Internet Press Freedom Conference

Growing Internet Restrictions
Many Countries See the Internet as a Threat and Use
Weapons of Mass Censorship to Repress It

By M. Kalyanaraman

New York City, June 30, 2003 --A panel of experts on legal, technical and physical restrictions on the flow of Internet news discussed how some countries like China and Saudi Arabia systematically filter and censor the Internet, as part of the World Press Freedom Committee’s Press Freedom on the Internet Conference.

A panel of experts discussed the weapons of mass censorship used by many countries to block the flow of news and information on the Internet.

But Xiao Qiang, a panelist and director of the China Internet Study Program at University of California at Berkeley, said the very nature of the Internet will ultimately change the situation in China.

Qiang added the Chinese media have become commercialized and must satisfy the news consumer if it wants to survive. He said things are reaching a point where it has become tough to control information.

But Qiang had some words of caution for those who expect dramatic changes in China. He said many tech savvy, young people, have less desire to read alternative news. Their life is not about desire for freedom but, Qiang said, these people have adapted into the country's political environment and many of them are using the Government machinery to increase their business.

Citing an example of a pro-democracy activist in 1989 who now runs a software company, Qiang said his company now makes blocking software which helps the government to censor the Internet in China.

The event was also sponsored by the Media Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York .

Benjamin Edelman (link to his photo no. 1301), a student fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School, said China and Saudi Arabia have made significant investment in hardware, software and human capital to censor and filter the Internet. He said he visited a government installation in Dubai which processes every single request for a web page and then decides whether to allow it.

He said the blocking devices have become so sophisticated that they can block individual web pages, images and even parts of images.

Edelman gave the example of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology web site which offers free encryption software which can break down many government firewalls. He said the Chinese government could block just this page on the MIT web site and let the other pages accessible as it wants Chinese students to go and study in the university as graduate students.

Edelman found that in two weeks of May 2002, Saudi Arabia had blocked 2,038 distinct web pages in an effort to limit access to sexually explicit content. The problem, Edelman points out, is that many of those pages had nothing to do with pornography.

He also says only 10 percent of the material blocked by China relates to pornography. In his investigation of leading commercial filtering packages, Edelman found that a total of 6,777 distinct web pages were wrongly blocked during a three-month period in 2002.

Shanthi Kalathil, an associate of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, gave the bigger picture of such Internet censorship. She said in many countries Internet content providers were often government-owned and therefore part of the official media.

She pointed out how censors lurk even in chat rooms and scrub off any dissenting posts. There were even cases of governments physically harming Internet journalists, like the Malaysian government harassment of Malaysiakini.

Kalathil, a former Hong Kong-based staff reporter for the Asian Wall Street Journal, said such actions were strategic and they promote self-censorship.

"Their broader message is to make people think twice before posting online", she said.

Kalathil, in her co-authored a book “Open Networks, Closed Regimes,” she analyzes cases of Internet censorship in China, Cuba, Singapore, Vietnam, Burma, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. And her conclusion is that those regimes do not feel the Internet posses a threat to them.

In his opening remarks, Leonard Sussman, a senior scholar of the Freedom House and founder of that organization’s Press Freedom Survey, said initially the Internet was thought of as a "sublimely anarchist, unstoppable force with liberating potential." But now, he pointed out, restrictions on Internet content have become widespread.

In his essay "Press Freedom on the Internet At Risk," Sussman says in the short-term he is a pessimist.

"Journalists and their institutions face increasing threats from press-controlling authorities worldwide," he warns.

His 2001 Press Freedom Survey found that although 33 percent of the 131 countries studied highly restricted their print and broadcast media, only 10 percent clamped down on the Web.

“In the long run I am an optimist. The utter diversity of the Internet will open even closed societies. That's the long run," he said.