RConversation

Global Voices: an amazing IRC chat

Members of the Global Voices community met this morning on IRC chat to discuss the Reporters Without Borders Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-dissidents. It was an amazing group. Click here for the transcript.

We had a pretty strong argument about whether the use of "cyber-dissidents" is appropriate for the handbook, or whether the word "dissident" will frighten off a lot of people who would benefit tremendously from the guide. (I gave my own concerns about the issue in the review I wrote of the Handbook.) There was a wide range of rather strong views.

One possible solution suggested by Joi Ito was that the handbook could be re-mixed by people in various countries, with different culturally appropriate and non-scary titles and packaging, perhaps with relevant information tailored to specific blogging communities. There was tremendous enthusiasm for doing this, and discussion about how to proceed. Check out the transcript for more

There was also a fairly involved discussion of anonymity and credibility. And a question of the Handbook's goals: to facilitate blogging or to facilitate online free expression more generally?  Should people be pointed to options other than blogging when other options might be safer or more practical under specific local conditions?

We're hoping that the Global Voices community will start using the GV IRC channel at irc://irc.freenode.net/#globalvoices to continue talking about these issues, and to orchestrate projects of common concern.

China: Fear of Smartmobs

China's latest efforts to control online news are being sold to the Chinese public by the Chinese media as an effort to protect innocent citizens from swindlers, pornographers, and rumor-mongerers. But everybody in China I've been communicating with over the past 12 hours thinks the real reason has to do with fear of the kind of thing depicted in the picture on the above right: smartmobs. This picture was taken by a blogger during the anti-Japanese protests (which occasionally turned into riots) last spring. The protests sprang up in true smartmob-fashion, mobilized by people on internet bulletin boards, mobile phone text messaging (SMS) and e-mail.  (Thanks to Chris Myrick of Asiapundit for permission to use the picture.)

In case this interpretation is in any doubt, the expat blogger Danwei points out an interesting factoid:

"Today, The Beijing News dutifully reports on new regulations to control the internet, saying that the incitement of demonstrations on websites will now be banned. Juxtaposed with the story, however, is an admiring photograph depicting the thousands of anti-war protestors gathered in Washington on Sunday. We like to think that the irony was conscious."

Admiring? Or terrified? Clearly the authorities are connecting the need to prevent political protests and spontaneous activism with the need to tighten controls over online information.  The headline reads: "The Internet is forbidden from inciting illegal protests."

Chinese news reports make it clear that the regulations include internet bulletin boards (BBS, as they're known in China) and SMS mobile text messaging. Should the regime be nervous about these technologies? You bet. After all, just a short flight away from Beijing in Seoul, South Korea sits a President who was elected thanks to a grassroots youth political movement galvanized by the online citizens' media news site OhMyNews, but which couldn't have been successful without the mobilizing power or chatrooms and SMS text messaging.

If you go through the original Chinese text of the regulations released this weekend, you'll find them to be an update of regulations released in 2000 (Thanks to Roland Soong for that archive link!)

As Sophie of China Digital Times points out, the number of forbidden content-categories has been expanded from 9 to 11, and all of those new categories relate to people's ability to organize online. Reporters without Borders and Roland of the EastSouthWestNorth blog have English translations of those points.

(UPDATE: China Digital Times now has an English translation here.)

Roland of ESWN has pointed out that in China, the internet bulletin boards and chatrooms are more powerful than blogs. Why? One big reason, he says, is because professional journalists use internet bulletin boards as a place to anonymously post stories their editors won't publish because they were too politically sensitive. Putting them on a blog leaves the individual too exposed and too potentially traceable. So Chinese who want to find alternative news know that the BBS are where they're most likely to find it.  It's not clear whether the new regulations cover blogs or not, but if they cover BBS there's no reason they wouldn't cover blogs. (UPDATE: it appears they definitely do.) But blogs don't actually appear to be a major concern right now. All the blog hosting services like Bokee, Blogcn, and Blogbus are required to censor and police the blogs on their services anyway. And all the independent bloggers were required to register their identities earlier this year. So from the government's perspective the blogs have been sufficiently neutered.  The BBS and SMS are what they fear.

