Slashdot Mirror
How China Cracks Down On Internet Dissidents
skippywalker turned us on to a
Washington Post article about how the People's Republic of China, instead of viewing the Internet as a means of liberation, sees it as a tool for maintaining political control.
What's really ironic is that financial transactions will probably be safer with Chinese financial institutions because they're actually putting in place an Internet infrastructure that they can police. Rather than security being site-centric like it is in Western countries, security is being country-centric in China, meaning that while you may have less anonymity, so do the bad guys.
Uh, not so. Sure, they can catch crooks easier - but if you take a second glance at China you'll see the authorities there ARE the crooks. They won't use this to safeguard innocent traders, they'll use it to guard their little fiefdoms and protection rackets - essentially, to crack down on the competition. Politically, AND financially.
I think the point is that a lot of people in the West (and particularly, in America) believe that our way of doing things is the Best Way, the Only Way, the Righteous Way, etc. and that anybody who deviates from our way is Evil. A good case in point is the whole Elian Gonzalez case. There, you saw conservatives and hardline anti-Communists protesting loudly. "Don't let him go back to Cuba! He'll be forced by law to attend a government-run school where they'll make him pledge allegiance to Castro in the morning and teach him that communism is good and capitalism is bad!"
.. not just in Communist countries.
Hello?
I don't know where everybody else went to school, but I certainly went to a government-operated school that made me recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning and taught me that communism was evil. As a kindergartener, I had absolutely no idea what the Pledge of Allegiance meant; it was basically an exercise in rote memorization at that point in time. Now I understand what it means, and I understand the differences between the world's social and political systems. I believe that the system used by most Western nations is the best one, but I also understand that that belief was carefully cultivated by our culture.
Have you ever corresponded with an average Chinese citizen? You'll find plenty of Chinese men-on-the-street who believe with every fiber of their being that capitalism is evil. They believe that not because they have some government agent standing behind them with a gun to their head, but because they have gone through the same type of careful cultivation that we have. People have a difficult time understanding this; for many folks, it is simply inconceivable that anybody, anywhere in the world could possibly disagree with Our Way of doing things. Just remember this: for every American who feels strong allegiance for Our Way, there are multiple Chinese who feel the same allegiance for Their Way.
With regards to the Tienamen Square crackdown, you're correct that no reasonable person anywhere could possibly look upon that as a Good Thing. But our own government has blood on its hands as well; remember Kent State? Obviously, that particular situation was orders of magnitude less bloody than Tienamen Square, but you can't assert that Their Government performs oppressive crackdowns and nobody else does. It was a horrible, heart-wrenching crime against humanity, but at the heart of it, it really doesn't have much to do with the core beliefs of the average Chinese citizen. Government, society, and culture dictate beliefs everywhere
And you thought the slashdot effect was bad already!
-Earthling
-Earthling
"I'm sorry, I had to; the irony was just too thick."
But their primary purpose still is to kill (or to credibly threaten to kill). Similarly, the Internet's primary use today is as a tool to disseminate information, and to "route around censorship". By this, it is a natural ennemy for all dictatorships, the MPAA and other unfriendly organizations: the Internet is not politically neutral. It's thus more than a mere tool. The Chinese now have implemented a way to muzzle this liberating force, and to keep their iron grip.
Say no to software patents.
Does it reject the notion of property? If so then what if I want to drive a car somewhere? How is the limited supply of cars allocated? Or does no-one have a car?
If Anarchism does not reject proerty then who enforces property laws? What if I want to make a contract exchanging my labour for property? Am I prevented from doing so? If I am prevented then I have lost freedom rather than gained it, and if I am allowed to make such a contract then we arrive at untrammeled free market capitalism in one short jump.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Why don't they have a clue about cooperating with each other? Every other regime has made its own concessions...
When will they be free?
And was it linux that was named its offical OS?
Thats a shame.
-Sleen
ok, according to our law, you can't use encryption, your email and stuff is readable by the govt, what you say can be held against you etc. but on the other hand, none of these laws are actually implemented. my former college, which is owned by the navy, teaches RSA, for example. So the deal is that they want to keep the economy open to whatever benefits CS and IT can bring, but they want a saftey net, "just in case".
Yes, but that safety net might not be for what you think. What that "safety net" does is gives them legal justification for prosecuting a select portion of a large number of people, without just cause.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the effect turn out similar to freeways in the United States: the speed limits are low enough that everyone on the road does 5 miles over, which gives the traffic cops justification to pull over anyone who "looks suspicious", who is of a race that the cop is bigoted against, or who has speeding ticket money to pay into the coffers of whatever city they happen to be passing by.
