emerging trend
Blog censorship
"You don't say 'tanks in Tiananmen. You say 'the tractors that came into the city.' You don't say 'press freedom,' you say 'press professionalism.'"
-- Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley.
Christopher Koch's The Year Of Living Dangerously should now be recommended reading for bloggers as well as intrepid foreign correspondents.
As recent events in Burma have shown, bloggers who collect, report, analyse and disseminate news and information, are often our only eyes and ears in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Orwellian regimes have twigged that these self-styled citizen journalists can play a key role in the fight for democracy and will continue to crack down on bloggers as much as reporters in traditional media.
Press freedom: Top ten and bottom ten countries |
Top 10 |
Country |
Bottom 10 |
Country |
|
1 |
Iceland |
160 |
Uzbekistan |
= |
Norway |
161 |
Laos |
3 |
Estonia |
162 |
Vietnam |
= |
Slovakia |
163 |
China |
5 |
Belgium |
164 |
Burma |
= |
Finland |
165 |
Cuba |
= |
Sweden |
166 |
Iran |
8 |
Denmark |
167 |
Turkmenistan |
= |
Ireland |
168 |
North Korea |
= |
Portugal |
169 |
Eritrea |
Reporters Without Borders' (RSF's) most recent study of press freedom said that the proportion of violations involving the internet was growing. RSF believes at least 64 persons are currently imprisoned worldwide because of what they posted on the internet. Several countries fell in the ranking this year because their governments disrupted the free flow of online news and information:
- China has imprisoned 50 cyber dissidents, some of them serving sentences of more than ten years.
- Eight are being held in Vietnam
- Kareem Amer was sentenced to four years in prison in Egypt for posts on his blog that were considered to be anti-religious and insulting to President Hosni Mubarak.
- Bloggers have been arrested and news websites shuttered in Malaysia and Thailand.
Beijing is getting better at blocking and bowdlerising 'objectionable' or 'subversive' material, usually with technology bought from US firms such as Cisco. It has also done a deal with China-based blog platforms to censor users. Beijing has managed to block all material that is critical of the Communist regime while simultaneously expanding China's internet facilities.
Repressive regimes usually keep a constantly updated blacklist of websites and use software to spot dubious keywords, or combinations of keywords such as "Tiananmen" and or "massacre". A post about the Dalai Lama will thus appear online with automatically inserted blank spaces in place of offensive words and may have a maximum online life of about half an hour. Vietnam follows China's lead, but does not have its neighbour's economic and technological capacity.
Other offenders
To print a book, poem, story, newspaper or magazine in Iran, one needs permission from the authorities. So many Iranian writers publish their views in blogs. The country's mullahs muzzle all content dealing with sex, and they also target independent news sites. The Saudi authorities openly admit they censor the internet and its official Internet Service Unit (ISU) even posts a form online for users to suggest new websites that could be blacklisted. Prohibition replaces censorship in Cuba, where President Fidel Castro has decided to simply keep the internet out of reach of Cubans. Internet access in the country is limited to a select number who have to get express permission from the Communist Party.
Blogging incognito
Whistleblowers conceal their identity from authorities by setting up a free webmail account from public computers to avoid detection of their IP address. They can also configure their computers to access the web through an anonymous proxy, which leaves a false trail: the IP address of the proxy server, not the address of a home machine.
Technically proficient bloggers may make use of 'Onion Routing' networks, which feed requests through additional computers, making it hard to trace where a request originated. Each step of the Onion Routing chain is encrypted, making it harder for governments to track blogs. Specially formatted email with cryptographic signatures can be sent to anonymous blogging sites, such as Invisiblog.
Sustained state-sponsored web filtering betrays a fear of the significance and versatility of the internet as a communications channel. Yet bloggers will continue to undermine centralised control over information flows as long as they have web access.
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