RConversation

Xinjiang Info-War

The screenshot above comes from the Anti-cnn.com website as it appeared on Saturday. The item is titled "Rebiya Fakes It! Using a fake photo to twist the truth in the Urumqi incident"

Click on the image to view an image of the full web page. I happen to have saved the page (a research habit I've developed) before Anti-CNN.com went completely offline, sometime on Sunday. For the time being at least there is a Google's cache of the front page from July 9.

Exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer mistakenly made prominent use in interviews of a photo that turned out to be from riots in Shishou, Hubei province, in late June. Al Jazeera has an account here.

Roland Soong at ESWN has a full account of how the photo came to be misconstrued and misused (scroll down to find the relavant material in his long compilation of news about the Xinjiang riots).

Apparently, the source of the error was Reuters, who had sourced the photo from Twitter and put it out on the wire before recalling it. Roland somehow got ahold of Reuters' recall notice (click to enlarge):

The Chinese media and netizens naturally went to town on the whole thing.

The unfortunate - but it appears genuinely honest - mistake by Rebiya Kadeer sparked a fury of comments on anti-cnn, many of which denounced the Western media for emphasizing Uighur casualties while making light of Han Chinese casualties. Some comments on that page and on other threads on the anti-cnn (which unfortunately I did not save) described the July 5th race riot as an act of terrorism, accused the Uighurs of being terrorists, and accused Western governments and the Western media of supporting anti-Chinese terrorism.

Such views were egged on by commentaries in the Chinese state-controlled media, some of which even appeared in English. One, which by Sunday had been removed (but which can still be found in the Google cache) began this way:

By whatever calculations, the blood-thirsty maiming and slaughtering of civilians, as young as six years old, in Urumqi, northwestern China's Xinjiang on July 5, is heinous homicide, barbarity against humanity, and terrorist act on China.

A look into the aftermath of the bloodbath found it bore the hallmark of secret and well choreography aiming at innocent human lives, identical to Al Qaeda's killing of thousands of office workers at the World Trade Center twin towers on September 11, 2001. The terrorists this time did not use flying petrol bombs to detonate tall buildings, they brandished steel rods and wielded knives to end lives.

It continues:

The barbarity has astonished China and the world. Thanks to the authorities' revised policy of free on-spot reportage, in sharp contrast to previous media controls, more people on the globe have got to know the senseless killing. Some said that even during New Stone ages, our ancestors, though barely dressed, did not do this to each other while chasing nuts and edibles in the woods.

..and so on.

This kind of language has raged all over the Chinese Internet between July 5 and Saturday or so.

With Xinjiang we've seen substantial evolution of the Chinese government's media strategy in times of unrest, aimed to make the best of a bad situation. The government has come to recognize that media blackouts don't work in the Internet age. Assuming your goal is to maintain the central government's power and the Communist Party's overall legitimacy (rather than total social control which they gave up on a long time ago) when localized unrest flares up it is more effective a multi-pronged strategy, as follows:

1. Cut off the Internet and mobile messaging in the immediate area where the violence took place.
2. Censor blogs, chatrooms, search engines and social networking sites heavily to prevent people from spreading unofficial information or using social networks to organize. Increase blocks on overseas sites. Shut some domestic ones down if needed.
3. Get Xinhua, the People's Daily, CCTV and other officially sanctioned news outlets on the scene as soon as possible. Fill the airwaves, news pages, and domestic websites with the government-approved version of what happened. (This new approach first emerged as a riot-information-management strategy with last year's Weng'an riots.)
4. Grant access to foreign media - the lesson of last year's Tibet unrest is that if you keep them out they're not going to believe a thing you say. This time, foreign reporters have directly reported about Han victims of Uighur violence as well as Uighur victims of Han violence. Which is probably one reason why the foreign media has not directly challenged the government's official death toll reflecting many more Han dead than Uighur dead, though they've quoted the Uighur exile groups who say the Uighur toll is actually much higher. Coverage instead emphasizes how hard it is to figure out what's going on, which is a much better storyline for the Chinese government than "they won't let us in, what are they hiding?"
5. Be helpful: facilitate the foreign media coverage with press conferences, a dedicated news center, and a discounted hotel in the area you want them to stay in. Allow the police to kick them out of places you'd rather they didn't go to, act coy when reporters complain.
6. Wait for the inevitable mistakes to be made in the Western media - mis-captioned photo here, mistakenly used video there, a grossly oversimplified turn of phrase comparing a race riot to the 1989 democracy movement, plus some downright factual errors here and there. Let the nationalistic blogosphere and Chinese media outlets like Global Times rip into these things as proof of the West's anti-China bias and deliberate obfuscation of the truth.
7. Take advantage of the failure by Western commentators, exiled activists, and human rights groups to consider how their statements and actions may sound and look to ordinary Chinese people, even those who are open to critiques of their government. Last year we saw a pro-Tibet protestor accosting a wheelchair-bound Chinese athlete. In the Xinjiang case, many Western commentators and human rights groups have condemned methods used in the crackdown, expressed legitimate concerns about an impending witchunt against Uighurs, and rightly critiqued the Chinese government's bad policies that led to the ethnic tensions, but then in many cases failed to deplore the killing of innocent Han. This has given many Chinese the impression that the West condones Uighur violence as excusable because they're an oppressed minority. For example, this statement by Human Rights Watch is unlikely to play well with Chinese audiences because it expresses no concern for the loss of innocent Han lives and stops short of condemning all killers regardless of ethnic background. The Chinese government can afford to dismiss it without domestic political cost.

