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

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom 66 We have slowly been rolling this out and testing it and have been working with a number of human rights organizations, for example all of those involved in Tibet. It will extend even further the ease of use and enable many more people to operate nodes. In fact, even a person in a censored country could set up and operate a node and give connectivity to friends and family members. We also produce a guide to bypassing Internet censorship, which may be handy for anyone traveling to China. It is translated into various languages and available free on the citizen lab web site, www.citizenlab.com. Have there been cases of false proxy sites? We have certainly heard rumors. In Iran, we found out about a service the American government was operating through VOA in cooperation with a company called Anonymizer. They were setting up proxy services outside of Iran, and broadcasting in the connection information inviting citizens to connect to the proxies. Our researchers in Iran connected to the servers and did some tests. We found out two things. One was that the service was entirely in plain text, meaning it was not encrypted. The very people whom the authorities wanted to track were being corralled into this system that was being announced over radio and that the authorities were presumably listening to as well. The other thing we found is less serious. We found there were porn filters on the proxy servers themselves. It didn't make sense to us. It turned out that, because it was paid for by US taxpayer dollars, the people behind it said they couldn't justify Iranians surfing for porn. So they put in crude porn filters that actually ended up blocking innocent sites. Chinese Citizen journalists: blogging for democracy Watson Meng Founding Editor, Boxun News web site I will briefly introduce Boxun News and I will tell you what is the impact of the Internet in China and give you a few live examples of the people who have got into trouble because they reported for Boxun. Boxun was founded in 2000 and was blocked two months after its launch. Boxun News now updates 24/7 and is very active. We have more than 2,000 blogs. If you compare that to the number of blogs in China - about 90 million, I think - the number is not so huge. But we are different. I think most of the blogs that we host can only exist in China. We are supported by citizen journalists, very similar to OhmyNews.com (a South Korean news web site) and NowPublic.com (a Vancouver-based collaborative site). We have no funding, but because of this model we can operate without many resources.
Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom 67 I mentioned citizen journalists. YouTube.com is a form of citizen journalism. It is operated by user-generated content with very huge impact and without much input from the company. In China, many things happen without journalists being on the scene. They cannot be there during a protest or police violence, even if they know something has happened. So in this situation, the citizen journalist steps in and reports through Boxun or through blogs With Internet technology, China's control on the media has been broken. China literally cannot control the information anymore because it is so easy to receive and share information through the Internet. With such a number of blogs inside China, some 90 million, a lot of discussion goes on. There is Internet censorship in China, but still the information comes out after a few days. NGOs like Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists can use the information from the Internet as a resource to affect policy makers. So we can observe that what we do affects policy-making in China and outside, too. Two weeks ago, when I went to [Washington] DC to get a visa to attend this conference, I met people at the Congress who told me that they watch Internet daily for what happens in China. We know the firewall exists. It means China does not have the Internet, it has an Intranet. Web sites outside China like us receive attacks, literally on a daily basis. Sometimes these are very serious. Last year, a two-month denial of service attack meant our web site could not be accessed by users for a long period of time. In December, our blogs were broken into and all the contents were deleted. And this month, our video web site was broken into and some user information was changed. Also, viruses have been targeted against dissidents. We had the experience at this conference. They put a spy in the user's computer. In China at all the Internet cafés, the business owners must install spy software on each PC at their own expense. So why does the Chinese government want to do this spying and seek information from companies like Yahoo? Because they want to know who did what and then punish some people. Many people have gotten into trouble. If you read accounts about jailed reporters and Internet users, a number of them relate to Boxun. Let me give a few examples. First, Huiang Jinqiu. He published about 500 articles before he was arrested. In September 2003 he was arrested and the next year he got a 12-year sentence. You may also know about Li Changqing. He was a former deputy director of Fu Zhou daily. He reported about dengue fever through Boxun in October 2004. He lost his freedom in December 2004 and received a three-year sentence. He is the winner of this year's Golden Pen of Freedom award. He was released in February. He is doing fine now. The next is Sun Lin and his wife He Fang. They both started to report for Boxun in late October 2006. The difference is that they used a video. They acted in a very public way, almost on a daily basis for a period. He had a business card with his contact details. He
Page 1 and 2:
Beijing Olympics 2008 : Winning Pre
Page 3 and 4:
Beijing Olympics 2008: Championing
Page 5 and 6:
6. How does China deal with foreign
Page 7 and 8:
Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Pres
Page 9 and 10:
Page 11 and 12:
Page 13 and 14:
Page 15 and 16:
Page 17 and 18: Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Pres
Page 67: Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Pres
Page 119 and 120:
Page 121 and 122:
Page 123 and 124:
Page 125 and 126:
Page 127 and 128:
Page 129:
show all

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

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?