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Is China's "Great Firewall" a Fraud?
An anonymous reader notes an article up on ScienceBlogs that calls into question the efficacy of the touted "Great Firewall of China" — a program by the government of the People's Republic of China to block users from reaching content it finds objectionable. Researchers at UC Davis and the University of New Mexico have performed experiments on the Great Firewall, sending test content to destinations inside China and observing what gets through. They conclude that the Great Firewall is more of a "panopticon" that encourages self-censorship through the perception that users may be being watched, rather than a true firewall.
That Chinese government! They like to kid. Remember Tiananmen Square? What a hoot!
I hate printers.
...that the "Great Firewall" is only filtering packets that are outbound from China.
Not necessarily likely, mind you, but it's possible.
It's completely ineffective and a waste of resources. All the Mongolian internet users just look for a weak point and then pour through in hordes.
I find that "panopticon" is something unfamiliar to many western readers. This concept, however was evident in many places where totalitarian authoritarian states were to be found. This includes the North American continent which has at least 3 known authoritarian states.
However, the Great Firewall is no surprise, as it is more likely civilian self censorship and self policing that results in most "apprehensions" of dissenters the Chinese government makes yearly. Many of these people are not caught by the "technologies" or police departments, but instead are turned in by "good citizens" (otherwise known as family members and friends).
Again this comes as no surprise to me.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
What they don't want you to know is that it is painted with lead paint!
Just imagine the effort it would take to continually watch even a small percentage of the population at any given time. Not to mention, effective surveillance would require people to do the watching (not just machines) and word would get out about it, no matter how oppressive the regime.
I would compare this with the carpool lanes on USA highways.They are one of the few instances that I could think of that has signs posted every few hundred feet to warn would-be violators about the dire consequences. It basically boils down to the fact that it is impossible to effectively police the carpool lane vehicle occupant policy (due to the fact that many vehicles have tinted windows and are moving at a high rate of speed, thereby making it difficult to see inside the vehicle), so they have to try and scare people instead.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
In communist China, YOU watch YOU!
They call it 'political correctness'.
I live in China. I have always been amused reading about the "Great Firewall of China" in the Western media. It really isn't that big of a deal. Very little is blocked, other than porn. Websites advocating Tibetan/Mongolian*/Xinjiang separatism, or Taiwanese independence in Chinese are blocked, but similar sites in English rarely are. The BBC is blocked, not sure why. That is about it.
Proxy lists are widely available. You can ask for one in almost any Internet cafe. So the Firewall is easy to bypass. 99.9% of people using the proxies are looking at porn.
The "Great Firewall" is actually fairly popular in China, because it means people can let their kids browse without worrying about them seeing erect penises.
* Yes, I know that Mongolia is already an independent country. But most Mongolians don't live there. 80% of them live in China.
I have been to china several times and I can't recall having seen a case of "content filtering", but then again I have not looked for it. However sites are blocked, last time I could not reach bbc, flickr or wikipedia as a few examples.
I can't claim that this has given me any profound insight into how the system affects the Chinese. What I did find was striking was this- I wrote an email about this experience to a friend. And afterwards, suddenly I started to worry. Not about myself, but about the Chinese woman I'd had a discussion with. I concluded it probably wasn't a problem, since all I did was mention that we "discussed socialism" which could mean just about anything. But knowing that my communications could be watched, and that the government could potentially harm someone because of what I said... well, our conversation was one of the most interesting experiences I had while I was there, but I didn't bother to mention it in any of my other emails to friends. So for me, that was the really scary thing, not the knowledge that the government could harm me, but that it could harm the people around me if I wasn't careful about what I said. So certainly, the system seemed to be having the desired effect with me, and I'm a westerner used to free (as in consequence-free) expression, and I was just there for a week.
What I have to wonder is, what's going to happen at the Olympics? Beijing is going to be flooded with foreigners. And unlike the Tienanmen square uprising, there will be cameras- digital cameras, video cameras, cell phone cameras, news cameras- everywhere, and I don't see how the Chinese government can possibly control the flow of information. All it's going to take is a few media-savvy demonstrators who want to make a scene, and either the government will have to tolerate them (which will be bad for them) or crack down (and have everyone witness it, which will be worse). I don't know... I think they may have gotten more than they bargained with in getting the international attention of the Olympics.
... I can definitely tell you there is a firewall. Short of using a proxy (thank you ssh -D), no machine can access Wikipedia, Blogger, etc.
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
And, surprisingly enough, the vast majority of Chinese people can't read English. So the existence of English-language media discussing controversial topics is largely irrelevant to all but a relatively small elite.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
What if the CCP has purposely built their firewall to be circumventable with just a little hacking? A few years of this and much of the population has an interest and a little skill in computer tricks, increasing the pool of computer talent in the country for both peaceful development and recruitment for nasty hacker armies? They could be engaging in social engineering to get a leg up in computer warfare.
In WWII, one huge advantage the USA had was that every kid had grown up tinkering with old cars, so every tank crew had an amateur mechanic, without having to specifically assign and train them. This could produce a similar effect for the Chinese.