The result is that while they've got much unpleasantness to deal with, their legitimacy in the minds of the majority of Chinese is sufficiently maintained. While many people may have a lot of serious issues with their government, enough people end up concluding that the foreigners and the exiles may not have the Chinese peoples' interests at heart either - so might as well stick with the current crop of bums and work things out with them gradually.

This weekend, however, the censors seem to have decided that the patriotism may have gone too far. Hence the deletion of certain articles, the shutting down of Xinjiang-related discussions in nationalist-leaning fora like the Global Times, and the outage of anti-cnn.com.

One reason for dialing things back may be the reactions coming from the Islamic world. Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has condemned China's crackdown in Xinjiang as genocide. Global Voices' Iran editor dug up this Persian-language blog comparing the Chinese in Xinjiang to the Israelis in Palestine. I get the impression that there is a lot more of that kind of sentiment out there. China has spent the last few decades cultivating strong relationships with the Islamic world, including Iran. China badly needs their oil, among other things. Chinese companies, engineering crews, and construction workers are all over the Middle East and Africa. Suppress the Tibetans however you like and your external economic relationships won't suffer that much. Treat China's restive Muslim minority in an insensitive, ham-fisted manner, and there could be all kinds of hell to pay. Time to start figuring out how to govern a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural country in a sustainable, enlightened way.

What's also interesting, I find, is that this year in the wake of the Xinjiang riots I've been seeing a lot of discussion and critique on Chinese-language websites about the Chinese government's ethnic policies. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong but there seems to be a more detailed and nuanced policy discussion going on this year than in the wake of last year's Tibet unrest. A number of postings by Han Chinese people who've lived in Xinjiang, and who think that the government's minority policies have been a failure, have been translated by China Digital Times, Global Voices, Fools Mountain, and ESWN among others. I've come across several Chinese blog posts and articles analyzing the policies on ethnicity and race practiced in Europe and North America. There seems to be a pretty strong consensus among nationalists as well as liberals that - whatever the solution may be - the status quo policies are not working. Combine this with pressure from the Islamic world to do a better job, will things change?

The problem, however, is this: does the Chinese government have the ability to conduct credible policy reform? If good policy happened to be formulated, does the center have enough control over the localities to actually implement it effectively?

If the answer to those two questions continues to be "no," the Chinese government's new and improved information management strategies may help them keep the country together in the short and maybe even medium term, but in the long run even the cleverest and most thorough strategy of censorship and information management will be hard pressed to prop up failed policy and bad governance.

[UPDATED] Green Dam reincarnated in QQ? - initial comments received cast doubt..

UPDATE (Monday 10am London time): Comments received to this post so far indicate that the Boxun.com upon which this post is based may have significantly exaggerated the situation. I am be investigating further and will report back. Clearly I posted prematurely and for that I apologize.

----

Pseudonymous blogger dafengqixi, writing on a Hong Kong-based blogging platform, has linked to this very interesting post published Saturday on the overseas Chinese news platform, Boxun.com (blocked in mainland China).