An example of this fear is how the government recently banned all further internet forum discussion about rural democracy and unrest in a village called Taishi. More on the Taishi story from the tireless ESWN here, here and here.

The list of content that online news sites are not allowed to report includes "state secrets." Roland provides an example (scroll down to the bottom) of how arbitrary the definition of "state secrets" can be, and how people often find themselves in possession of documents (handed to them by officials) which are not marked anywhere as classified - but then they are busted for possession of them later. Charges of reporting state secrets could also be levied in this manner - as an excuse to nail somebody. This tactic has been used against plenty of Chinese conventional newspaper journalists in the past. We are simply reminded that online news organizations cannot escape. It could be extremely easy for a journalist to be nailed for posting "state secrets" on a BBS without knowing he or she had done so.

So the Chinese government is trying to extend the same kinds of regulations it uses on mainstream media to the internet - to professional and grassroots media alike. It will be interesting to see just how far they're able to go. With the quiet compliance of the commercial sector I think China's leadership will buy themselves more time in power.

Now, before you argue that flashmobs aided by BBS and SMS may still ultimately prevail and bring democracy to China in the longer term, think again. It's going to take a lot more than that. The Chinese Communist Party has learned to control the internet not perfectly, but well enough:  Nascent opposition groups have been successfully prevented from using the internet to grow into any kind of national movement. Outside the Communist Party, there's currently no viable alternative group of people capable of governing China.  If an altermative is going to emerge from anywhere it will likely be from within the party itself. 

The Chinese government has very good reason to be scared of flashmobs and I very much doubt they'll succeed in preventing them in the future. Flashmobs could indeed bring the government down if they get big enough and out of control. But flashmobs can't incubate a generation of leaders capable of democratic governance. On the other hand, mobs are very good at crowning new demagogues to replace the old ones. After all.. that's how Mao came to power...

China's internet news regulations

Yes I know. I've been following all the coverage of China's latest effort to control online news. I was offline for most of yesterday and this morning, and am taking my time to go over all the coverage, read the actual regulations, look at how the Chinese media is reporting it, talk to some people, and come up with something more useful and nuanced than the kneejerk reaction of: "Omigod! The Chinese CENSORING AND CONTROLLING THE INTERNET!!! How evil!!" Not that I think it's a good thing, and it's something I think we should push U.S. tech companies not to support. But let's just say I am not shocked and stunned that these regulations came out. People inside China who do internet-content related business I've spoken to so far are not particularly excited or freaked out by these regulations. This is the reality they have always lived with. It's not fun but they have no choice and won't have a choice any time soon. So I'd like to take a closer look at how the government is seeking to control online news and information, what's succeeding and what isn't, and how people in China are reacting to it and perhaps adjusting. A long, considered, non-hasty blog post is forthcoming when it gets done, in between the stuff I need to do today for Global Voices and other ongoing projects.

Meanwhile, check out the unfolding analysis on China Digital Times, where Sophie Beach writes:

It is worth noting that these new regulations include two additional categories of forbidden content compared with previously released regulations: 1) information inciting illegal assemblies, demonstrations, marches, or gatherings to disturb social order and 2) information released in the name of "illegal civil organizations." This is an apparent attempt to target the capacity to organize online.

More later.

UPDATE: Reporters Without Borders, in a press release titled The 11 Commandments of the Internet in China, has this take:

"You shall not spread rumours", "You shall not damage state security”, “You shall not destroy the country’s reputation”. There are just three of the 11 commandments ordered by Beijing, on 25 September, aimed at bloggers and websites managers.

Reporters Without Borders expressed concern at this latest turn of the screw in an ongoing crackdown on freedom of expression.

"The Chinese authorities never seem to let up on their desire to regulate the Web and their determination to control information available on it ever more tightly,” the worldwide press freedom organisation said.

“These new rules, announced with a fanfare by the official media, are certainly more intended to frighten Internet-users than to codify the use of the Net,” it said. “In fact there is nothing really new in these 11 commandments, which simply repeat that the party has the monopoly of the dissemination of information and that the media’s task is not to be objective but to relay state propaganda.

