News & Views

[23/8/2009 中国信息中心] 香港各界示威，呼吁中共释放在押异议人士

《今天是8月23日，中国著名作家、独立中文笔会前会长刘晓波因为参与起草《零八宪章》，被北京当局以“涉嫌煽动颠覆国家政权罪”逮捕，已经满两周月了。

香港市民支援爱国民主运动联合会、劳改基金会、独立中文笔会、公民党、香港记者协会、四五行动、民主党、民间人权陣线、香港教育专业人员协会、香港天主教正义和平委员会等十个团体共同发起抗议示威游行，这些团体的成员和有关人士集体到中国政府驻香港联络办公室要求释放刘晓波、胡佳、谭作人、黄琦等所有被关押的异议作家、维权人士，释放所有良心犯；立即废除“煽动颠覆国家政权罪”。》。。。多念

［19／9／09 Radio France International］劳改会在港办活动记中国的罪与罚

《有关活动由本月二十三日起至十月一日在港举行，谴责中共六十年来对人民的一压迫，活动由基金会华盛顿办公室主任妮可‧肯普顿以「中国的镇压机器：中国的劳改制度与改革展望」为题的专题演讲揭开序幕，其余活动包括在中文大学和各行人专用区举办以「劳改下的中国人」为题的专题展览，详细讲述中国人在劳改营内不为人知的经历；又会举办行为艺术表演和研讨会，邀得曾被诬陷触犯间谍罪而入狱的资深记者程翔参与讨论。》。。。多念

The Egg on the CCP’s Face

China’s Communist Party sure has had an embarrassing couple of weeks. Starting with its Green Dam Youth Escort public relations disaster, followed by outrage over the Party’s scapegoat attack on Google, and now, in an extremely telling event, China’s anti-corruption website crashed as users overwhelmed it.

The central government launched its “24-hour anti-corruption website and its accompany hotline number… to inform central government officials about local-level corruption,” the BBC reports. Unsurprisingly, the number of Chinese citizens logging onto the site far exceeded the site’s capacity.

China corruption website crashes [BBC, 6/24/09]

A Chinese website set up so people can inform on corrupt officials has been inundated with so many visitors that it crashed shortly after launching.
Staff said the website was designed to cope with a maximum of 1,000 people making a complaint at the same time.
But the number of people using the site far exceeded this when it was launched on Monday.
A Beijing News editorial said the site’s popularity showed that people preferred national to local inquiries.
The idea of the 24-hour anti-corruption website (www.12309.gov.cn) and its accompanying hotline number was to inform central government officials about local-level corruption.
An earlier version of this nationwide tip-off system generated 20,000 reports of official abuse in 2008.
Corruption is a huge problem in China, and correspondents say the central authorities are keen to crack down on it to prevent the issue weakening government control.

China's Labor Camps on the Agenda at Columbia University [Epoch Times]

“Laogai: The Machinery of Repression in China,” published by Umbrage Editions, is the topic of discussion at Columbia University. Read more...

Critics Say Unhappy Birthday [AFP via Straits Times (Singapore)]

His remarks were echoed by Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in China's system of labor camps known as 'Laogai.' Mr Wu charged that even though US law forbids products made in the Laogai, they were still making their way into the market for lack of compliance.

Harry Wu Testifies on “The State of Global Internet Freedom”

Harry Wu, Laogai survivor and LRF founder, testified for The Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the United States House of Representatives regarding the state of Internet freedom in China. His statement is below:

I want to thank Co-Chairman Wolf and Co-Chairman McGovern for inviting me to speak before the Commission today and for the Commission’s ongoing attention to the human rights situation in China.

Over the past several weeks, the Chinese government has caused quite an uproar among its 300 million or so Internet users, the most of any country in the world, after the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced its decision requiring that all computers sold within the country from July 1st onward be preinstalled with the Green Dam Youth Escort (‘Green Dam’). Developed by Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co., Green Dam is software that uses blacklists and image processing technology to filter out “harmful” words, images, and website addresses.

Jinhui claims that the software is only intended to block pornographic content, but the government has demonstrated as recently as 2008, with what was purported to be a nationwide crackdown on pornographic websites, that its interpretation of “harmful” includes information on human rights topics and commentary that is critical of the Chinese Communist Party. Indeed, the Green Dam software includes filtering options to block religious, political, and other socially sensitive content. To my knowledge, this government mandate represents the most intrusive attempt by any government in the world to systematically censor the Internet on such a large scale.

The Green Dam directive is unprecedented in the extent of control that it aims to achieve over the Internet and its users. Testing of Green Dam has shown that it can not only block access to banned websites, it can also shut down word processing, email, and other programs running on the computer when proscribed language is input into the applications. And just like anti-virus software, the Green Dam software can be updated remotely by Jinhui’s company servers so as to expand the scope of banned content, without notification to its users. More disturbing yet, testing of Green Dam has shown that Jinhui could easily use this remote update capability to alter the software in a way that would allow the company (and, by extension, the government) to monitor the personal communications and Internet browsing behavior of users, turning it into a tool of not only censorship but one of surveillance as well.