It reports that QQ, China's largest instant-messaging and micro-blogging service (with over 570 million registered users of its IM service, see Wikipedia entry about it here), is now requiring users of the QQ IM client to install a censorware upgrade - possibly also containing spyware - before they can continue using the client.

It features this screenshot:

Upon opening his (or her - the author is not named) QQ client, the reporter was greeted with the above pop-up window. It says:

QQ Online Upgrade

Your QQ must install the upgrade below before you can continue to use it:

Upgrade content:

Security, Important Patch Upgrade

Detailed information:

Improves the user's login performance

The Boxun article reports that due to recent unrest in Xinjiang and related concerns about security and social stability, the government has required QQ to implement a mandatory software upgrade which would block and track the use of sensitive keywords, enabling authorities to follow conversation trends of users, track and monitor them, etc. The model, according to the reporter, is Green Dam.

The QQ client only works on Microsoft Windows computers. As a Mac user I am unable to download and duplicate the reporter's experience. I would like to hear from others confirming whether they get the same popup requiring the mandatory download. I also hope people will test the upgraded client with some of the Xinjiang-related keywords found in a recent government order to filter search engine results, and some of the political keywords recently unearthed from the Green Dam software.

For readers unfamiliar with QQ, here is how Scott Harley at the Internet and Democracy Blog recently described QQ's importance Chinese Internet users:

Another emerging form of domestic communication is Tencent’s Instant Messaging (IM) on QQ.com. No site in China enables greater horizontal web communication than QQ.com, now the 9th largest web property in the world. Founded by Pony Ma in 1998, Tencent –a Chinese-listed company earning $1.2 billion annually in revenue, 88 percent via the sale of “virtual goods” rather than online advertising– has over 570 million registered users of its IM service. In January Tencent launched an English version of the IM platform at IMQQ.com, and a 3G version that offers QQ chat, real-time news, and search engine accessible over mobile phone.

Many users in Western China, and across rural China, do not have email accounts. And many rural Chinese view and understand the Internet as Tencent, the platform on which they’ve grown up. In fact, as of March 2009 China had as many active Tencent QQ users as it officially had people online. Despite focus on access to Google and Twitter –observations of Tweet trends, and Google search engine query data patterns– undoubtedly most relevant in China is continued access to those domestic services of communication most widely used by Chinese citizens.

Some more Green Dam documents...

This photo, posted last week on Twitpic by a pseudonymous blogger claiming to be based in Hangzhou, shows a document included in the box of a new Sony Vaio computer. (Click to enlarge.)

It is titled: "Sony Disclaimer Notice Concerning the Green Dam - Youth Escort" Software." The document makes the following points (my summary, not verbatim translation):

• Green Dam doesn't support a 64-bit operating system, so PC's with the 64-bit OS don't include this software.
• The software is provided to users in accordance with government requirements.
• Sony cannot guarrantee the authenticity, legality, or compatibility of the software's content, function, service or any other feature.
• Sony assumes no responsibility whatsoever for any kinds of loss or harm incurred by the user as a result of use of Green Dam. Sole responsibility lies with the software's maker.
• The locations on the PC's hard drive of the program and user manual are then listed.

So it appears that Sony has gone ahead with distribution of Green Dam on at least some of its computers sold in China, providing the program on the hard disk for the user to install if they want, with major disclaimers.

Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal reports that a broad coalition of international business associations, including most of the world's major technology companies have issued an appeal directly to Premier Wen Jiabao:

The letter, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal, says the plan "raises serious concerns for us and seems to run counter to China's important goal of becoming a vibrant and dynamic information-based society."

It urges the government to "reconsider implementing the Green Dam requirements," and proposes an open dialogue on parental controls over content for children. "The Green Dam mandate raises significant questions of security, privacy, system reliability, the free flow of information and user choice," it says.

An executive from the Taiwanese computer company Acer is quoted saying they're going ahead with compliance, having "no choice."

I have also received two documents from an anonymous source. Both were issued by the Ministry of Information Industry in 2006. They're in Chinese, and quite long. I have not had a chance to go over them in detail. I am sharing them both in full. Hopefully somebody with more time and stronger technical translation skills than I have will help the community by doing a partial or full translation.
In sending me these documents my source points out: "Note the Jinhui and others were drafters of this standard. The 国家计算机网络应急技术处理中心 is a national cyber security related organization... Note that it also refers to possible mobile phone standards of similar nature. Also language in there about having a remote access capability."