“These moves to filter the Internet are nevertheless a sign that the Internet frightens those in power, in particular during a period of ever greater social unrest. It’s noticeable that the only new elements in the text relate to banning the calling of strikes or gatherings though the Net,” it said.

The new rules, ordered by the state council information bureau and ministry of industry and information, are aimed at bringing into line all previous such edicts. According to the Chinese daily Beijing news (thebeijingnews.com), it contains 11 subjects forbidden to online editors.

They are banned from putting out news that :
  violates the basic principles of the Chinese constitution :
  endangers national security, leaks national secrets, seeks to overthrow the government, endangers the unification of the country ;
  destroys the country’s reputation and benefits ;
  arouses national feelings of hatred, racism, and endangers racial unification ;
  violates national policies on religion, promotes the propaganda of sects and superstition ; [Reporters Without Borders note : More than 30 members of the spiritual Falungong movement are currently behind bars for posting news on the Internet]
  diffuses rumours, endangers public order and creates social uncertainty ;
  diffuses information that is pornographic, violent, terrorist or linked to gambling ;
  libels or harms people’s reputation, violates people’s legal rights ;
  includes illegal information bounded by law and administrative rules.

Two completely new bans have been added to the nine rules above :
  It is forbidden to encourage illegal gatherings, strikes, etc to create public disorder ;
  It is forbidden to organise activities under illegal social associations or organisations.

Websites that break these new rules will be shut down and those running them will have to pay a fine that could reach 30,000 yuans (3,000 euros).

Reporters Without Borders points out that 62 people are currently imprisoned in China for having posted articles on the Internet that the authorities deemed to be “subversive”.

Internet Censorship & Corporate Choices

The Christian Science Monitor has a piece today titled China's Model for a Censored Internet about internet censorship in China, and how corporate profit motives could ultimately make the internet a lot less free.

A number of bloggers, including Fons Tuinstra and the Angry Chinese Blogger have been pointing to reports about AOL's choices in China, and how - according to quotes from Time Warner Chief Executive Richard Parsons - AOL turned down a business opportunity because Parsons didn't want to be directly involved with internet censorship.  The original quotes come from a Bloomberg article titled Murdoch Says News Corp. Has Hit `Brick Wall' in China, reporting on a media conference in New York on Sept. 16, where Rupert Murdoch and others also made comments about China's rather difficult media market (to put it mildly). Relevant excerpt:

Some media ventures have disappointed their overseas investors. Time Warner Inc., the world's largest media company, withdrew from a $50 million Internet venture between its AOL unit and Lenovo Group Ltd., then known as Legend, in January 2004.   

The ``straw that broke the camel's back'' was the government's insistence that it had the right to monitor all traffic on the service, Richard Parsons, chief executive of Time Warner Inc., said at the media forum.         

Banned Words                

``You're given lists of words that you have to block through your service, like democracy,'' he said. ``We bailed out.''         

Time Warner thought about ``what we would look like here in the U.S. if we agreed to a governmentally imposed regime where words like democracy had to be blocked,'' Parsons said. ``We made a judgment that it wasn't a market that we wanted to enter in this way at this time.''             

Microsoft Corp., the world's biggest software maker, was criticized in June by Reporters Without Borders for agreeing to block words such as ``democracy'' from its MSN service in China.         

``The Chinese are doing everything they can to manage the message,'' Parsons said. ``They are opening up in their own time and at their own speed.''        

Companies do have a choice. Investors who care about free speech should reward them for making the right choices.

Hot off the Press: Handbook for Bloggers & Cyberdissidents

(NOTE: This review is cross-posted from Global Voices.)

Reporters Without Borders has given Global Voices a sneak peak at the Handbook For Bloggers and Cyberdissidents before its official Thursday release. Click here to download the full PDF booklet. Thanks to Julien Pain for his hard work on this project. It is a valuable gift to the world's bloggers.

