RConversation

The University Channel

My former CNN colleague Donna Liu has been working hard over the past year to create the University Channel, a service which makes videos of academic lectures and conferences from all over the world available online and via cable TV. Check it out.  You can watch the streaming video or listen to audio of  this recent panel discussion on religion and politics at Harvard, or this lecture titled Confessions of a Muslim Dissident by Irshad Manji, controversial author of The Trouble With Islam.

You can even subscribe to a podcast feed of the site's audio content.

Read this article about the UC in today's Chronicle of Higher Education.

Here is how the UC's website describes its mission:

The University Channel makes videos of academic lectures and events from all over the world available to the public. It is a place where academics can air their ideas and present research in a full-length, uncut format.  Contributors with greater video production capabilities can submit original productions.

The University Channel presents ideas in a way commercial news or public affairs programming cannot. Because it is neither constrained by time nor dependent upon commercial feedback, the University Channel's video content can be broad and flexible enough to cover the full gamut of academic investigation.

All the stuff that never makes it on CNN... or even CSPAN!!

If you're affiliated with an academic institution and know that many conferences and lectures are videotaped, help share your wisdom with the world by sharing the video with the University Channel. They're taking content from anywhere in the world!

Trying the new OPML tool

So I'm playing with Dave Winer's new OPML tool... and bumping into lots of things that bewilder me... then delight me once I figure them out.

I am what programmers and software creators would politely call an "aggressive but not very techical and extremely impatient user." To help them understand how people like me think, I'm documenting everything that happens - as it happens - as I explore OPML thrash about on my test blog. 

Corporate behavior in China: where does the buck stop?

Veteran Chinese human rights activist Harry Wu, founder of the Laogai Research Foundation, has emailed me his response to my recent conversation with Cisco's representative. Wu's concluding paragraph:

We should now ask Cisco to make public the information about exactly how much business it has done with the PSB. Every Cisco shareholder has a right to know about this information. They should publicize their profits, the quantity and date of sales and business dealings, and contacts in China, as well as the specific types of software and technology that has been sold. After Cisco has truthfully revealed this information, Congress and the American people can decide whether or not Cisco has committed a violation of the law.

The full text of his letter can be read by clicking on the continuation link at the bottom of this post if you're reading this from the blog's main page. If you're coming directly to this post's permalink, then you can just scroll down and find the letter at the bottom of this post.

A number of people think Cisco is being singled out unfairly. As somebody named Travis wrote in my comments section: 

To single out Cisco is, with respect, rather shallow and shortsighted. The real criticism and pressure should be levied at G7 governments that go about beating their breasts and trumpeting the cause of human rights but quickly change the subject when it comes to one fifth of humanity. Cisco's products are barely even a detail in that context and, if serious about promoting Human Rights in China, we need to realize them as one of many remora fish picking up a few scraps left from odious foreign policy, not as an organization with any real power.

In a blog post titled Cheap Shot in a Good Cause, Dana Blankenhorn of Moore's Lore writes:

McKimmon's point now is that China Cisco is cooperating with the worst excesses of the China government, which is seeking to have both the world's best Internet technology and full control over what people do with it.

That is a good point, but I don't think you don't go after Cisco to make it.

You ask the U.S. government, is your policy to enable full cooperation with the Chinese tyranny? And if you don't like the answer you work to change it.

Public companies should not be expected to make or enforce American foreign policy, or trade policy. The buck stops with the government, and in a democracy it stops with us.

There is precedent for all this. IBM cooperated with Hitler, selling the punch card equipment that enabled the Holocaust. At some point it was up to the U.S. government to halt that cooperation, but the government never did. Is this IBM's fault entirely? No, I'm afraid it's not.

There's more on his blog, and please check it out... but please do not perpetuate his gross misspelling of my last name!

