ASIA
HAND A quantum leap in censorship By Shawn W Crispin
The future
of Internet freedom is being decided in Asian
cyberspace, and judging by recent trends and
developments, that future looks increasingly dim.
Past hopes that an unfettered Internet
would empower lots of little information-driven
democratic uprisings have more recently been met
and systematically squashed by a number of
censorious Asian governments.
China's
highly restrictive state-run firewall - which
significantly is
built
into all levels of the country's Internet
infrastructure, from routers, to Internet service
providers, to e-mail and in chat rooms - is fast
emerging as the region's cyberspace censorship and
surveillance model of choice.
Southeast
Asian governments are increasingly taking their
technological cues from China on how to filter and
block politically sensitive content, as well as
locate and jail cyber-dissidents bold enough to
make online postings calling for more democracy
and freedom of information.
Some of the
region's most backward, otherwise mismanaged
military-run regimes are emerging as surprisingly
adept at Internet censorship. Vietnam's crusty
Communist Party-led government and Myanmar's
highly inept army-led junta represent two
troubling cases in technological point.
According the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a
collaborative research partnership among Harvard,
Cambridge and Oxford Universities, Vietnam's
Internet-filtering regime has shown the most
dramatic improvements of any country the research
unit has studied. A newly released ONI report on
Vietnam says that "the technical sophistication,
breadth and effectiveness of Vietnam's filtering
are increasing with time" and "it seems
inescapable that the state's online-information
control will deepen and grow".
Apart from
blocking hundreds of political and
religious-related websites, the study found that
Vietnamese censors are increasingly focusing their
filtering technology on so-called "anonymizer"
sites - which are designed to allow users to
bypass state-run filtering systems and remotely
access blocked content. On the surveillance front,
at least 10 Vietnamese have been arrested for
conducting perceived political activities over the
Internet, seven of them sentenced to prison.
Myanmar's ruling military junta likewise
implements one of the most extensive
Internet-censorship regimes in the world,
according to ONI. Sophisticated software-based
filtering techniques limit the content in-country
Web surfers may access, while state censors have
more recently improved their capabilities to
conduct surveillance over Internet-based
communications, including blogs, e-mail, and chat
rooms.
For instance, the junta has long
blocked local access to major global e-mail
providers Yahoo and Hotmail. In June, government
censors temporarily blocked access to the
significantly more secure G-mail and G-Talk
services, neatly planned to block Internet
dissident chatter concerning detained opposition
leader Aung San Suu Kyi's birthday.
Meanwhile, ONI now is focusing on the
Internet-control capabilities emerging in
Thailand, Singapore and Pakistan, according to one
of the group's researchers who recently spoke with
Asia Times Online.
Splitting the 'Net
Worryingly, while China's, Vietnam's and
Myanmar's Internet controls are already among the
most repressive in the world, all three regimes
appear to have even more ambitious censorship
designs - that is, to cut off their Internet users
from the World Wide Web altogether.
This
year China raised new concerns that it may soon
move to split the global Internet by migrating the
country's tens of millions of Internet users over
to a new Chinese-language top-level domain, a
state-managed intranet service completely
disconnected from the global Internet.
That in the main is already the case in
Myanmar, where most dial-up Internet accounts
provide access only to the limited Myanmar
intranet rather than the globally connected World
Wide Web. Vietnam is in the process of
implementing its own Vietnamese-language
second-level domain, similar to China's, which
will further improve its Internet-filtering
capabilities and curtail the country's Internet
connectivity with the wider Web.
Internet-freedom advocates often
understate these threats, contending that
tech-savvy cyber-dissidents will always remain a
step ahead of pursuant government censors through
the use of hyper-secure e-mail systems, such as
Hushmail, and internationally hosted proxy
servers. However, those arguments only hold on the
assumption that governments do not unplug from the
broader World Wide Web - a move that many
repressive regimes are in fact now making.
The sadder part of the story is that many
US and European technology companies, which
publicly enthuse about the Internet's
democratizing potential, provide the region's
censorious regimes with the blunting technology
they so desperately crave. Microsoft, Google,
Yahoo and Skype have all cravenly complied with
China's strict censorship requirements, in effect
supplying Chinese censors with the most
sophisticated filtering techniques in the world.
Meanwhile, lesser-known US technology
companies are more directly profiting from selling
censorship tools. Myanmar has substantially
upgraded its technical filtering capabilities
through its recent deployment of US technology
company Fortinet's firewall product. Researchers
are still trying to ascertain exactly how Vietnam
has been able to accomplish its quantum leap in
censorship capabilities, but suspect it too has
had foreign technical help.
It's a matter
of melancholy fact that the region's repressive
regimes will do everything in their power,
including censoring the Internet, to keep their
respective peoples information-starved and
disempowered. But what's more lamentable is that
profit-oriented, morally bankrupt Western
companies should so eagerly line up to assist in
the process.
That otherwise
technologically challenged countries such as
Myanmar and Vietnam now possess some of the
world's most repressive censorship platforms would
seem to indicate that Internet freedom in Asia is
already a lost cause. That may or may not be the
case. But it's certainly high time that global
technology companies stop assisting the region's
censorious governments and instead work to develop
and deploy easy e-solutions for end users to
bypass and subvert the filtering systems they have
already been paid to put in place.
Shawn W Crispin is Asia Times
Online's Southeast Asia editor.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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