My experience from having lived here in a year is something like this:
/. I get 404 or something similar.
It is actively censuring the most common adult *cough*Porn*cough* sites, many news sites, a lot of blogs are inaccessible etc. For about 1/5 of the links from
Sometimes when I get too annoyed about this unreasonable amount of blockage and then cross-check with TOR running I get about 99% functional pages.
It works in another way as well, the basic communication from China to abroad is VERY slow. Basically downloading anything, that be software, articles playing WOW in EU server and so on is excruciating, if at all possible. Downloading from Chinese sites I can max out my band width.
Bigger hotels in international cities such as Shanghai and Beijing seems to by-pass the firewall, so for many visitors they will never notice this. On a related note, the big hotels also have permission to show international TV such as CNN, BBC, HBO, where local people can get StarMovie, TCM and the Hallmark.
If the authorities are actively monitoring what we try to get hold of, I don't know, but the functional effects of 200.000 people actively banning the internet can not be denied.
For anyone who doubt the existence of the firewall, I suggest trying to live in China.
STDK
I can tell you that the things in the west are very exaggerated. You can pretty much speak about anything you want here in public, as long as it doesn't cover a few hot-button topics. You can take photos and video anywhere. Many services are paid for anonymously, so there is very little tracking. And the public is aware that internet filtering is more of manifestation of a policy than the policy itself. This is very common in Chinese culture - the outward manifestation and the implicit reality being two different things. This allows for quick flexibility, whether it be bending the rules by those that obey them, or changing the rules by those that create them. You are expected to know where this implicit line lies so that you do not step on toes, even though it will never be explicitly described. It has it's positives and negatives, for example the ability to quickly override bureaucracy, but also greasing the skids of nepotism.
Anyway, the firewall is like DRM. It 'protects' the general public from seeing things they shouldn't, but it isn't really effective against anyone who knows anything.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
If China's censorship system were a true firewall, most blocking would take place at the border with the rest of the Internet
Well duh, the so-called firewall is certainly not the same firewall that everyone means, and the researchers should know better. The system was not setup to totally block/filter everything at the gate. Certain groups of users must be allowed to access all contents, regardless of political censorship at the time, this includes: foreigners living in China, certain government departments and agencies (some police departments, NSA-equivalent, CIA-equivalent, ...). For example, if you go to places where there is high concentration of foreigners living in China, especially in certain building, you can access everything, there is no blocking/filtering at all. For example, when there is any well-known, well-publicized international conference held in China, the whole block where the conference is held can have non-filtered access, especially in hotels where foreign guests are concentrated.
The system is setup to allow contents in and out, but certain routes are blocked/filtered, while others are not. That's why you see some messages passed through several routers before being blocked. If the system was setup to block/filter everything at the gate, this would not be able to achieve.
As someone who's written a lot about the GFW, I always remind people -- the Great Firewall only affects connections going into and out of China. For domestic traffic there is no firewall or filtering at the router level. There is another system for censorship of content on servers inside China -- good old fashioned licensing to be a "content provider" and local regulation. If you're operating inside the sovereign borders of the PRC, then there are other conventional means of controlling content, like telling your ISP to shut you down or serving your company legal notice.
So it's a fallacy to talk about the Great Firewall as the most important part of the censorship system. The majority of folks in China are looking at entertainment content on servers inside China, and not trying to lookup the latest human rights abuses on foreign servers. Similarly, Americans are more interested in Britney Spears and the latest viral YouTube video than they are researching historical abuses of Native Americans.
I'm writing this from a coffee shop in Beijing using their free Wifi (which is quite common). With all these sensitive words in the post, hope it makes it through. (Though I'm kind of tempting fate by hitting the Preview button repeatedly)
A tremendous amount of sites are blocked. Many of them are barely political at all. I can not even get to my own blog. I can post but not view. Of course, there is wikipedia; but then, there is also VOA. It is incredible, the students are tested on a standardized test using material from VOA; however, they can not go to the site. To download the mp3s of the VOA broadcasts there are back door ways of doing it; but, it is just plain stupid. It is part of the TEM4 exam.
I am not going to bother listing the NON-PORN sites that I can not access. Rest assured that I hit one of these sites almost daily. Most Chinese are not aware of the firewall, this is true, they just think that this is the way the Internet works.
- Politics were the most popular topic for a drunken conversation around the table in the ex-Soviet Union.
- Political jokes constituted roughly 60-70% of all humour floating around. We had jokes about the fact that Brezhnev jokes cannot exist because they violate the fundamental universal constraint on the speed of light by travelling from one end of Moscow to another instantaneously.
- The situation in other ex-Warsaw block countries like Bulgaria was not any different. It went even further. Everyone was grumbling, taking the piss of the system, moaning complaining, telling political jokes. Nobody was even considering rebelling or doing something proactive against the government.
- Add to that that a lot of the literature and "formally allowed" humour like stand up comedians at the time had a lot of politics and very serious political satire inside.