Blanketom (or however you spell it- I can't be bothered to check either) does make a good point despite his spelling problem. ;-) We as citizens need to set behavioral standards for the companies that trade in our name. Where should the line be drawn, if it can be drawn? I've heard some pretty strong arguments over the past few weeks that any attempts to draw such a line would do more harm than good. I still think we need a lot more public debate and scrutiny on this issue.  I'm not willing to just give up on it just because it's too difficult and can't be solved with quick and easy black-and-white solutions.

Some people still seem to be twisting my words and claiming I don't want to engage China economically. As I've said before, I have always believed strongly in economic engagement with China. But should we hold engagement to some basic and consistent ethical standards? I think we can and should.

Got some views? Don't be shy...

IT Industry, "Policenets" and "Warnets" Worldwide

My latest Cisco post has generated a lot of debate and a fair amount of criticism.

Several people have pointed out that the issue goes far beyond the question of how U.S. tech companies may be assisting Chinese police thuggery and state censorship. As many, including Dan Gillmor point out, there is a much bigger question about the relationship between the tech industry and curtailment by governments of freedom of speech and human rights worldwide. Dan writes:

...Moreover, the issues get even more fuzzy when you consider our own government's race toward creating a surveillance state, or worse. As Congress moves to reauthorize the grotesquely named "Patriot Act," who are we to blame domestic companies for cooperating with repression overseas when we're creating our own version at home?
...

On a discussion list, Sasha Costanza-Chock writes of the need for more "ICT for Development" to balance out the extensive resources put by governments into "ICT for War" :

...Now, my point is not to argue about the equivalence or relative levels of state repression of internal dissent in China vs. the USA. And if it comes to that, then we could just shift the conversation to Cisco's role in the US' current multiple wars of aggression and occupation.

But the point is really not about relative levels of state violence, it's about the need to recognize the deep structural links between, not just Cisco, but the IT industry in general and the military-police apparatus everywhere. The IT industry can't be decoupled from state repression and violence by picking a few instances for delinking.

Yet Cisco-DOD contracts are of course funded by the public. So maybe the conversation and strategies are really about how to ensure that public money put into ICT isn't used to enhance state surveillance and violence but instead is used for 'development.' One (small) step for researchers is to be able to demonstrate the comparative spending levels for networked warfare vs. networked development. I'm shocked that, in all the WSIS process, I've barely heard mention of the military (though we did get a clause about information warfare into the CS Declaration at Geneva) and haven't seen 'civil society,' let alone government delegates, make frank comparisons of the budgets for ICT4War vs. ICT4Dev.
...

Food for thought.

Newsweek's chronic sloppiness

Last month I gave an interview to a Newsweek journalist, Traci Carpenter, about the complicity of U.S. technology companies in Chinese internet censorship. Today they finally posted it on their website.  Here's how the Q&A begins:

NEWSWEEK: What do you think American companies should do differently with respect to Internet censorship in China?
Rebecca MacKinnon: What I'm sort of calling for, and what people in the human rights community are saying, is not that the U.S. companies shouldn't sell technology to China. Everybody agrees that it's great China has an Internet, and it's great that Western technology is helping to build that, but we have no business assisting in censorship. It's completely contrary to our values. And when our president is telling the world that we believe in democracy and free speech, and our companies then go and deliberately go and do things that help to stifle that free speech, then it's not surprising that a lot of people on this planet think we're hypocrites.

Do you believe allowing U.S. technology to be used this way compromises American efforts to spread democracy?
I think it contributes to a general cynicism towards Americans around the world, and a general feeling that Americans talk a big game about democracy and human rights but really only uphold these ideas when it's expeditious and when it's profitable. And when it's unprofitable to uphold these ideas, they go out the window very quickly...

Click here to continue reading.

After Traci emailed me with the link yesterday I clicked over to see what they'd done. It was bizarre. The introductory paragraph setting up my interview described me as the co-founder of the Committee to Protect Bloggers.  I am on the CPB's advisory board (which means I respond to Curt Hopkins' emails requesting advice from time to time), but I have nothing to do with its day-to-day operations and am certainly not a co-founder. They also neglected to mention that I worked for CNN in China for nine years, which is the only reason why I have any credibility talking about Chinese censorship in the first place. So I asked them to correct the web-only report (which is easy to do) to accurately describe my background as a journalist who worked in China for 9 years and co-founder of Global Voices Online.  They did neither of these things. All they did was change "co-founder" to "advisory board member."  Lazy. But I know how it goes. I've been on the other side of the interviewee-mangling process.  Most of those editors don't really care.

