WashPost on China and Internet Controls

Let a Thousand Filters Bloom

Annie Applebaum writes on US companies and their facilitation of China's internet policing:

Without question, China's Internet filtering regime is "the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world," in the words of a recent report by Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The system involves the censorship of Web logs, search engines, chat rooms and e-mail by "thousands of public and private personnel." It also involves Microsoft Inc., as Chinese bloggers discovered last month. Since early June, Chinese bloggers who post messages containing a forbidden word -- "Dalai Lama," for example, or "democracy" -- receive a warning: "This message contains a banned expression, please delete." It seems Microsoft has altered the Chinese version of its blog tool, MSN Spaces, at the behest of Chinese government. Bill Gates, so eloquent on the subject of African poverty, is less worried about Chinese free speech.

But he isn't alone: Because Yahoo Inc. is one of several companies that have signed a "public pledge on self-discipline," a Yahoo search in China doesn't turn up all of the (politically sensitive) results. Cisco Systems Inc., another U.S. company, has also sold hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment to China, including technology that blocks traffic not only to banned Web sites, but even to particular pages within an otherwise accessible site.

But as U.S. companies become more deeply involved in China, and as technology itself progresses, those lines may begin to sound weaker. Over the past couple of years, Harry Wu, a Chinese human rights activist and former political prisoner, has carefully tracked Western corporate cooperation with Chinese police and internal security, and in particular with a Chinese project called "Golden Shield," a high-tech surveillance system that has been under construction for the past five years. Although the company won't confirm it, Wu says, Cisco representatives in China have told him that the company has contracts to provide technology to the police departments of at least 31 provinces. Some of that technology may be similar to what the writer and former businessman Ethan Gutmann describes in his recent book, "Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire and Betrayal." Gutmann -- whose account is also bitterly disputed by Cisco ("He's getting a lot of press out of this," complained the spokesman) -- claims to have visited a Shanghai trade fair where Cisco was advertising its ability to "integrate judicial networks, border security, and vertical police networks" and more generally its willingness to build Golden Shield.

She adds:

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.

What Applebaum doesn't ask is why Cisco was willing to build such technology for only one country. What she really should be asking is not just whether it is ethical for these companies to engage in such business (clearly it is not) but also how our own government is utilizing this technology, for it is difficult to imagine that it is not, especially since the government has stepped up monitoring and spying on its own population using the excuse of fighting terrorism. Just today the news was out that the FBI has released 3,500 pages of data it has acquired on peace groups......the media is good at facing the easy questions, like whether Cisco should be helping authoritarian regimes erect internet controls. The difficult ones, like the growth of the authoritarian regime at home, it glances away from.

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