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The business of stifling the
Internet
By Alan Boyd
SYDNEY -
Internet users are losing ground in the censorship war
being fought in Asia's cyberwaves, partly because
Western corporations are helping to undermine the spirit
of enterprise that made the medium such a potent weapon
for free speech.
While smarter and more discreet
communication technologies offer a way around creeping
state controls, advocates of reduced government
intervention fear that multinationals may present a far
greater long-term threat.
Media watchdog Privacy
International warned in a year-long study released in
September that corporations with a vastly different
agendas were quietly hijacking the 'Net for their own
commercial ends. At the same time, almost all
governments worldwide - including many supposed
flagbearers of democracy - were exploiting terrorism
fears to enact laws that would impede the flow of
information.
"Governments and their agencies
have traditionally viewed new technologies with
suspicion, arguing that their presence can disturb the
hard-won 'balance' of rights and responsibilities, in
the same way that large companies have traditionally
viewed any new media as a threat to the balance of their
markets," co-authors Simon Davies and Karen Banks wrote
in a foreword.
"Technological developments are
being implemented to protect a free Internet, but the
knowledge gap between radical innovators and restrictive
institutions appears to be closing," they said.
The study, and a flurry of other recent reports
by media watchdogs and human-rights organizations,
confirm what many frustrated Asian consumers had
suspected: meddling in the 'Net has intensified during
the past two or three years.
Websites and their
harassed subscribers have fought back with a game of
subterfuge that many had expected would eventually
exhaust surveillance resources by stretching their
ability to monitor constantly changing techniques.
Online addresses have been rerouted through a maze of
cyber corridors to fool proxy government servers that
attempt to block content by filtering all data before it
actually reaches the public domain. Crossover
technologies between the Internet and mobile phones are
opening up other possibilities, as websites use
messaging services to keep regular users informed of
suppressed content or shifting site locations.
Amnesty International (AI) noted this week that
even in China, widely regarded as having the most
repressive Internet climate worldwide, online activism
has become more evident as controls have been tightened.
"Over the last year, there have been signs of
Internet users acting increasingly in solidarity with
one another, in particular by expressing support for
each other online," the human-rights group stated,
adding: "Such expressions of solidarity have proved
dangerous, as a growing number of people have been
detained on the basis of such postings."
Amnesty
International listed the names of 54 Chinese nationals
who had been detained or sentenced for expressing their
opinions online, or for downloading information from the
Internet, since November 2002 - a 60 percent increase in
that period. This was in addition to an unknown number
of people who were still in detention for disseminating
information about the spread of severe acute respiratory
syndrome (SARS) over the Internet last year.
Most Internet criminals in China have been
charged under 1995 decrees that make all users register
with their local police stations and sign an agreement
with the Ministry of Public Security that they will not
engage in "subversion" or "endanger state security". The
edicts carry prison sentences of two to 12 years. A
separate proclamation issued by then-premier Li Peng in
1996 required that all international computer networking
traffic, both incoming and outgoing, be routed through
state channels.
China, as well as autocratic
neighbors Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, got its censorship
cue from Singapore, whose filtering system is arguably
the most effective in Asia. Because it controls the
three Internet service providers, Singapore was able to
set up a computerized proxy server in the 1990s that
screens all websites for content viewed as
"objectionable" or a potential threat to national
security.
Although political leaders in the
republic acknowledge that some loosening of media
controls is inevitable as education and income levels
grow, they are not in any hurry to oblige.
"I
have no doubt that our society must open up further. The
government has no monopoly of knowledge and ideas. To
understand and tackle our challenges fully and
vigorously, we need to draw on the expertise and
resources of all our people," Deputy Prime Minister Lee
Hsien Loong said in an address to the Harvard Club this
month. "But we will not ape others blindly and do
something simply because it appears fashionable.
Coffee-shop talk is helpful for sensing the popular
mood, but it cannot be the basis for deciding on
national policies," Lee said.
Singapore acted as
an adviser to several of the communist states when they
were setting up their Internet filters in the late
1990s. Most initially had little success because of Cold
War limits on technology transfers.
However,
this has all changed in the past decade, as Western
companies have targeted emerging investment
opportunities for telecommunication systems, especially
in China.
China, with a reputed 30,000 full-time
Internet surveillance operatives for the country's 45
million web surfers, now has access to the same
cutting-edge technology that content providers were
using to skirt its censorship regime.
The
Amnesty International report named Cisco Systems,
Microsoft, Nortel Networks, Websense and Sun
Microsystems as multinationals that had supplied Beijing
with Internet equipment without imposing any conditions
on its use.
Privacy International, which has
also campaigned against unrestricted sales, noted:
"Without the aid of this technology transfer, it is
unlikely that non-democratic regimes could impose the
current levels of control over Internet activity."
An equally worrying trend is that Western
corporations, including many in the mass media, are
manipulating the Internet to pursue their own business
objectives without considering the adverse effects
elsewhere. According to the Privacy International study,
"multinational corporate censors" with different agendas
from their governments' have represented one of the most
important growth trends in recent years.
"Some
American cable companies seek to turn the Internet into
a controlled distribution medium like TV and radio, and
are putting in place the necessary technological changes
to the Internet's infrastructure to do so," warned Simon
Davies and Karen Banks. "It is arguable that in the
first decade of the 21st century, corporations will
rival governments in threatening Internet freedoms."
Some Western governments indirectly add to this
process by using commercial pressures to impose
misguided censorship standards on software
manufacturers, even with products that were designed to
blunt the technological edge of repressive regimes. Last
year the makers of Safeweb, a US software package that
was developed in partnership with the Central
Intelligence Agency to help Chinese users avoid
censorship, were forced to install a filter on some
content so it would qualify for US public funding.
Asian governments have taken note of the
financial and political benefits of letting the
commercial world assume the censorship burden, which
takes some of the human-rights heat off security
agencies.
For the past 12 months, China has been
delegating responsibility for surveillance and
monitoring to private companies, including Internet
cafes and information service providers. Davies and
Banks argued that Western governments were neglecting
their leadership responsibilities to ensure that the
Internet is allowed to evolve without political or
commercial constraints.
In many cases this has
occurred, they said, because political leaders have
overreacted to perceived security threats posed by the
free flow of information since the 2001 terrorist
attacks in the US.
"While paying lip service to
personal freedoms, the leaders of the democratic world
have affirmed with uncharacteristic harmony that the
pursuit of a safer society must prompt a reassessment of
individual liberties and privacy," they said.
"In its most blatant manifestation, this will
result in a substantial increase in the right of the
state to place controls on all citizens, shifting the
default in favor of comprehensive surveillance over the
population.
"Technology is at the same time the
culprit and the savior."
(Copyright 2004 Asia
Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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