Traci tells me that she gave her editor the accurate background information and that somehow it ended up all confused. Of course nobody bothered to check with me before they published the story.

Newseek's reputation for sloppiness is well deserved. Sure, my little experience may not have policy implications the way some of their other sloppy reporting recently has... but still. It's not nice. And it makes me a lot less inclined to trust Newsweek's reporting in general. Even if their reporters are hard-working, well-intentioned and trying their best, you can count on their editors to mangle the details and have no respect for interviewees - without whom they would have no stories.

Fortunately we're now living in the age of the blog so I don't have to be a silent victim.

UPDATE: I just got a call from Traci's editor, Susanna Schrobsdorff, who is responsible for the mistake. She apologized. Apparently the excuse is that they had listed too many affiliations for me, and had to cut it down, and so somehow the CPB thing, erroneously calling me co-founder, ended up on top. Still, they could have called and checked. But that doesn't seem to be their M.O. when they're on deadline. Susanna said she hoped this issue will not obscure the fact that they've done me a big favor by helping call attention to an issue I care about. Sure, I'm glad they did that, but it's not like I wasn't already getting quite a lot of attention on this issue.

Darn those ungrateful bloggers...

My conversation with Cisco

Yesterday I got a phone call from Terry Alberstein, Director of Corporate Affairs, Cisco Systems - Asia Pacific.  He wanted to clarify a number of things in response to my recent blog posts. We had a long conversation, some of which was "on background" - which means I agreed not to quote him directly, and some of which he agreed after the fact I could put "on the record."  By the end of our discussion, all of his personal perspectives stayed off the record (which are less relevant in the greater scheme of things anyway), while everything he told me about Cisco's policies and activities ended up on the record.   So here's what I learned:

• Alberstein confirmed the authenticity of the Cisco pamphlets promoting police surveillance equipment to the Chinese Public Security Bureau  acquired by businessman and author Ethan Gutmann from a Chinese trade show.
• Cisco confirms that it does indeed sell networking and telecommunications equipment directly to Public Security and other law enforcement offices all over China. 
• Alberstein said that Cisco sells to police around the world, and it's not illegal for Cisco to do business with the Chinese police, because the equipment sold is not actually prohibited under the Foreign Relations Authorization Act.   (Indeed, the Act only prohibits equipment like stun guns, handcuffs and helmets, saying nothing about high-tech communications or networking equipment.)
• He reiterated that Cisco is doing nothing against U.S. law. Nor does Cisco believe it's doing anything wrong. Quote: "It's not against the law to sell networking equipment to policing agencies in the PRC." [People's Republic of China]
• He emphasized that Cisco does not tailor routers for the Chinese market and does not customize them for purposes of political censorship. What the purchaser does with them is their business. Quote: "The products that Cisco sells in China are the same products we sell in the U.S.  We do not custom-tailor any product for any export market."
• ...but yes, they do provide service and training to their customers.

Following up on our conversation Alberstein emailed me a statement with further clarification of what he would like to have on the record. I've attached it to the end of this post. Let me know what you think.

What do I think?