The first is titled "Technical Requirements of Internet Parental Control Software Based on PC"
Green Dam Technical Requirements - Official Doc (Chinese)

The second document is titled "Test Methods of Internet Parental Control Software Based on PC"Green Dam Test Methods Official Document

China's censorship blowback

I'm not sure what the Chinese government is thinking, or whether certain parts of certain ministries and party apparatus have gotten completely out of control.  

Until recently, it had seemed to me that the Chinese government was managing its censorship system with surprising success: censoring enough (combined with strategic arrests) to keep people from using the Internet to organize a successful nation-wide political opposition movement; but at the same time allowing enough space for online discourse and citizen-muckraking that people have felt freer and more empowered than ever before, which actually seemed to work in favor of the central government's legitimacy - despite being very bad news for corrupt local officials. But this month, something shifted. It's unclear whether the shift is long-lasting or just temporary madness until the PRC's 60th anniversary on October 1st.

Most of China's educated, largely apolitical, internet-connected urbanites have until now been generally willing to accept the political status quo - and with it a certain amount of censorship, thuggishness and injustice, political paranoia and occasional bizarreness - in exchange for overall social stability (compared to any other time in living Chinese memory), economic growth, plus an impressive increase in China's global power and status. But whoever is driving the latest Internet crackdown and the accompanying moralistic propaganda drive may have done substantial damage to the government's credibility.

June began with the expected tightening of Internet censorship around the 20th anniversary of the June 4th crackdown, including the temporary blocking of Twitter and various other websites. That in itself was not a huge surprise. It followed the usual logic of Chinese Internet censorship: tighten up the bottleneck between the Chinese Internet and the outside Internet during politically sensitive periods. Chinese Internet users who tend to be concerned with politics know to expect this kind of thing. However a simultaneous suspension in service for "technical maintenance" on many domestic websites impacted a much larger number of Chinese Internet users who don't visit overseas-hosted news or social networking sites very much. It would likely not have occurred to many million Internet users that June 4th was a politically sensitive date if China's "net nanny" hadn't made it so blatantly obvious, prompting many teenagers who weren't even born in 1989 to ask each other and their parents what happened on June 4th. But that was June 4th. People expect a certain amount of government paranoia around that time.

Little did we know, that was just the beginning of The Month The Censors Stopped Taking Their Medication.

The next week the government's Green Dam censorware mandate became publicly known. Authorities insist on implementing the mandate despite the fact that it doesn't work as intended or advertised, is a security risk and has been subject to widespread domestic criticism (by bloggers as well as state-controlled media and respected public figures like Caijing editor Hu Shuli). Now the U.S. government warns it could be a violation of the WTO. It seems the government is having trouble finding a face-saving way to climb down. Rather than admit they made a mistake and work out a sensible solution with domestic and foreign industry, they have chosen instead to escalate in an increasingly irrational manner that serves only to increase Chinese Internet users' scorn and irritation.

Last week the propaganda department turned it sights on Google China, and continues to blame Google for smut on the Internet. Horror of horrors, when you type smutty words and phrases into the Google search box, you get smutty content coming back in your search results! Many people including this blogger (via Roland Soong) and this blogger have pointed out that plenty of smut remains available via Google's Chinese competitor Baidu. How commercially convenient for Baidu... though some bloggers point out that the whole fracas - aided by outrage and ridicule over a staged anti-Google interview on CCTV - is actually making Google more popular among netizens, who were already annoyed with the government for dispensing commercial favoritism on the makers of Green Dam.

So far this week we've seen the temporary blocking of Google.com and related services hosted outside of China including GMail. As if that wasn't bad enough for one week, we're now told that sexual health websites are a no-go for ordinary Internet users.

Meanwhile, the increased discussion of censorship all over the Chinese Internet is prompting China's netizens to educate themselves about the various technical methods to "jump over" the "great firewall." There are no hard and fast statistics on how many people in China are now using proxy servers, Tor, Psiphon, Freegate/Dynaweb, or OpenDNS as compared to a month ago. But based on the frequent mentions of these tools I've been seeing every day on blogs, in Twitter, and on other social networking sites, it seems that the latest Net Nanny follies have helped raise awareness of circumvention tools to a whole new level. If you plug the term 翻墙 (which means "scale the wall" - the most common Chinese euphemism for censorship circumvention) into Google's search insights and restrict it to searches coming from China, you see a big spike in early June and a bigger spkie in the past few days (click to enlarge):

Searches for Tor (a nonprofit tool for anonymizing and circumvention) are also substantially up this month, and Chinese-language searches originating in China for Freegate (a tool developed and operated by a FLG-affiliated organization) spiked dramatically over the weekend.