20% "China is a great country, and the fact they ran this story just shows Slashdot's xenophobia."
30% "FUX0R CHINA! AMERIKKKA R00LZ!"
10% "I have hot grits down my pants RIGHT NOW."
20% "What's this got to do with Linux?"
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
You've probably heard it many many times. The Internet is just a tool. I've heard people talk about how the Internet revolutionized commerce, how it revolutionized our understanding of information.
The Internet doesn't do jack. The Internet is a tool. Hammers are tools, too. A hammer can be used to pound a nail into a wall. A hammer can also be used, ironically, to pull a nail out of a wall. A hammer can be used to kill someone. A hammer can be used to save someone.
China's just using the Internet as a tool. Everything's a political tool in China. What's really ironic is that financial transactions will probably be safer with Chinese financial institutions because they're actually putting in place an Internet infrastructure that they can police. Rather than security being site-centric like it is in Western countries, security is being country-centric in China, meaning that while you may have less anonymity, so do the bad guys.
But again, it's just a tool. China's not abusing the Internet. They're just defining the way in which they're going to use their tool, and it just happens to be different from the Western ideology.
Alright I'll grant that if they have PGP then their email won't be read. But by the very reason of it being encrypted will be enough for them to get jailed. This isn't a democratic government, they don't need a reason to lock them away.
I live in Pakistan, which is also a pretty authoritarian state. What's interesting to me is our governments' policies regarding the net and IT in general. The reason i mention this here is because i some parallels...
ok, according to our law, you can't use encryption, your email and stuff is readable by the govt, what you say can be held against you etc. but on the other hand, none of these laws are actually implemented. my former college, which is owned by the navy, teaches RSA, for example. So the deal is that they want to keep the economy open to whatever benefits CS and IT can bring, but they want a saftey net, "just in case". I think China is leaning more towards the saftey net mentality. And since they are pretty much the closest thing to facism you're gonna find today, i guess they have a need to be paraniod. My government is making this tech very open and accessable cuz they feel our economy needs it. How accessable? well the only national backbone provider is a govt-owned and protected monopoly. But my city has like 10 or 15 ISP's and i get flat modem access for around $20/mo. Compare against our neighbour India, which has only one state-owned ISP (legally protected monoploy, last i heard), and you'll see that this is a pretty big deal for this reigon.
China, with all the trade deals they keep getting (from the US, and the thaw with the WTO), don't feel that economic need. Ultimately, the govt's who supress their people are the one's that can *afford* to.
Think about it. If people in china have less of a voice, who's paying to make that happen? the IMF? the WTO? Uncle Sam? You?
You're kidding, right? This is the clique going after tobacco producers, gun manufacturers, and Microsoft, and are gearing up to drop the hammer on oil companies. They've raised the minimum wage more times than I can count, increased regulation on many business sectors, and are proposing legislation giving new mothers 3 months of paid leave. (Just examples.)
Yeah, this is a real pro-business group.
--
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
the PROC want's everyone in china to read headlines about how much the chinese government sucks? "Hey....we should really do more to promote people hearing about how much we've done to totally fuck up the lives of people living in this country!"
If only....but the one thing people forget about china is that the vast majority of it's population really doesn't give a shit about what form of government they live in. The farmers on the mongolian border don't care. And they sure as shit don't care about what people are saying the chinese government is doing about the "internet" either.
the internet is information, but what most people fail to realize is that the vast majority of the chinese populous KNOW how much Communist China licks goat ass, they just don't care because, with a country of more than one billion people, the government and the internet aren't priorities. They'll just live their lives and deal...and they're not going to die for freedom, and certainly not freedom of speech, when the government isn't bugging them. It's called political apathy, and everyone's got it...even the U.S.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
PGP doesn't help if the Chinese state security agency views encrypted email as evidence of subversion.
During World War II, the use of codes and ciphers in telegrams and snail mail by civilians in the United States was banned and would result in a visit from the FBI. There was a huge censorship operation that screened mail for war secrets, codes, ciphers and secret writing (invisible ink).
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
If Chinese people used encrypted email, what would the government do? Come over and shoot them? Come over and demand the key and then shoot them? Or, possibly, nothing (like if they were using keyword searches)?
I'm going to pull out an old arguement: if EVERYONE used encryption, whether or not they have 'something to hide', it would be impossible to monitor them. I'd like to see this done in the U.S. but in China, echelon is very, very real.
It is 1984 in China RIGHT NOW.
Perhaps the U.S. of A. finally has a good reason for export of strong encryption, eh? Democracy, anyone?