1. The fact that Cisco clearly has no qualms about doing business with the Chinese Public Security Bureau is odious. We should change the law to make it illegal for companies like Cisco to sell networking and telecommunications equipment to police agencies in countries like China where the practice of law enforcement includes things like beating up little old ladies who demonstrate peacefully for their religious rights in Tiananmen Square, routine torture of people jailed without due process, and ongoing crackdowns against political dissent of all kinds. 
2. Cisco insists that it does not directly assist with censorship or suppression of free speech in any way. Its routers are global-standard, out-of-the-box, one-size-fits-all.  OK. But I remain skeptical that the service and training which they provide to their customers (including the Chinese Public Security Bureau and other law enforcement organs) has never involved assistance of clients with configurations and functions that would include political censorship or invasive surveillance.  I never got a definitive answer that cleared up my skepticism on this point. My skepticism runs especially deep given that Cisco has no qualms about doing business with Chinese law enforcement, and that CEO John Chambers says in public speeches that Cisco aims to become a "Chinese company."  I know for a fact that Chinese companies work closely with Chinese law enforcement on whatever Chinese law enforcement wants. So if you're trying to behave like a Chinese company that's naturally what you will do. 
3. Cisco argues that if they don't do this business, their competitors will. And that will be bad for U.S.  jobs.  Well, as I've said before, at the end of the day either we believe that the ideals of "freedom" and "democracy" mean something, and are worth sacrificing short-term profit so that more people around the world have a chance of benefiting from them, or we don't. Cisco clearly doesn't. This is an insult to the thousands of Americans - public servants, men and women in uniform, journalists and others - who risk their lives daily in far-flung corners of the globe for the sake of these ideals. Such business behavior cheapens and sullies these sacrifices, making Americans look like total hypocrites in the eyes of people around the world. They contribute to the reasons why, as a journalist covering protests from Beijing to Seoul to Peshawar, Pakistan, I had to pretend I was Swedish in order to avoid bodily harm.
   

China's new real-name registration requirement for instant messaging

Our new Global Voices China blogger, Frank Dai, reports that the popular instant messaging service, QQ, is trying to require users to register with their real names and ID card numbers. Chinese bloggers are questioning the legality of this.

Frank will be on the case with updates.

...that sincerest form of flattery

Anne Applebaum has an Op-ed today in the Washington post titled Let a Thousand Filters Bloom. Hmm... sounds a lot like the title of my recent article, China's Internet: Let a Thousand Filters Bloom, which I wrote last month for Yaleglobal Online, and which has since been reprinted in various versions in the International Herald Tribune, the South China Morning Post (pay-to-read, boo hiss), Asia-Pacific Media Network, and others.

I'm glad A.A. agrees so much with my argument that she makes a lot of the same points, drawing upon some of the same sources I cited in my article and a lot of information subsequently discussed on this blog and in several other recent news articles, then adding some new updated information to advance the story.

It's a forcefully written Op-ed. She points out that Microsoft, Cisco, Yahoo! and others insist they're doing nothing illegal while helping to build the censored Chinese cyberspace, and concludes:

If this isn't illegal, maybe it should be. After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the United States passed a law prohibiting U.S. firms from selling "crime control and detection" equipment to the Chinese. But in 1989, the definition of police equipment ran to truncheons, handcuffs and riot gear. Has it been updated? We may soon find out: A few days ago, Rep. Dan Burton of the House Foreign Relations Committee wrote a letter to the Commerce Department asking exactly that. In any case, it's time to have this debate again. There could be other solutions -- such as flooding the Chinese Internet with filter-breaking technology.

Beyond legality, of course, there's morality. And here the judgment of history will prove more important than whatever Congress does or does not do today. Sixty years after the end of World War II, IBM is still battling lawsuits from plaintiffs who accuse the company of providing the "enabling technologies" that facilitated the Holocaust. Sixty years from now, will Microsoft, Cisco and Yahoo be doing the same?

"Flooding the Chinese internet with filter-breaking technology" won't do much good, IMHO, if U.S. companies continue working as hard as they are now to sell filtering equipment and services to China.   

Live streaming video tonight: Dave Winer on OPML

Dave Winer will talk about his new OPML tool at tonight's Berkman Thursday blogger meeting. 7pm EDT. It's free and open to the public.

Steve Garfield will provide a live video feed. The archived video will be available later here.

Berkman Thursdays also has an audio feed and IRC channel. Check out the group's blog for more details.

A balkanized internet future?

