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Reporters Without Borders Internet Annual Report
kratei writes "The BBC is running a report discussing the Reporters Without Borders internet annual report 2006. The RWB study details and decries the rising tide of net censorship and lays the blame squarely on the west as the source for the technology that allows repressive regimes to stifle freedom on the web." From the article: "China's success at censorship means it has effectively produced a "sanitised" version of the internet for its 130 million citizens that regularly go online. The wide-ranging scrutiny also means that it is the biggest jailer of so-called cyber dissidents. RSF estimates that 62 people in China have been jailed for what they said online. "
[CENSORED]
Hey I know! Lets bash China again. Slashdot is just soooo much fun when we get to take it out on China like it was some sort of virtual nation-pinjata thingy!
(Of course we should all forget that we don't actually know a damn thing about China)
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
..it is just me or can't chinese dissidents use google.com instead of google.cn and get an uncensored version. Having said that i have never been to china so I wouldn;t know.. but this just highlights more than ever to get all the azeureus users off tor and get more tor servers set up to help protect these people who need the annonimity.
The people I know in China all claim to use Japanese and Korean proxies to get access to everything. Anybody know if this is true? If so, then you can be assured that plenty of people are doing this, and largely making the PRC efforts pointless.
Vonal Declosion
RSF estimates that 62 people in China have been jailed for what they said online.
If this estimation is accurate, I would say it's pretty relaxing to surf and talk about things online in China.
Is the author implying that citizens in other countries will be left to talk about their countries freely with no serious consequences? These citizens might not be jailed as per Chinese standard, but to assume that they will not suffer in other ways from what they said is just as extreme.
Please stop entering code 2,2,7,6,6,4
Western tech may help to censor internet jounalism in some countries, but didn't western tech allow for that medium in the first place? I would hope that they would qualify their blame of western countries with a thank-you to the technology that allows millions/billions of people in repressive regimes to at least access some information, certainly more than they had before hand. thats not to say that the west should strive to censor other coutnries, but it shouldn't be forgotten that far more censorship was possible without the internet exisiting at all than is possible with western censoring-technology and the internet.
Wow! This means you have a 1 in 2 million chance of being arrested for dissidence in China. You have better odds winning the lottery or being struck by lightning.
China doesn't need the West's help to censor their internet; they build most of the world's computer equipment, they've shipped a person into orbit, and they have nuclear power. They're a big science and technology power and have been for some years. To say that Cisco or Yahoo are helping China to keep tabs on dissidents is true in the narrow sense but in reality the Chinese government is perfectly capable of doing it all themselves.
That said, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth to know that American companies are complicit in locking down the Chinese network, but of course we in the U.S. long since traded any moral high ground for profit, when it comes to China; there's just too much money to be made from outsourcing there. Maybe when India gets its manufacturing act together, we can go back to being moralistic about China's repression of dissidents.
What's probably more important than moralizing is to allow more of their students into our universities so that they can experience a more unfettered system. Not that the U.S. is perfect but it is way more open than China's system and the educated elite need to appreciate the value of openness.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
I don't think so. This is the same thing that China has been doing for ages, only now electronically instead of on paper. Information (and it's free release) have not changed at all in China, only the means by which it is censored.
For anyone who has read 1984 though, it makes sense. The only way to control a mass ammount of people, the only way to subdue them and hold at bay their very rights to speech, it to keep them ignorant. If you can keep a people ignorant, they won't know any better and they certainly will not rise up against you. Like I said though, this isn't news. Because you can't spell NEWs without NEW.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
3 persons in orbit.
..here in GroupThink town.
Of course, being behind the "Great (Fire)Wall of China", can they even get to google.com anymore?
Isn't a restriction on censorship sofware, censorship in itself?
Oh sure, you can access all the pages you want. But ... wait a minute, why're you looking at that page that deals with bomb building? And you there, what are you doing on a page that talks about the creation of LSD? You're running torrent all day, very interesting. And streaming video, but the site you're at is neither Fox nor another official broadcaster, what're you streaming there?
What? Impossible? Look up some recent laws, it's not like anything you do on the net is your business only.
The difference between China and us is just that we get to access the content first that we get "questioned" for. But the snooping is the same.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So this equipment is helping the cause of repressive regimes.
How difficult would it be to restrict the sale of this equipment, just like certain defense equipment?
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines
Can you access the YRO section of /. in China?
I'm not sure if 62 is anywhere near correct when it comes to China jailing internet dissent. Who's to know? China is very secretive and evasive when it comes to releasing numbers, even numbers that most governments take pretty seriously.
And who cares about whether the "jailable offense" is on the internet, or in a newspaper, or in a diary? If the Chinese government thinks a citizen has the word "democracy" (for example) in their head, there is a good chance they can just lock them up, throw away the key, and nobody will ever know.