Lately there has been a proliferation of blogging guides published in English, but almost all of them are aimed at Americans and Western Europeans. Or they're meant for companies and organizations who want to use blogging for smarter P.R., "knowledge management," or internal communication purposes, or for people who want to turn their blogs into little commercial media enterprises.  Then there are the articles about how you can improve your social and romantic life through blogging... or how to use your blog to make yourself notorious, get on TV and become famous...

The Reporters Without Borders Handbook for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents is not for any of those purposes. It is the first truly useful book I've seen aimed at the kinds of bloggers featured at Global Voices every day: People who have views and information that they want to share with the world beyond their own national borders. They are often people whose perspectives are not well represented in their own country's media, and certainly not well reported by the international media. Sometimes they are political dissidents, but usually not. Mainly, they are just ordinary citizens with a passion to communicate with the world - and no easier way to do so than by writing, podcasting, and posting pictures on their own blogs.

The Handbook for Bloggers is for people who want to be serious participants in the emergent online global conversation: How to set up a quality, credible blog. How to get it noticed. And.. if you're in a country where there government might not like what you're saying, how to avoid getting in trouble when you by-pass the information gatekeepers and talk directly to the world.

Read on for the rest of my review of the Handbook for Bloggers...

More on corporate responsibility in China

Coming on the heels of the Washington Post's dressing-down of Yahoo!, the New York Times' Tina Rosenberg has another excellent Op-Ed in the International Herald Tribune, with some strong words for U.S. tech companies who continue to claim that in the long run they're doing more to foster democracy in China than to impede it, despite the fact that they collaborate with censorship and in Yahoo!'s case, help convict journalists like Shi Tao. After detailing Yahoo!'s role in the Shi Tao case, she writes:

...America has a bipartisan human rights policy in China. It is called trade. The idea is that Western companies will bring Western values - especially when they develop the Internet, supposedly an unstoppable force for openness. But Shi's fate is the latest piece of evidence that it's not working out that way.

After further discussion Rosenberg concludes:

...In many important ways, foreign investment has been good for the Chinese people. It has lifted living standards greatly. China's desire to trade has encouraged new permission for thousands of Chinese to study abroad, which is also a force for liberalization. Foreign businesses have promoted legal reform, although largely in commercial law.

But let's not pretend that foreign investment will make China a democracy. That argument was born out of self-interest. Because China is too lucrative a market to resist, Western businessmen have ended up endorsing the party line through their silence - or worse. They are not molding China; China is molding them.

Hear hear.

The San Fransisco Chronicle also had a good article on Sunday, Chinese Interent vs. free speech: Hard choices for U.S. tech giants. She asks the important question about what we actually expect these companies to do? Withdraw from China?  Should we boycott them?  Most of the people she interviews, including human rights activists, aren't advocating a boycott or disengagement. But there are suggestions for ways in which tech companies could do more to show they do actually care about keeping Chinese dissidents out of jail and about promoting free speech.  An extended excerpt:

Starting in the 1970s, U.S. companies with business in South Africa united in opposing apartheid there, and although their pact did not end the racist system, it is credited with bringing mainstream attention to the problem. U.S. Internet companies should follow that example and agree on guidelines for operating in China while respecting human rights and use the heft of the group to resist Chinese pressure, said Lori Tansey Martens, president of the International Business Ethics Institute in Washington, D.C. 

"I'm not asking Yahoo to do it alone," said Pain of Reporters Without Borders. "I'm asking Yahoo to discuss it with Google and Microsoft and find a common position."

Some suggest that U.S. companies continue following Chinese law but be a little less cooperative about it. Danny O'Brien, activism coordinator for San Francisco's Electronic Frontier Foundation, suggested that Yahoo call attention to any future requests for information from the Chinese government.

"A perfectly reasonable thing for Yahoo to do within the legal framework is to comply but announce it publicly," O'Brien said. That's a strategy Google has used when complying with legal requirements in the United States to remove links to copyrighted material.

Companies could be less cooperative by using encryption and anonymizing technology, and avoiding storing unnecessary information about users, said Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and Oxford University's chairman in Internet governance and regulation.