Joi Ito has an important post on how the internet is in danger of becoming balkanized into separate "internets." Read the whole thing but here's an excerpt:

...there are people who don't like the policies of the Internet and either want to censor or otherwise manage differently THEIR internet. Others who don't like the way DNS works, have proposed alternative roots. This is possible and easy to do, but you end up with "the internets".

It is the fact that we have a single root and that we have global policies and protocols which allows the Internet to be a single network and allows anyone to reach anyone else in the world. Clearly, allowing anyone in the world to reach anyone else in the world with a single click introduces a variety of problems, but it creates a single global network which allows dialog and innovation to be shared worldwide without going through gateways or filters. This attribute of the Internet is a key to the future of a global democracy and I believe we need to fight to preserve this.

He's not the only person who's concerned. Greg Walton worries about Regime Change on the Internet.

My friend Tim Wu, a law professor specializing in international trade and intellectual property, has written an article for Slate: The Filtered Future: China's bid to divide the Internet.

He describes what he believes is a "larger assault on the identity of the Internet itself":

The Web was conceived as one global medium, by its nature open and free. But countries like China are pushing hard to divide that global network into a system of Balkanized national networks. Censorship of the sort Microsoft acceded to is grabbing headlines, but the more important restrictive measures are taking place quietly—and quietly succeeding.

He agrees with me that the NYT's Nick Kristof is naive in his claim that broadband will bring down the Chinese Communist Party. Then goes on to describe how China will shape it's own internet. I quote at length:

Another Chinese attempt at control involves the Internet's physical infrastructure. Within China, the Web looks more and more like a giant office network every day, centralized by design. Last month, China announced its latest build-out—the "Next Carrying Network," or CN2. This massive internal network will be fast, but it will also be built by a single, state-owned company and easy to filter at every step. Its addressing system (known as IPv6) is scarcely used in the United States and may make parts of the Chinese Internet and the rest of the world mutually unreachable. While such things are hard to measure, Internet maps suggest that, powered by projects like CN2, growth in China's domestic bandwidth is rapidly outpacing the speed of its international connections. Networkwise, China will soon be like a country with a great internal transport system but few roads leading in or out. The goal is an inward-looking network that is physically disconnected from the rest of the world.

China is also trying to influence Internet protocols. As anyone knows who has anonymously logged in to his or her neighbor's network, the American Wi-Fi standard creates access anarchy. Last year, citing national security concerns, China ordered all domestic and foreign electronics manufacturers to bundle Wi-Fi with a Chinese encryption standard called WAPI (the acronym stands for "Wireless Local Area Network Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure"). WAPI makes a wireless network closed rather than open by forcing every user of the network to register with a centralized authentication authority. Because it's under heavy pressure from the United States to lift trade restrictions, China has for the moment retreated from requiring all Wi-Fi units to be sold with WAPI. But the country is still pushing its own companies to use the standard and trying to get it adopted globally. What the WAPI campaign foretells are future battles between open American standards and closed Chinese versions.

Techno-optimists like Kristof nonetheless take it as an article of faith that all of China's controls are destined to fail. They echo the hacker's creed—if a system can be beaten it will, so control of information is impossible. They point out that when chat rooms are closely monitored, people start talking about "cabbages" when they mean "democracy." As one blogger wrote recently, "No democratic movement in the history of mankind has ever stalled just because the word 'democracy' could not be uttered." But these arguments ignore a fundamental principle in legal theory: A law does not need to be perfect to be effective. If you're talking about carrots and cabbages instead of multiparty elections, the Communist Party has already won. Ordinary Chinese won't have any idea of what you're talking about. Competing discussion threads that rant against the Japanese, on the other hand, will continue to enjoy mass appeal.

China's long-term vision is clear: an Internet that feels free and acts as an engine of economic progress yet in no way threatens the Communist Party's monopoly on power. With every passing day the Chinese Internet reflects that vision more closely. It portends a future for the Web that we're only beginning to understand—one in which powerful countries refashion the global network to suit themselves.