Or not. It's impossible for anyone outside of the "Inner Party" to know what's really going on. And even Western governments have a tendency to say things that are a little... off... of the real truth...
When did I become my in-laws?
The Chinese put their imprisoned dissidents to work. I don't have any problem with workers in foreign factories getting low wages, as long as the wages compare well to where they live. I do have a problem with political prisoners being forced to make the same products for no wage.
Breaking the China habit is hard, though; like pollution, we're in too deep to make a significant change in a short amount of time.
Dark Reflection
'Nuff said?
I find it dismaying that on one hand, they claim that freedom is their motivator, and on the other hand, they implicity suggest that software developers should be restrained from writing software that could be used to censor the net. They are able to write and sell this software because the governments are corrupt, not the other way around.
The marvellous blend of "Funny" and "Insightful" is only made even more wonderful by its brevity.
Coming from China and pursuing graduate studies in Europe, I find that some of these organisations persist in criticizing the "Chinese way". Armchair philosophers pointing at our human rights record and our "one party state" as they like to call it as a "concern" (to put it very euphemistically).
I'd like to say that you may not completely understand the Chinese context. Not all of us have the same concept of "personal freedoms" that you do. We understand that we must sacrifice some of our personal freedoms for the greater good of the society as a whole. I can only speak for my friends, family and myself, but we give these freedoms happily and in the knowledge that we know that the government that we elected works for the benefit of all in China. Not all of us agree, we all know there are plenty of dissidents who openly voice their opinions, but you must recognise that these can be dangerous people.
In a society as large as China, there are always pockets where the seeds of discord can grow into a tree that could serve to disrupt the harmony. Does government censorship necessarily have to be a form of repression? No. I remind you that many of us freely voted for the government that we have and while you hear of the vocal minority who protest such actions, you never hear of the silent majority who recognise the benefits.
The Chinese government is not a "great evil" as some would have you believe. I, and others I know, feel that whatever is being done is more out of necessity and would like to at least point to things like our recent economic record and educational successes as some indication that the system works.
So what you're saying is that two wrongs make a right? And our minor (by numbers, anyway) infractions here in the US make China's long history of killing political dissenters acceptable? Good logic there, sparky. Unless of course that's not what you're trying to say, in which case, what the hell are you trying to say?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Groupthink, really? Could you please tell me what the groupthink here is, exactly? Because from what I can tell it changes from day to day based on who has the mod points.
Oh wait, you meant groupthink as in "anyone who disagrees with me." Gotcha.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
For all the filtering over there, the governmet is still rpetty unsophisticated about it.
For example: My mom went over to China last year to teach English. She'd regularly e-mail us updates. She warned everyone to please not say anything untoward about the government, as she didn't want to get in trouble. However the e-mail she used was her US account, connected to via webmail. It was all 256-bit SSL encrypted. There was no way the Chinese government had any idea what she was sending.
Since their ban is reactive (meaning they ban stuff they don't like when they find it) rather than proactive (meaning everything not on an explicit approve list is denied) it is impossible to stop all the proxies out there. They apparantly don't stop encrypted traffic so once you've got that, you can get anything.
Sure what mom was doing looked like someone checking e-mail via SSL,a nd was, but it didn't have to be could have just as easly been a tunnel to other sites, and they never would have known.
To me it looks similar to the RIAA's anti-P2P efforts. They don't really understand what they are fighting and they make an effort to swat at it, but they have no handle on things overall. Still may be effective though, I'm not sure how many savvy people there are and of those, how many are willing to risk the Central Committee's wrath by looking at banned sites.
Here's a tool to get around Web censorship. It's the censorhip-circumventing software itself, not just a site that runs it; anyone can downlad and install it on a Web server for their own use. It's been around since 1996, first developed when Singapore and China first announced they would try to censor the Web. I think this approach is more effective than the various sites running public proxies, because those can be blocked by censors much more easily than when everyone has their own private proxy.
If you try CGIProxy and find any shortcomings, please let me know so I can fix them. To my knowledge, it's the only such software out there that solves certain kinds of problems, such as proxifying JavaScript (in beta, but almost there); for example, this means that most Web-based email and other complex sites can work through it.
Note that out of the box, the CGIProxy isn't optimally configured for privacy, but there are config options to change that. The code is heavily commented, with the intention that users can customize it in several ways to make it unrecognizable to censors.
Have fun! Let me know if you have any questions.
I see. So it's a numbers game? When the US gets up to 62 killed dissidents, then we will be allowed to speak as the person you are replying to has?
Killing people for political reasons is no worse than stripping them of all of their freedoms, I don't care who they are. Killing one makes your country just as guilty of the crime as a country that kills 100.
Wake the hell up.