Aggravation is certainly mounting. After finding Google.com and GMail blocked on Wednesday night Beijing time, Jeremy Goldkorn, who runs Danwei.org wrote a letter to China's "net nanny," in which he pointed out: "You are making Chinese people look like children on the world stage. You are bringing shame to the People's Republic of China, and the Chinese Communist Party."

To protest the mounting ridiculousness, Ai Weiwei is calling for an Internet boycott on July 1st. Others like lawyer-blogger Liu Xiaoyuan believe a boycott is not the best way to protest Internet restrictions. He writes (translated by Roland): "We have nothing against the Internet. We should not boycott the Internet. We should be using the Internet to promote democracy, rule of law, people's livelihood and progressiveness." Roland suggests some other kind of protest that is more measurable, as the success or failure of an Internet boycott is very hard to measure. Meanwhile a group of anonymous Chinese Netizens have issued an open letter, vowing to take collective action on July 1st. It's not clear exactly what they will do, other than to say: "we are going to acquaint your censorship machine with systematic sabotage and show you just how weak the claws of your censorship really are. We are going to mark you as the First Enemy of the Internet."

The following paragraph is particularly interesting. They claim they're not interested in overthrowing the government; but the government is bringing on its own punishment for behaving in such a stupid manner:

NOBODY wants to topple your regime. We take no interest whatsoever in your archaic view of state power and your stale ideological teachings. You do not understand how your grand narrative dissipated in the face of Internetization. You do not understand why appealing to statism and nationalism no longer works. You cannot break free from your own ignorance of the Internet. Your regime is not our enemy. We are not affiliated in any way with any country or organization, and we are not waging this war on any country or organization, not even on you. YOU are waging this war on yourself. YOU are digging your own grave through corruption and antagonization. We are not interested in you, destined for the sewage of history. You cannot stop the Internetization of the human race. In fact, we won't bat an eyelid even if you decide to sever the transpacific information cables in order to obtain the total control you wanted. The harder you try to roll back history, the more you strain the already taut strings, and the more destructive their final release. You are accelerating your own fall. The sun of tomorrow does not shine on those who are fearing tomorrow itself.

June has been pretty wild. I wonder what July has in store...

Green Dam's makers fail to fix problems

Last week, computer scientists at the University of Michigan, The Open Net Initiative, and an independent group of Chinese programmers all found serious security flaws in the government-mandated Green Dam-Youth Escort software.

Earlier this week a Chinese official told the China Daily "that all security problems reported by the professors from University of Michigan had been fixed."

Well, not really. The Michigan team has found that while some problems are fixed, more serious security problems remain. Here is the summary of their latest update:

Following our initial analysis, the makers of Green Dam have released at least one security update and two filter updates. These updates address the original web filtering security vulnerability we described above, disable certain blacklists that were copied from the CyberSitter program, and bring the software into compliance with the OpenCV license.

Unfortunately, we have discovered an additional remotely-exploitable security vulnerability in the patched version. Even with the updated version installed, any web site a user visits can exploit this problem to take control of the computer. We continue to recommend that users protect themselves by uninstalling Green Dam immediately.

While Green Dam's developers have patched the software quickly, the program's continuing vulnerability suggests that its security problems run deep. We fear that the deeper problems cannot be resolved in time for the July 1 deadline for PC makers to distribute Green Dam on all new PCs sold in China.

Read the details here.

Also of possible interest is my Op-Ed in yesterday's Asian Wall Street Journal, The Green Dam Phenomenon: Governments everywhere are treading on Web freedoms.

Whether or not Green Dam ends up being mandated, this is not the end - not for China nor for the rest of the world. It's just the beginning. Get ready. I conclude:

It is very encouraging that a coalition of industry groups has pushed back publicly against the Green Dam mandate, calling on the Chinese government to reconsider. But the Green Dam incident is yet another example of why it behooves companies to think ahead about how they are going to uphold their larger responsibility to society. Industry has a choice: be reactive -- and be forced into growing complicity with government censorship and surveillance around the globe. Or be pro-active, develop robust human-rights policies, and consider how to responsibly handle the inevitable pressures by all kinds of governments to serve as national auto-parent, if not auto-cop.

