Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom - World Press ...

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
108
Servers in Hong Kong obviously have more individual freedom than servers in Beijing. There are
also variations at different times. There are reports that during summit meetings or other official
events with high-level Western presence, forbidden web sites are accessible but are blocked again
after the events. The New York Times has observed that “the government's filtering, while
comprehensive, is not total. One day a banned site might temporarily be visible, if the routers are
overloaded - or if the government suddenly decides to tolerate it. The next day the site might
disappear again.” 32
Other reports document that the firewall is rather easily circumvented by determined
parties using proxy servers outside the firewall. VPN and SSH connections to outside mainland
China are not blocked, so circumventing all of the censorship and monitoring features of the Great
Firewall is easy for those who have available such secure connection methods to computers
outside mainland China. Anonymizer Inc. provides a free service to allow uncensored and
anonymous browsing in China. The software is available through a number of sources, including a
China-accessible web site.
Psiphon, a software project designed by University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, is another
circumvention technology that works through social networks of trust and is designed to help
Internet users bypass content-filtering systems.
Furthermore, Tor (The Onion Router), a free software program, enables users to communicate
anonymously on the Internet. Neither the Tor web site nor the Tor network are blocked, making
Tor an easily acquired and effective tool for circumvention of the censorship controls. Tor allows,
among other things, uncensored downloads and uploads, although no guarantee can be made on
freedom from repercussions.
In addition to Tor, there are various HTTP/HTTPS tunnel services, which work like Tor. At least
one of them, Your Freedom, is confirmed to be working from China and also offers encryption
features for the transmitted traffic.
Some legal scholars have pointed out that the frequency with which the government issues new
regulations on the Internet demonstrates their ineffectiveness. New regulations never refer to the
previous regulations, which then seem to be forgotten.
Punishment of cyber-dissidents and self-censorship
Expectations that in the lead-up to the Olympic Games the restrictive system would be
substantially liberalized were disappointed following the unrest in Tibet. Numerous web sites were
blocked, blogs were taken down and individuals who uploaded pictures or videos of violence in
Lhasa were arrested.
The number of cases where Chinese Internet users are jailed for distributing “bad content” via the
Internet is growing. The recent annual report of Reporters Without Borders lists nearly 50 cases in
2007 in which individuals or journalists were jailed and given Draconian sentences of several years
in prison, just for making critical statements that, in the eyes of the Chinese government,
undermined national security, public order or were seen as revealing “state secrets.” 33
These cases have produced growing self-censorship. Not only individual bloggers, but also
professional journalists are increasingly careful about expressing their views, particularly on critical
political affairs. One journalist was quoted in the Reporters Without Borders report as saying that
in his newspaper staffers now wait for news from the official news agency Xinhua before writing
their own comments, to avoid trouble with local or national authorities.