No one suggested boycotting the major U.S. Internet firms.

"How much choice do you have if all of these companies are doing this?" asked Mickey Spiegel, a senior researcher in the Asia division of Human Rights Watch. "We're not going to stop using the Internet."

"I don't think (a boycott) would make much difference," agreed Chinese activist in exile Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Instead, Xiao is focusing his energy on supporting Chinese bloggers and studying how the Chinese are using the latest social networking and Web browsing programs to communicate under the radar of the censors.

But there is one activist group that has taken up the cause of Internet freedom in China: investors.

Two asset management firms that concentrate on socially responsible investing have penned a shareholder resolution for Cisco Systems, which will come up for a vote at the company's next annual meeting. The resolution urges the company to draft and implement a human rights policy. It was submitted by Boston Common Asset Management, which holds 104,200 shares of Cisco common stock, and Domini Social Investments.

Cisco unsuccessfully challenged the resolution with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company said it has already done what the proposal suggests.

Skype blocked in China: users go underground

Over at Global Voices, Chinese blogger Frank Dai has a detailed post on how Chinese bloggers are reacting to the Chinese government's blockage of Skype. 

Some people who defy the block are being punished by losing their internet access:

Virushuo cited a story of a Shenzhen Skype user surnamed Wang, who reported that his internet access was down and some ports were blocked. He consulted with the personnel at China Telecom, who replied that he had been added to a black list because he used Skype-Out and required him to guarantee not to use it any more. They also warned that next time he would be fined for 3000 Yuan, about 370 US Dollars.

Most Chinese use the Chinese version of Skype, which is blocked. According to Frank, the international version is not blocked, but is hard to get in China now because it's no longer possible to download directly from the Skype site. So bloggers are emailing around information about how to access it. Frank concludes with a quote from one defiant Chinese blogger: “Skype has been blocked in China but it won’t disappear.”

Yahoo! & Chinese Censorship

There is much applause in the blogosphere for today's Washington Post Op-Ed condemning Yahoo! for its collaboration with Chinese authorities in the conviction of Chinese journalist Shi Tao.
(See my previous blog posts on the issue here and here.) 

Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang said the company was merely following Chinese law - it had no choice. But as human rights groups have been pointing out, Yahoo! has been going above and beyond the strict legal requirements for some time. In 2002 it signed the Internet Society of China's Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry.

This "self-discipline" is reflected in the way Yahoo! filters (censors) its search results. The ONI China Filtering Report describes the process in detail. To illustrate the process, I've taken screenshots to show what happens when you try to search for terms like "Tiananmen massacre" on the Chinese language versions of Yahoo! and Yahoo! News.

Here are the steps I took:

1) Sitting at home in Cambridge, MA, using my Comcast internet connection, I accessed Chinese Yahoo! News and Chinese Yahoo!, then typed in the Chinese words for "Tiananmen Massacre": 天安门屠杀. (Click image to enlarge)

Here's the result:

A big fat error message. Same thing happened when I did the same search on the Chinse Yahoo! News.

2) Then I configured my browser to use a Chinese proxy server, so that my searches would be going through an internet service provider based in China. (Chinese ISP's configure their routers to block politically sensitive web pages and filter politically sensitive search results.)

Same error message, plus the Chinese ISP barred all further requests from my computer's IP address. Punishment for trying to access blocked material.

3) By way of comparison, I repeated the same steps for Chinese Google and Google News searches, both with and without a Chinese proxy.

Here's the result of a Google News Chinese search through my normal Comcast connection:

A search on the term "Tiananmen Massacre" returns a long list of results.

In contrast, when I do the same search on a Chinese ISP, I get this:

The error message tells me that no results can be found, etc......

What do these screenshots illustrate? They show that Yahoo! actively filters politically sensitive terms from within its own service. Even if a Chinese user finds a way to access Yahoo from outside China or via a foreign proxy server, they will still get filtered search results on politically sensitive terms. By contrast, Google does not actively filter. The filtering of Google search results is done only by the Chinese ISP... although Google helps hide this process from Chinese users by choosing not to show results that the Chinese user would be unable to access.