Green Damned

Chinese netizens are certainly having fun mocking the government's mandate for PC manufacurers to install the Green Dam-Youth Escort software. Danwei posted some great pictures of cartoon "green dam girls," greated in the style of Japanese porno manga. This one on the left (click to enlarge) is removing the underwear of "Windows XP Girl". Hecaitou has a lot more.

The Guardian, Associated Press, and even the China Daily are now quoting an unnamed Chinese official at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology who says that the installation of Green Dam-Youth Escort is "not compulsory." The China Daily reports:

"The PC makers only need to save the setup files of the program on the hard drives of the computers, or provide CD-ROMs containing the program with their PC packages," said an official of the department of software service under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, who did not want to be named.

PC users have the "final say" over installing the filter and recent reports of the government compelling them to use the software was "a misunderstanding", the official said.

"The government only provides the Green Dam-Youth Escort software for free."

It seems like there must have been some kind of policy tug-of-war going on these past few days. Late last week the Communist Party's Propaganda Department sent round an edict to the media instructing them to say nice things about Green Dam and stop being so critical. But Caijing and other media continued running critical articles, and then the People's daily website, Renminwang, launched a whole feature section on Saturday with full coverage of the Green Dam story - pro and con. Plus a reader opinion poll. Here's the screenshot I took Monday morning of the results, soon before the whole thing got taken down (click to enlarge):

At the time the screenshot was taken, more than 5 million readers had voted. 16 percent (nearly 880 thousand) supported Green Dam, while 74 percent (more than 4 million) voted against it.

On the left is a screenshot of the front page of the feature section, provocatively titled: "Have you been 'Green Dam-Youth Escort-ed' today?" (Click to enlarge.) Interestingly, the accompanying discussion forum has not been deleted - and it's full of comments criticizing or mocking Green Dam. Even though the main section has been taken offline, Chinese media insiders say the fact that the critical analysis and online poll managed to appear at all on the People’s Daily website is proof of strong internal government disagreement over how to respond to this public relations fiasco.

Despite today's reports about an apparent climbdown, however, I got an email from one person in the industry who said his company has yet to hear anything different from the original directive in his company's discussions with the government. So the game may not be completely over, and some in the industry are concerned about the implications of even providing an accompanying disc, knowing the security and IP issues in addition to the free speech implications.

Meanwhile the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has ordered Green Dam's maker, Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co. to urgently patch their now well-documented security flaws. That could take a while if it’s to be done right: the University of Michigan computer scientists who analyzed Green Dam last week warned that the problems are so serious that they can only be resolved with “extensive changes to the software and careful retesting.” Whether the government requires installation or just an accompanying disc, it’s unclear whether it will still hold PC makers and importers to the original July 1^st implementation deadline. It also remains unclear whether the mandate will ultimately end up being enforced. If Jinhui fails to patch Green Dam’s leaks to government satisfaction in a timely manner, that could give the authorities solid reason to scrap the plan. Meanwhile, never a dull moment on the Chinese Internet. I look forward to the continued Chinese online humor... including this doozy that some reader managed to post for a short period of time also on the People's Daily site:

Open Net Initiative report on Green Dam

The Open Net Initiative has released a detailed analysis of Green Dam. Executive summary (emphasis added):

A recent directive by the Chinese government requires the installation of a specific filtering software product, Green Dam, with the publicly stated intent of protecting children from harmful Internet content. The proposed implementation of software as reviewed in this report would in fact have an influence that extends beyond helping parents protect their children from age inappropriate material; the filtering options include blocking of political and religious content normally associated with the Great Firewall of China, China’s sophisticated national-level filtering system. If implemented as proposed, the effect would be to increase the reach of Internet censorship to the edges of the network, adding a new and powerful control mechanism to the existing filtering system.

As a policy decision, mandating the installation of a specific software product is both unprecedented and poorly conceived. In this specific instance, the mistake is compounded by requiring the use of a substandard software product that interferes with the performance of personal computers in an unpredictable way, killing browsers and applications without warning while opening up users to numerous serious security vulnerabilities. The level of parental control over the software is poor such that this software does not well serve parents that wish to the limit exposure of their children to Internet content.

