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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]
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.
Yeah, I forgot. We must first spend years studying the socio-economics of china before we can say it's wrong to throw people in jail for their opinions. How silly of me to forget that.
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.
..it is just me or can't chinese dissidents use google.com instead of google.cn and get an uncensored version.
;-)
It's just you.
I don't know how they do it, but I guess Google either does geolocation and redirects to the appropiate version or they simple block access to google.com.
No sig
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...
Google definitively uses geolocation. If I go to google from any computer here (Venezuela) it's automatically redirected to google.com.ve. Even if I go to the options and tell it to use the homepage in english and the like (which I usually do, mostly because , I still get the regular google website, but with a "visit google Venezuela" link in the bottom
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.
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.
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.