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
That has always struck me as the most ironic of positions -- the people arguing for improved trade relations with the only Communist power left in the world worth considering are the arch-capitalists out for a buck who don't give a damn about human rights. The people arguing that China violates human rights and shouldn't be accepted by the world community until they clean up their act are for the most part liberal people who also question the motives behind capitalism.
You have the MPAA getting police to kick down doors and drag 16 y/o to jail.
You have the CPHack case.
We have corporations use lawsuits to shut people up instead of throwing them in jail. Or judges that give vague orders and threaten jail.
Fight Spammers!
As if. Totalitarianism and capitalism get along just fine, as the history of the third world shows. Making a buck has nothing to do with free speech.
Well, they might see it as a tool, but if I were a Ruthless Dictator I'd still rather be using TV and radio, for pretty obvious reasons.
While it might be easy to publish on the internet, it's basically impossible for sites to be anonymous. I'm sure the chinese government knows exactly where every IP address is being used. Besides, the internet doesn't grant freedom, people can only use it in the fight to gain it.
It's more than just a tool unlike someone else said, but frankly it can't help at all if the entire population lives in fear, which any good Ruthless Dictator is able to acheive. You won't need some facility with thousands of people surfing the web for violations if the society lives in fear. Or even better, you can get the population to beleive that personal freedom isn't a big deal, that things like money and entreprenurial spirit are more important, which they seem to be doing with some success.
China would ban internet technologies outright I'm sure, but the Chinese government isn't dumb. If they want to be an economic player in this century, they have to be part of the information based economy, of which the internet is central. Russia failed because it couldn't (and/or wouldn't) do the same, generally speaking. Whether or not expanded internet access will allow China to keep strict control and apathy over it's population remains to be seen, but I'll bet they can do it. They can just take a lesson from the US, where the illusion of freedom is just about the best form of control there is.
I'm sure that in China there is much bad press about the US of A. And in the USA there is much bad press about evil imperialistic and totalitarian countries like Iraq and China.
Why should we believe either one? Remember, the majority of Chinese citizens feel just as strongly about the US whenever their government places an anti-US propaganda piece in their media, as the US citizens do when it's government does the same.
There is no government in the world that does not produce significant amounts of propaganda in the press (and specifically in the schooling system, children are far more impressionable). There never has been one, and I doubt there ever will be. The USA is not an exception.
In my country we get quite a lot of American TV shows and movies, and quite frankly, I cannot bring myself to believe that a completely free press can produce so many movies and TV shows that are so blindly adoring of the US government. Almost every single TV show/movie makes some reference to how wonderfully great the US of A is, and how wonderfully "free" it is, and depicts anyone from any other country as just feeling that life has no meaning because they aren't US citizens. (If you don't believe me, start watching out for it next time you go the movies or watch telly. You might be surprised. Check your schooling system as well.)
The only movie I can think of that didn't do this is Bulworth. I'm sure there are more, but they are very few and far between.
I can't believe that a truely free press can produce so much patriotic propaganda. A free press normally produces material that is far more critical of its government's practices.
A country needs to define some sort of enemy in order to (a) maintain a sense of patriotism, and (b) to justify pouring ever more money into expanding its military power. The US press goes out of its way to make it's citizens feel like they are just "the good guys", morally superior to others - but there needs to be a "bad guy" in order to maintain that. During the Cold War Russia was "the enemy", but now that the Cold War is over, the US needs a new "bad guy" to rally its people against, and it seems to me that China is the candidate.
Now, I'm not trying to argue that China isn't imperialistic, or that they don't engage in many human rights violations - they probably are, but that isn't my point. My point is that when Vice President Gore steps up there denouncing China, he isn't doing it because he happens to feel strongly about human rights violations. He is doing it because the issue is a handy "political pawn" with which he can rally up the support and patriotism of US citizens.
In short, I deny the major and minor of your attempted syllogism.
--
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
If it suppresses too much it will eventually face a revolution. If it has too much freedom of expression it will (it believes) disintegrate into anarchy
Would that be such a bad thing?
Michael Chisari
mchisari@usa.net
"...the Ministry of State Security "has been able to track individual e-mail accounts through monitoring devices on Internet Service Providers. Internet bulletin boards were subject to round-the-clock monitoring..."
Dude, I'll bet over there if you go to a message board topic just to write "Woohoo!! First Post!!" the cops come and shoot you in the head. Cool.
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
Does anyone have any wild-ass guesstimates as to the likelihood of being prosecuted for guerilla infowar on China's Internet, hacking their government's web sites, stealing and publishing their government secrets, etc.?
I'm fairly sure this would be illegal under international law, but hey, they don't uphold our copyrights, I wonder if the government would tacitly condone such action, or at least not do anything about it.
I am certain it would be popular and would attract attention to this issue.