The mandate requiring the installation of a specific product serves no useful purpose apart from extending the reach of government authorities. Given the resulting poor quality of the product, the large negative security and stability effects on the Chinese computing infrastructure and the intense backlash against the product mandate, the mandate may result in less government control.

Read the whole thing online here or download the PDF here.

University of Michigan: Analysis of the Green Dam Censorware System

A team of computer scientists at the University of Michigan have released this report about the Chinese government-mandated censorware, Green Dam. Here is the summary:

We have discovered remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities in Green Dam, the censorship software reportedly mandated by the Chinese government. Any web site a Green Dam user visits can take control of the PC.

According to press reports, China will soon require all PCs sold in the country to include Green Dam. This software monitors web sites visited and other activity on the computer and blocks adult content as well as politically sensitive material.

We examined the Green Dam software and found that it contains serious security vulnerabilities due to programming errors. Once Green Dam is installed, any web site the user visits can exploit these problems to take control of the computer. This could allow malicious sites to steal private data, send spam, or enlist the computer in a botnet. In addition, we found vulnerabilities in the way Green Dam processes blacklist updates that could allow the software makers or others to install malicious code during the update process.

We found these problems with less than 12 hours of testing, and we believe they may be only the tip of the iceberg. Green Dam makes frequent use of unsafe and outdated programming practices that likely introduce numerous other vulnerabilities. Correcting these problems will require extensive changes to the software and careful retesting. In the meantime, we recommend that users protect themselves by uninstalling Green Dam immediately.

Read the rest of it here.

"All new computers are required to wear condoms...."

...so reads one of the many sarcastic netizen comments translated by ChinaSmack. It's like being mandated to use only one brand, made by one company, and word from people who've used them is that they're very low quality....

(Note that the official government edict mandating Green Dam, along with background information about the product, has now been translated in full by Human Rights in China.)

People aren't limiting their scorn for Green Dam to words alone. This is the opening menu for "Green Dam - Youth Escort":

Here is a spoof uploaded by somebody to a forum on Mop.com, also courtesy of ChinaSmack:

Domestic Chinese critiques abound in the domestic media as well on the blogs, chatrooms, and Twitter networks. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and BBC have some good roundups of what the Chinese editorials, blog posts, and chatroom postings have to say about Green Dam. Even the state-run Xinhua news agency covered a range of critiques. A group of Chinese techies have been testing the software and are posting their findings (with translation) here. The Open Net Initiative is also conducting tests and will release a report at some point in the coming days. Critiques of Green Dam cover several categories of issues:

Free speech issues: Many people are arguing that the government has no right to act as "The Big Parent" to all Chinese - and that it should be left to the individual user to decide what software comes with his or her computer, and left to individual families, schools and teachers to decide how best to protect and safely educate their children. This argument is made forcefully by Yang Hengjun, Isaac Mao, and Qin Xudong in Caijing, among others.

Testers report that some programs will shut down when the word "Falun Gong" is typed, and that the circumvention tool Freegate is blocked. This flies in the face of claims by government officials and by Jinhui that it is anti-porn only. Also we know that the blacklist of blocked URL's and terms can be updated by Jinhui remotely at any time, and that there is no transparency to the process. Given that all other levels of filtering in China include political terms, nobody believes that Green Dam will deviate from the norm and be apolitical.

Ham-fistedness: As user feedback shows, the software itself isn't even very good at accomplishing it's goal. It censors things that aren't obscene (like pictures of pigs) and fails to censor porn involving black-skinned people. Plus it is reported not to work with Firefox, at least with some settings some of the time.

Intellectual property issues: A U.S. software developer who has examined Green Dam in detail, but who asked not to be quoted by name because he isn't authorized by his employer to talk to the media, writes:

From what I have seen, the product is a bit of frankenware, that is bits and pieces from different projects out there. I would guess that many of the ‘contributors’ to this project have not been asked. So that there are numerous licensing violations in the product. If I were Dell or another PC manufacture, I would stay the hell away from associating my name with this software. They would be opening themselves up to a lawsuit. Some notable references I found: PrettyWall – GUI Skinning software; OpenCV – Neural network software (BSD license) not having the source code or an acknowledgement is a violation.

Security issues: As discussed in this BBC report and in other posts by Chinese testers, the software has serious security issues and makes computers in China even more vulnerable to hackers than they already are. By making this product available to users even in an accompanying disk, PC makers could knowingly be putting their customers in harm's way.

