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October 31, 2007
China's Great Firewall Is Doomed
Wired — The Great Firewall: China’s Misguided - and Futile - Attempt to Control What Happens Online:
“The Golden Shield - the latest addition to what is widely referred to as the Great Firewall of China - was supposed to monitor, filter, and block sensitive online content. But only a year after completion, it already looks doomed to fail. True, surveillance remains widespread, and outspoken dissidents are punished harshly. But my experience as a correspondent in China for seven years suggests that the country’s stranglehold on the communications of its citizens is slipping: Bloggers and other Web sources are rapidly supplanting Communist-controlled news outlets. Cyberprotests have managed to bring about an important constitutional change. And ordinary Chinese citizens can circumvent the Great Firewall and evade other forms of police observation with surprising ease. If they know how.
“Like its namesake, the Great Firewall consists of hundreds of individual fortifications spread out along a vulnerable frontier. At its core is a giant bank of computers and servers. Traffic generated by China’s 162 million Internet users is routed through the shield, which checks all requested URLs against a blacklist of tens of thousands of Internet addresses. The list includes pages offering political information deemed dangerous by the government, like BBC News and Voice of America. Access to these sites is blocked (at least in theory), and when users attempt to view one of them, they are punished with an involuntary time-out lasting anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 minutes. Search engines are similarly restricted. If you enter the characters for “democracy” or “Tiananmen Square massacre” into Google.cn you will generally get zero results. This is a technological breakthrough for the Chinese government. Until recently, it could not interfere with the inner workings of search engines and instead blocked entire sites, not just individual pages of a site.
“The Golden Shield hardware - supplied by Cisco and other US companies - is supplemented by human censors who are paid about $170 a month. They sit at screens in warehouse - like buildings run by the Public Security Bureau. These foot soldiers in China’s information war monitor domestic news sites, erasing and editing politically sensitive stories. Some sites provide the censors with access so the authorities can alter content directly. Others get an email or a call when changes are required. Similar methods are applied to blogs. Sensitive entries are erased, and in the most egregious cases blogs are shut down altogether.”
As always with these stories, I end up focusing on the part about American companies and their usual willingness to abet practices abroad that we’d find abhorrent here. I think we’re supposed to buy some line about how their involvement in that market “promotes engagement,” which is a marginally debatable point when we’re talking about search companies. It falls apart when the company in question is building and selling hardware designed to prohibit engagement.
Posted by mhall at 6:46 PM | Add Comment
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