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

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Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom 54 Let’s be clear: freedom of speech, freedom of political choice, and the rule of law are not relative values; they are absolutes. China’s regime of Internet censorship is, without question, a crime against individual liberty on a truly mass scale. That it coexists with a fast-modernizing economy offering its people considerable choice in the economic sphere only makes the curtailment of personal freedom more offensive because less excusable. China does not need to suppress speech to achieve its economic goals. China’s leaders are more cynical than that. They maintain censorship solely to preempt challenges to their monopoly on political power. This can be seen in the government’s censorship policies. Web sites based inside China are subject to content restrictions that are, by design, so uncertain and unpredictable that they force Internet companies to censor themselves. Standards that are unknown and unknowable, backed by the threat of license revocation for companies and jail for individuals, create a pervasive fear that is far more effective than direct regulation at muting opposition to the government and its policies. Web sites based outside China, meanwhile, are subject to blocking by the Great Firewal,l based not on their content, but on their capacity to create, inside China, large, voluntary online communities that are independent of the government. These include nearly all blogging services, Wikipedia and wiki platforms generally (Wikileaks included), social networking web sites and peer-to-peer technologies of all kinds, including photo-sharing and video-sharing businesses - in other words, the full panoply of Internet 2.0 technologies. Web sites commanding vast audiences for user-generated content are seen by authorities as a grave threat. The Chinese government’s worst nightmare, after all, is a lone and anonymous Tibetan uploading to YouTube grainy cellphone videos of rioting police. What should American Internet companies do? To point out that doing business in China is morally compromising is not to say that companies must forswear the world’s biggest market - hardly a realistic option, in any event, for premier Internet firms like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Amazon. And while these companies might prefer to compete in China remotely - basing their servers outside the Great Firewall - government policies force them to set up shop inside China. Those policies manipulate the firewall to degrade the performance of web sites based outside China. Because all data from foreign web sites pass through bottlenecks connecting China’s Internet with the outside world, and because sensors at those bottlenecks further degrade transmissions across the firewall, non-Chinese web sites are experienced from inside China as performing v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. This performance deficit is so substantial - and puts non-Chinese web sites at such a huge disadvantage relative to their competitors inside China - that foreign web sites must establish a presence inside the firewall. Indeed, Google, despite misgivings, established Google.cn within China in 2007 mainly for this reason, while Yahoo and Amazon crossed the firewall by investing in their Chinese domestic rivals.
Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom 55 American Internet companies doing business in China should, for starters, acknowledge the extent of their self-censorship, not hide it or rationalize it or pretend that it is something other than the intensely unpleasant compromise that it is. Spare us the tortured and hypocritical justifications. It helps for companies to admit their complicity; to clarify that all is not as it should be or appears to be; to openly assert their disagreement with Chinese government policies (if they do, indeed, disagree); and to disclose specifics about how their content has been altered to avoid displeasing authorities. US firms also should do everything they reasonably can to protect their Chinese customers from the surveillance - and worse - of Chinese government authorities. If customer data and identifying information can be stored outside the firewall, beyond the reach of Chinese regulators and courts, they should be, even though that may involve greater costs. While this step does not assure protection of anonymous users (since control of a company’s license to operate in China gives the government considerable de facto leverage, quite apart from territorial limits on subpoenas and other legal processes), it is still meaningful. If off-shoring of confidential user information is not feasible, companies must take steps to warn their customers about the risks of using their service. And finally, where warnings are not possible or go unheeded, companies should force customers to give their real names when using their web sites - which will, in turn, force users to think carefully about what they say or do online. Ironically, the barring of anonymity is the surest means of getting users to appreciate the risks of saying what the government doesn’t want to hear. Doing business on China’s Internet is a messy, though potentially very lucrative, activity. Some companies may be so put off by the messiness that they stay away. For most, however, that is not a viable option. They must learn to be both honest with themselves and honest with their customers. The Red Hacker Alliance and the Year of the Gh0st RAT Gregory Walton Asia Editor, Infowar Monitor I am going to talk about Chinese cyber-espionage directed against non-state actors, including several of the sponsors of this conference. I had intended to talk about an entirely different topic, but two weeks ago a targeted malware attack against the World Association of Newspapers, and the organizers of this conference specifically persuaded me that this would be a topical subject to address. My presentation is entitled, “Year of the Gh0st RAT,” and for those who are wondering, this refers to a Remote Administration Tool that we have seen used in these attacks. The presentation is divided into two distinct parts. In the first I very briefly outline the
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