The funny thing is most of their sites are on US ISPs and even on user sites on fucking AOL and thus governed directly by US law, and thus a bad idea to mess with.
Their Ministry of Foreign Affairs appears to be based in China if the traceroute is any indication. Hits an OC3 off sprintlink, and at that point I presume a cable uplink, as the ping goes up to 1669.641 ms (from about 80 ms).
Also, their China Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation appears to be in China.
There are other such sites on Yahoo!, but the interesting stuff is probably elsewhere.
I'd best not touch it, and bad bad me for even thinking such thoughts. In China it would be illegal to think that way.
All the sites listed under "Military" are in the US. ROFL.
telnet www.moftec.gov.cn
HP-UX www B.10.20 A 9000/861 (ttyp1)
login:
Naaaaaaah, best not go there ;-) The idea is fascinating, but I'd best stop there before I start an international incident.
What's the deal, is getting ugly with those totalitarian scum a good idea likely to make one an international hero lionized by the world, or is it more likely to get you shanghai'ed to Shanghai by goons, disappeared in the middle of the night with nothing left behind but a fortune cookie for the authorities to discover?
Or would our own goons in our own respective liberty-loving nations drag us off themselves?
Notwithstanding the fact that I wish the Chinese wouldn't abuse freedom in this way, it does serve a very useful purpose: it shows us what could happen if the essential freedoms of the internet are eroded in freer countries. It doesn't hurt to be able to counter some of the misguided "law an order" propositions we are seeing so much of with "and you want to make our internet more like China's, do you?".
:-/
I sure hope this isn't preceived as a troll
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
How many people have you chatted with from China?
Last year, when my son graduated from high school, I wanted to take him on a trip around the world to celebrate his achievements. (He also was awarded his Eagle Scout rank. And was a leader of his Sea Scout group.) My plans were to fly to Beijing and take the Trans Mongolian rail to Irkutsk, Russia, and then the Trans Siberian rail to Moscow and points west. But the Yugoslavian war came along and we had to do a tour of Europe instead. It had become too dangerous for Americans to travel in Russia and China may have ignored our visas when we stepped off the plane.
But during the process of getting ready before we had to call that trip off, I got familiar with the Chinese people on the Internet in both Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai. I exchanged email with a few people in those cities. One guy in Shanghai was interested in getting a new digital camera and so was I so we compared notes.
One woman I exchanged email with worked in Beijing for the government monitoring the Internet for sites that were "anti-Chinese" (meaning any criticism of the government's policies, whether they were political, sexual, or religious). I didn't want to put her on the spot by raising the moral and ethical issues that her job implied. And she was helpful on getting an inexpensive place to stay.
But I was reminded of similar censoring responsibilities our own civilization assigned to the religious establishments up until the mid-1950s. We mostly think of them as being anti-ponorgaphic but even earlier they and the governments of Europe (the USA wasn't around yet) were quite active in suppressing any anti-government sentiment until it boiled over into revolutions.
Look back on our own history and discover how we moved to a more open society. Basically, the truth is that a centralized government is the most inefficient form of government and slowly falls apart by its own centripital forces. Intelligent people in China will become astute in using that to their advantage. It is a dangerous game but the demon that allowed the cultural revolution to start is dead and slowly being turned into a beneign shadow of his former SOB self.
That is the threat that China is faced with. If it suppresses too much it will eventually face a revolution. If it has too much freedom of expression it will (it believes) disintegrate into anarchy. And its people have the dangerous game of teasing this mad beast into doing what it would not do itself.
China has the following difficult problems to solve: 1) Its population, 2) How to move to a Democracy without falling into revolution or anarchy. Everything else is minor by comparison.
Bypassing the government censors will happen. Our job is to help it happen. You do want Chinese to be able to read Slasdot, don't you?
So China must open up whether it wants to or not a little bit at a time. I have this visual image of a person timidly and slowly getting wet at the edge of an ocean. Yes, it is silly and tragic. But it is their choice (so far). And at least there is email communication, even if it is somewhat limited. And there are Internet cafes in Beijing and other large Cities (almost every city in China is a large city by our standards).
So I challenge you out there to come up with clever ways to help the Chinese citizens to bypass their government censors! It is really not that difficult a problem if you think about it. Have fun.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen. Ludwig Wittgenstein
While we have porn and drug sites in the USA, we can expect that censorship in China will be futile.
When porn and drugs (and copyright violations) are successfully policed in the US, the Chinese will succeed in their censorship. It's the same technology.
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
Now that I re-read that, it does seem someone might take it the wrong way. . .so if it strikes any of the admins that way go ahead and zap it. Or mod it "Inciteful." And in either case, DO NOT DO DUMB SHIT.