business News) of Hunan, who forwarded, ultimately to foreign Web sites, his account of political directives to Chinese journalists forbidding the coverage of the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The Paris-headquartered free-speech advocate Reporters Without Borders, citing court records, says Yahoo’s subsidiary fingered Shi by handing Chinese authorities the digital fingerprints of Shi’s e-mail. The evidence led to the journalist’s ten-year prison sentence last year.

Reporters Without Borders fumes on its Web site: “It is one thing to turn a blind eye to the Chinese government’s abuses and it is quite another thing to collaborate.” Don’t try to access that site from a computer in Beijing. If you do, you’ll just get a blank page.

On Dec. 31 Microsoft shut down Zhao Jing’s popular blog, penned under the pseudonym Michael Anti. Zhao, who writes from Beijing, had fiercely criticized the firing of an editor at a progressive newspaper in Beijing. Microsoft says it had to shut down the blog based on the “explicit government notification” it received. “[The U.S. Internet companies] argue they have to follow local laws,” says Corinna-Barbara Francis, China analyst for Amnesty International in London. “But when Microsoft took down the Michael Anti blog--what was the law they were following? Chinese laws protect freedom of expression and freedom of the press. And the Yahoo case hits home really hard. We have asked Yahoo whether they were presented with a court order; the company has not said that it was. So it seems Yahoo simply went along with a political request.” Yahoo says it did have a legally binding request and only responded to what it was legally compelled to provide.

Google is under attack for allowing its Chinese site to be hijacked by the authorities. Type the Chinese characters for “Falun Gong” (prominent among China’s many outlawed spiritual movements) into google.cn, hit search the “entire Web” and you get 626,000 hits of Communist Party propaganda about an “evil cult” that makes its believers go insane and commit suicide. A footnote at the page bottom, easily overlooked, tells Chinese surfers their search wasn’t complete. Meanwhile, a Falun Gong search in Chinese characters on Google in the Free World comes up with 4 million pages of all sorts, from supportive to hostile. Says Congressman Smith: “Many Chinese have suffered imprisonment and torture in the service of truth--and now Google is collaborating with their persecutors.”

Censorship is quite an industry in China. Every village has spies to watch neighbors; the mail and the poster boards are watched, say expat Chinese. It is said (by dissidents) that China has 40,000 Web police hard at work just in Beijing, looking over the shoulders of Web users and composing lists of banned words that cause a Web search to freeze up or a site to automatically be blocked. They have quite a challenge, not just because e-mail traffic in China is running at 300 million a day (based on China’s own statistics), but because they are aiming at a moving target. They block not only “Tiananmen Square,” but also chat-lingosubstitutes like “Tsquare” and “June 4,” the date of the incident. Block documents with repeated instances of “June 4” and you have a new problem: How does a law-abiding construction firm insist in e-mail that concrete forms have to be in place on June 4?

The censors have on their side not just industriousness but the long arm of a police state. Reporters Without Borders says that at least 50 Chinese citizens are behind bars for breaking the rules with their cyberdissent. The group counts another 32 print and broadcast journalists who have met the same fate.

(From Forbes.com)

[Richthofen]

Yes, yes it does suck big dick.
Good article.

[Orcinator]

(insert joke about small asian penises here)
yes censorship does suck

[Jinzoa]

that is what you get for allowing a government like that into power.

[qiushidaren]

Yeah and there are so many superdifficult gestures in American Pornograghies, Father f##ks daughters, mother be f##ked by gradfathers, so that is what you get.
Some Americans always like interfering other country's affairs, without handling their own affairs.
hehe~~~~~~~~~~

[qiushidaren]

But why American government is so sensitive to communisim, what I know is sensorship is served for the government, who has the power who controls the sensorship.

[Bowski]

At 2/13/06 01:34 AM, Jinzoa wrote: that is what you get for allowing a government like that into power.

Wha? They TOOK power. Not much anyone can do about it.

[MrCokeCan]

there government works for them, and they need censorship to keep it that way. THey may not ahve the same rights and stuff that we do, but there ecomnomyl; most of the stuf you buy is from there. This chinese government reminds me of the book 1984 by George Orwell, and that government system works well to.

[Jinzoa]

At 2/18/06 10:38 AM, Bowski wrote:

At 2/13/06 01:34 AM, Jinzoa wrote: that is what you get for allowing a government like that into power.

Wha? They TOOK power. Not much anyone can do about it.

Well considering how many people could have stopped them taking it, it still seems like they let them in.