Privacy issues: Data about the user's activities are sent back to Jinhui. It is not clear what Jinhui will do with this data and what right they have to it. Plus testers say it is transmitted in an insecure manner making the user vulnerable to criminals as well as to the police.

Public expenditure issues: The government paid 40 million RMB for the rights to this software for a year. Many believe their tax money would have been better spent in any number of other ways - like helping China's poor, or fixing the medical system.

Anti-monopoly and fair competition issues: Netizens have raised two possible laws that may have been broken by the government's Green Dam edict: the anti-monopoly law and the law against unfair competition.

Some people are so incensed they're calling for a boycott of computer makers and shops that actually comply with the order to pre-install the software. It would certainly seem that there will be a lot of consumer love for any companies that push back against the edict, stall on implementation, and - if really left with no choice - implement it to the minimum extent possible with maximum support and information for users about how to uninstall the software, what its known flaws and problems are, what it does and doesn't do, what ways it might make them vulnerable and how to protect against those vulnerabilities, etc.

Green Dam filtering software scorned by many Chinese

   

Some Chinese geeks have been playing with the new government-mandated Green Dam censorship software over the past couple days. People are reporting their findings on Twitter and on blogs. Eisen blog posted the screenshot above, taken after the software blocked his efforts to visit a porn site on Internet Explorer. He points out, however, that he had no problem accessing the site when using Firefox, concluding that the tool might prevent the average kid from accessing porn but not the determined tech-savvy kid. Interestingly, @shizhao reported that the software transmits reports to Jinhui Corp. when the user tries to access dodgy websites. Not clear if that only applies when IE is used, as with the filtering.

Roland Soong of EastSouthWestNorth has translated feedback posted on the software manufacturer's user forum (since closed) by teachers and parents who've been using Green Dam. Here are three of the many comments:

Let me say something here. We were forced to install the software. So I have to come to this website and curse. After we installed the software, many normal websites are banned. For example, it is normal for students to like games like 4399, but no more ... many news reports have certain normal words but they are banned ... for example, when <Network News> reports that there is a campaign against pornographic websites, the software bans the story because of the term "pornographic websites." Don't tell me how great the software technology is, because this is a piece of junk. When we need to look up some course-related material, there is always some provocative advertisements so we can't access them anymore. Why doesn't the state just ban those advertisements directly? I want to curse someone out ...

And another:

Can I determine the content of the text filtering? Today, a teacher posted an exam question which talks about "students playing touch-ball game." The Word document was shut down. I spend a long time trying to determine the cause. This was really depressing. It will be a lot of work dealing these kinds of things in the future.

And another:

After testing, I found out that the software can record Internet usage data as well as being spyware with the ability to obtain periodic screen captures. When schools are compelled to install this software, there is the serious worry of computer security about the private information of teachers and students. There is no guarantee that personal information is not being secretly collected. It is a huge problem when teachers feel unsafe when they use the computers.

The Foreign Ministry spokesman may have defended Green Dam, but it's his job to defend everything any part of the Chinese government does unconditionally. Many others in China clearly don't agree with him and are publicly saying so. Even the state-approved Caijing magazine has a long critique of the government's Green Dam mandate, arguing that decisions and control over censorship to protect children should be left in the hands of parents and teachers - that centralized censorship even when well-intentioned "throws the baby out with the bathwater." I hope somebody translates the whole thing. It concludes: "The government can use all kinds of mechanisms to guide and urge parents to take responsibility [for their children], but it not become the omnipotent "great parent.""

As the week progresses I'm putting more of my money on the likelihood that the Green Dam filtering software edict will not get implemented, or efforts at enforcement will fade quickly. One thing Western observers need to remember is that China has a long history of edicts targeted at the tech, telecoms, and media sectors going un-enforced, quietly retracted, or morphed in practice into something very different. There was the failed attempt to ban encryption software back in 2000. There were multiple failed attempts to force Reuters, Bloomberg, Dow Jones, etc. to sell all their news exclusively through Xinhua. Both were defeated by strong lobbying by international industry groups. The effort to impose a real-name registration requirement on Chinese Internet companies died after fierce opposition from Chinese industry. And last year's new requirement that online video websites in China must have majority state ownership appears to have gone ignored. Etc.