- For example on the subject of what you are mentioning - scientists taking the piss of the system - just read "Monday starts on Saturday". That is present in plenty of books from that period. "Monday starts on Saturday" and "Snail on a Slope" by the Strugatcki brothers come to mind as a perfect example.
-
Similarly people like Okudzhava, Zhvanecki, etc wrote all kinds of stuff that was taking the piss of the system and that was sang by people, shown in theatres and some of that even shown on TV.
What the "socialists" do not tolerate is open rebellion. That they squash straight away. They let the people grumble and vent steam (within limits) because if they clamp on that the chances for open rebellion increase dramatically. They do not have the resources to clamp on all of that either.Further to this, organising something like Tian-an-Men Square or the student strikes nowdays requires money and is usually supported by foreign resource. Been there, seen that in the ex-Soviet block. Never got my hands dirty with it though (probably should have). If China does a good job of following all suitcases with money flowing into the country prior to the Olimpics they will not need to worry about any troubles.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Now, it may not be an actual "Firewall" in the strictest sense but "The Great NetNanny of China" doesn't have the same ring. Like another poster said, it seems to work via reset packets. I'm not networking expert, I just know I get a lot of "connection reset" error messages.
The problem with the Firewall isn't what it blocks, but it's HOW it blocks...the sporadic, chaotic nature. I've been here for two years. When I arrived, LiveJournal (which I was using to keep in touch with friends) was fine. In October of last year, it got blocked. It remains so. Wikipedia has been blocked and unblocked SEVERAL times. As ShanghaiBill said, there are proxies, but THOSE sometimes get blocked. And it's NOT just porn or "politically objectionable" material that's being blocked. There was a "computer help" call-in radio show I used to listen to, but THEIR site was blocked. All manner of sites that have NO political, pornographic or otherwise "controversial" information are blocked for reasons unknown.
Another prime example is Google News. The HOME page often opens just fine, but if you try to click a link to follow one of the stories ON the home page? "Connection reset". I'll often get the same thing when trying to SEARCH from Google News. SOMETIMES it works, but you never really know WHEN it will and when it won't.
That's the big problem with it for me, the fact that you never know from one day to the next WHAT'S going to be accessible and what won't be.
I mention this not to complain, but to point out that any thoughts of "There IS no Great Firewall" are foolish. Like I said, it may not meet the strict technical definition of "firewall" because it doesn't do all of it's filtering 'at the edge', but the truth is MOST people not on Slashdot have NO idea how a firewall works. They just know it's supposed to BLOCK stuff. That's the case in China. The internet IS censored here MUCH more than it is in the US and many other countries I've heard from.
It was not blocked when I was in Shanghai three weeks ago..
Though Wikipedia was blocked for most of my year in china from August 2005 to August 2006. So annoying...
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
Did you hear clicking noises on your phone while in China, too? :D
:)
Regarding the Chinese system of business relationships, it is called guanxi. I term it a euphemism for corruption. But hey, Chinese culture is 5000 years old, or so they claim, and things do not change swiftly there.
Regarding discretion of speech, some of my chinese friends were not afraid to says "fuck the communist party" in front of other chinese. It is not a big deal anymore. Just don't say something dumb on live tv or make yourself a big target.
The government will become interested if you try to foment an insurrection and challenge their power. Small scale chit chat probably does not register a blip on their radar these days. Now that we are in the 21st century, I assume that all communication is monitored, no matter where you are. Email is sent in plain text, IM in plain text as well, etc etc.
As to the Beijing olympics... I think the government's main problem at the moment is smog. A clear blue sky is a rarity there these days, and this does not create the best impression of the city. I *loved* living in Beijing, but the air quality is terrible.
Hope you enjoyed Beijing!
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
panopticon (pan opti con)
noun historical
a circular prison with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners could at all times be observed.
ORIGIN mid 18th cent.: from pan- [all] + Greek optikon, neuter of optikos 'optic.'
Hope this helps some one :-)
I was born in China in the 1970's. when I was kid and I had no many toy so I tried to fold a paper ship out of a newspaper, but my sister, who is 5 years older, told me not to do that because there was the picture of Chairman Mao on the paper. that was pretty much the only self-discipline event I have remembered. Then starting in the early 1980's, thing started loosen up. Nobody cared or worried if you said bad things about the government or the part or the leaders; we listened to radio from Hong Kong as well as Voice of America on the short-wave. Blaming and criticizing the government and the party are the daily topics around the lunch/dinner tables. In the current days, things are even more open. Like in July, when the government suddenly raised the stock transaction fee (to curb the rampant stock market,) there were over 270,000 messages in the sina.com.com news discussion board -- almost all of them were slashing on the government and its credibility in explicit wording as well as calling for democratic reform. What usually got blocked nowaday are the three topics: tiananmen, Fa Lun Gong and Taiwan independence. If you don't try to promote your messages on mass media and make yourself a big figure, nobody cares. All people and the government care nowaday is money.
This post has been blocked.
-Your friendly Chinise Government.