I lived in South Africa when nobody was openly selling anything military etc to them. This did not stop the flow of equipment, it just came via alternate routes and fed a bunch of middlemen. The military etc could easily get stuff illegally, but genuine commercial folk could not. If you went through the sales records of various test gear manufactueres etc, you'd find some very wierd countries (eg. Swaziland) buying large quantities of equipment.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It works both ways one does not excuse the other.
Posting AC to avoid burning karma, but I just have to say: If it means fewer bloggers, I'm not going to complain. Bonus points if anyone can use this report to justify shutting down myspace and the like. Tell me I'm not the only one who WANTS things to go back to the early 90s, when you could actually find useful stuff without wading through 300 linkfarms, ads taking over everything, blogs that do nothing except whine about how unfair life is, etc.
RSF estimates that 62 people in China have been jailed for what they said online.
How do we know how many people are in jail for the same thing right here? Only here we call it "copyright infringement" or "incitement" to do something illegal (some DCMA or patriot act provisions could apply here). We have reporters in jail for failure to release their sources. Not as many as China perhaps, but the numbers don't mean much to me. My problem is the fact that anybody can do this. We won't have a robust internet that can route aound the damage until we get widespread wireless mesh. It will be our only hope of escaping gov't/corp control.
What?
So what you're saying is that two wrongs make a right?
As this is Slashdot, perhaps another way of explaining this is possible. This is not an OR situation. It is an AND situation.
Another way of saying it might be "Pot Kettle"
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
China censors its internet, and Bush gets the blame. Who wrote this report? Oh yeah, Reporters without Borders, I should have guessed...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I support the Chinese people, however the government is absolutely terrible on human rights and free speech. China wants to become modern and more capitalistic, rising their way to being a first-world nation. However, as long as China continues to treat its citizens like third-world citizens, China will remain third-world.
The fascist capitalist regimes run by middle-age white heterosexual males have created insidious software tools that have corrupted the poor impressionable leaders of the proletariat.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Is there any mention of the shutting down of web sites in US for "supporting terrorism", or the impossibility from coutries like France (though the country of RSF) to access websites with revisionist content, due to court rulings forcing ISPs to ban these websites from their customers reach?
RSF seems very eager to point at censorship in "dictatorships" (though RSF's own list of such countries is in itself subject to dispute) but at the same time seems to forget about that very same kind of censorship is occuring in "democratic" countries as well.
That attitude has a name, it is called double standard. Or hypocrisy, if you prefer.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
No, you *don't* see.
It *is* a numbers game. What don't you get?
So, if one equals 100, would you say that the death of sixty thousand is remotely equivelant to the Holocaust?
If so, tell us what dictatorship is paying you to post that crap.
1) When I submitted the story I didn't include that bit about China in my version of the summary. I think that quote wasn't a good one to include. It TOTALLY misses the point RWB was making in the article. A better quote would have been:
In other words, China figured out how to most effectively silence those who wanted to use the web to promote political dissent by singling out online editors. Now many other countries are following suit, because the Chinese method works so well. You don't have to throw large number of people in jail, you just make a few draconian rules and get rid of the people who are causing the most trouble.The story is not about bashing China, it is about how more than a dozen other countries are following China's lead, now that China has figured out how to censor the internet effectively.
2) I thought the last section - about western complicity - was thought provoking (or at least here would spark some debate). Their comments are not inflammatory, they just state what has happened. "Secure Computing, for example, sold Tunisia a programme to censor the Internet . . ." and "Cisco Systems, created China's Internet infrastructure and sold the country special equipment for the police to use." I'd like to hear somone from each of those companies explain/defend themselves.
We need to get our own houses in order before we have enough credibility to criticize China today. China has improved. We have digressed.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
How's that for "Land of the Free?"
One in 12 American men will spend time in jail.
Cheers.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Leave it to Reporters Without Borders to blame the West for creating technology just because a bunch of Commies in the East use it improperly. Next let's go after GM for "allowing" drunk driving deaths.
damn foreighners.
Sure, launching military invasions of neighbouring countries, annexing their land and national resources and systematically extinguishing those neighbours' indentities and statehoods is certainly "beneficial to all of China", but do you find that acceptable?
If your people, the Chinese, were still suffering under brutal Japanese occupation the same way that the Tibetan people are in reality suffering under Chinese oppression, would you be fine with that?
Is it acceptable for a China to commit genocide and for the Chinese people to do nothing to stop it?
Are you ashamed or proud of that imperialist aggressor aspect of your country?
Do you hate the Japanese for having attempted to do to China (over sixty years ago) what the Chinese have been doing to Tibet since 1950? (incidentally, your arguments for accepting CCP's dictatorship sound eerily similar to what the Japanese were indoctrinated to believe in the 1930s and 1940s.)
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?