[Mb-civic] And you think WE are censored

[Barbara Siomos]

The Chinese government limits discussions about Tibetan independence, Falun Gong,
the Dalai Lama, Tiananmen Square and
other topics deemed sensitive, the OpenNet
Initiative study finds.

The Chinese government's Internet
controls have kept pace with rapid changes
in technology and are buttressed by self-censorship, university researchers said in a
study Thursday.

One of the study's principal investigators, John Palfrey, warned that the sophisticaton
of China's controls raises the prospect of a
broken Internet and could show other closed states that censorship can be effective.

"Do we want to have multiple Internets, a China Wide Web, a U.S. Wide Web, a Saudi
Wide Web, or do we want the whole World Wide Web?" asked Palfrey, who is
executive director of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

China's filters can block specific references to Tibetan independence without blocking
all references to Tibet, according to the
report by the OpenNet Initiative.

Likewise, the government limits discussions about Falun Gong, the Dalai Lama,
Tiananmen Square and other topics deemed sensitive, the study finds.

Numerous government agencies and thousands of public and private employees
are involved in censorship at all levels, from the main pipelines, or backbones,
hauling data over long distances to the
cybercafes where many citizens access the
Internet.

That breadth allows filtering tools to adapt to emerging forms of communications,
such as Web journals, or blogs , the study
finds.

Because Chinese filtering methods
constantly change, the government 
manages to keep its users off-balance,
Palfrey said.

China is more successful than other countries in keeping the extent of its
censorship efforts secret, he said. Elsewhere, visitors trying to access a
banned site generally get a message saying it has been blocked. In China, content often
is simply removed rather than replaced
with a notice.

Google  Inc. has acknowledged its Chinese-language news service, which was 
introduced on a test basis last fall, leaves
out results from government-banned sites.
The company says this is done so users
won't grow frustrated clicking on dead
links.

China, with the second-largest population
of Internet users behind the United States,
promotes Internet use for business and
education, while trying to curb access to
political dissent, pornography and other
topics the communist government deems
sensitive. Many users find ways around the
controls - for instance, using "proxy" 
servers that mask a site's true origin.

It is through similar proxy servers and long-distance calls that researchers
outside China managed to test what users inside China see. The researchers also
employed volunteers inside the country to
conduct more extensive testing.

They deployed software and physical equipment called packet sniffers to
monitor traffic and try to gauge where content gets dropped. Many Internet
systems have security  flaws through which outsiders can sneak in software, Palfrey
said, refusing to elaborate on the 
researchers' techniques.

Funded by George Soros' Their testing determined that:

-Though some dissidents complain that e-mail newsletters sent in bulk are 
sometimes blocked, individual messages
tend not to get filtered.

-Much of the filtering occurs at the backbone, but individual Internet service
providers sometimes deploy additional
blocking. Cybercafes and operators of
discussion boards also control content
proactively under threat of penalties.

-Filtering tends to be triggered by the appearance of certain keywords, rather
than a visit to a specific domain name  or
numeric Internet address.

The keyword-based filters also allow blogs to keep people from completing posts
containing banned topics.

"You can filter much more precisely at a keyword level," Palfrey said