As a result, Chinese users of Yahoo! have no way of discovering that the search results they seek actually do exist -- even if they are tech-savvy enough to use a proxy server. This is the same experience that Chinese users have when using home-grown Chinese search engines like Baidu. Google users have a better chance of finding forbidden material if they know how to use proxies, but those who don't (i.e., most Chinese internet users) also have no way of knowing what they're missing.

Like their Chinese competitors, these American companies are not being transparent or honest with Chinese users about the fact that search results on their services are being censored in compliance with Chinese legal and extra-legal requirements.  A bit of transparency and honesty, at very least, would be a step in the right direction.

FEMA Spoils System: Bloomberg

My friend, Bloomberg correspondent Mike Forsythe, has given me permission to reproduce his article on FEMA in full, as it's not easily available online:

FEMA Spoils System Leaves Few Experts Managing Crisis Agency

By Michael Forsythe
     Sept. 8 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency's upper ranks are mostly staffed with people who share two traits: loyalty to President George W. Bush and little or no background in emergency management.
     Director Michael Brown served as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association for a decade before coming to FEMA in 2001. Acting Deputy Director Patrick Rhode is a veteran of Bush's 2000 presidential campaign, and Acting Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks Altshuler worked in the White House in 2001 planning presidential trips.
     The lack of experience among Brown's top lieutenants in responding to disasters was revealed by Hurricane Katrina, said Paul Light, a professor of organizational studies at New York University. It also marks a reversion to the days when the agency was treated as a ``turkey farm'' -- a place where political operatives could get high-level jobs -- after being led by professionals during
the Clinton administration, he said.
     ``These guys kind of have a deer-in-the headlights look; they haven't been through this kind of thing and it shows,'' said Light, the founding director of the Center for Public Service at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based research group. ``I'm afraid FEMA has gone backwards in time to the old era of a more traditional campaign-loyalty position.''

Yahoo! e-mail in China: must be evil to be legal

New developments in the furor over how Yahoo! helped convict a dissident Chinese journalist:

ESWN (scroll down to bottom) and Angry Chinese Blogger have both posted translations of the summary of an internal Chinese Communist Party Propaganda Department circular, e-mailed by Chinese journalist Shi Tao to a foreign website via his Yahoo! China email account. (Click here for the PDF of the full verdict text in both Chinese and English.) A lively discussion is going on in the comments section of my last post about Yahoo!'s role in Shi Tao's conviction.

According to Shi Tao's summary, the Propaganda Dept. circular includes the following instruction to Chinese editors and reporters: "pay attention to any liaison between overseas democratic elements and individual media editors and  reporters inside China.  If anything is discovered, it is must be   reported immediately"

For transmitting this, plus a very general list of measures the government was taking to crack down on dissident speech and prevent unrest, Shi Tao got 10 years in jail.

Yahoo! has now responded to Reporters Without Borders and other human rights groups who have strongly condemned Yahoo!'s role in handing over Shi Tao's e-mail logs to the Chinese police.

In an email to Reuters, a Yahoo! spokesperson wrote: "Just like any other global company, Yahoo! must ensure that its local country sites must operate within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based."

In Shi Tao's case, Yahoo! had to be evil in order to be legal.

But as the discussion on my last post reveals, Yahoo! had a choice. It chose to provide an e-mail service hosted on servers based inside China, making itself subject to Chinese legal jurisdiction. It didn't have to do that. It could have provided a service hosted offshore only.  If Shi Tao's email account had been hosted on servers outside of China, Yahoo! wouldn't have been legally obligated to hand over his information. 

When providing information and communications services in countries where political dissent is illegal, companies like Yahoo! need to ask themselves tough questions about whether they can realistically operate "within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based" while still upholding their ethical values. Assuming they have some. Even if they don't, they must recognize that helping put dissidents in jail is pretty bad for the corporate image. Is the damage to Yahoo!'s reputation, credibility, and consumer trust really worth whatever money they're making on that Chinese-language e-mail service? 

I don't think so.