China has already developed the most advanced police state in the world, and if implemented as planned, Green Dam would significantly supplement its capabilities. The software would add a new layer of censorship, operating at the level of individual computers, on top of the network-level censorship that already exists, which is commonly referred to as the ‘Great Firewall of China.’ The Great Firewall was developed in the late 1990’s, shortly after the Internet came to China, and was built to a large degree with technology supplied by Western companies such as Cisco Systems, which sold the Chinese government the routers and switches necessary to build the highly sophisticated system. Cisco would later involve itself in the Chinese regime’s ambitious “Golden Shield” project, which aims to develop a national surveillance system and database of citizen records that would be readily accessible by state and public security organs at the national, provincial, and municipal levels. Cisco actively courted and signed contracts with Chinese public security agencies to develop some of these technologies.

A number of other US technology companies have also marketed hi-tech surveillance products to the security organs in China, including facial and voice recognition software that could be very useful for identifying and detaining dissidents. Such sales certainly seem to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the Tiananmen sanctions prohibiting the export of crime control or detection instruments or equipment to China, which were enacted through the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for the 1990-1991 fiscal year. Last year I called upon the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security to update the Commerce Control List to include these kinds of hi-tech surveillance products as dual use technologies, and to take into consideration their end user—the repressive Communist regime. To date, I am unaware of any changes having been made.

The Chinese government has procured the assistance of US companies in restricting online freedom in other ways as well. Companies such as Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft that have operated search engines inside of China have been complicit (though to varying degrees) in filtering search results for sensitive content at the direction of the Chinese government. Notably, several years ago Yahoo! even went so far as to turn over user information for several individuals inside China who used its services to publicize or transmit information critical of the government, the most well known of which is the journalist Shi Tao, that contributed to their being arrested and sentenced to lengthy terms in prison. Yahoo!, which no longer operates inside China but owns a large share of the Chinese search engine Alibaba.com, has since apologized to the families of those individuals and offered them financial compensation. It also partnered with Google, Microsoft and others to create the Global Network Initiative, which aims to develop a shared approach for companies and other stakeholders to advance the freedom of expression and privacy in markets such as China. But it is still unclear how other Internet companies operating in China, including those that have signed onto the GNI, would respond to future requests for user information made by Chinese authorities. That is why I have consistently advocated for the US Congress to pass the Global Online Freedom Act, sponsored by Representative Chris Smith, which would prohibit US companies from complying with such requests, except under limited circumstances.

Fortunately, the rollout of the Green Dam software does not appear to be proceeding as smoothly as the Chinese government had probably hoped it would. In addition to the backlash from its own citizens, including a lawyer who is mounting a legal challenge against the policy, researchers at the University of Michigan and elsewhere have identified major security flaws in the software. It seems that installing Green Dam on a computer makes it highly vulnerable to hackers, who could potentially steal private data or take control of the computer itself. The software is also said to significantly impair the performance of the machine running it. The government has ordered Jinhui to fix these errors, but it is unlikely that they will be able to fully correct the software by the July 1 deadline. Already, there are reports that the Chinese government may be backtracking, with one government official quoted as saying that the Green Dam software does not have to be preinstalled on computers, but can be included in an accompanying disc instead.

In many ways, the Internet has become the new battlefront for freedom and democracy in China. Sadly, I fear it is a war that the Chinese government is slowly winning. It has invested immense resources into “cleaning up” the Internet—acquiring and installing the most advanced firewall technology, employing an estimated 30,000-50,000 Internet police to monitor the web, shutting down domestic blogs and websites, and threatening to take away business licenses from service providers that don’t censor content on their own. Moreover, the more the Chinese public becomes aware that the government is monitoring them, the greater is their tendency toward self-censorship. As for the Green Dam endeavor, even if it is not completely successful, the government will have already laid much of the groundwork to replace it with a superior system at some point in the future.

However, while Chinese technology firms have come a long way since the Great Firewall was first constructed, it seems the government still requires the assistance or complicity of US businesses to make it work. It is telling that the one software package the Chinese government selected to be installed on every new computer in the country, and for which it paid 40 million RMB to make freely available to the public, is alleged to use code that was pirated from a California-based firm, Solid Oak Software. In this latest manifestation of China’s “state capitalism,” not only is there no choice of products offered to the consumers, but the one product chosen by the state was apparently stolen from the US. For its part, Solid Oak, a small firm, is asking US computer manufacturers not to comply with the government edict, which would entail violating their intellectual property rights.

If US computer manufacturers do decide to abide by the Chinese government mandate, they should, at the very least, give very clear and prominent notice to their customers about what the Green Dam software is and provide instructions on how to uninstall it. Still, I sincerely hope that this time around, US companies will think twice about whether they want to cooperate with one of the world’s worst violators of human rights to increase their market share or if they would rather advance the freedom of expression abroad at the expense of profit.

Mo Money, Mo Children

Since China’s One Child Policy was enacted in 1979, women all over China have been subjected to forced late-term abortions (some as late as nine months), forced IUD insertion, forced sterilization, police detention, and even the destruction of their homes.

Additionally, the Policy has created an unnatural gender imbalance – 32 million more men aged under 20 than women – which has lead to increased human trafficking of young boys and women, as well as a host of other problems.

But, as is true in many circumstances in China, money is buying the opportunity to have more children:

China’s One-Child Policy Undermined by the Rich [Telegraph (UK), 6/15/09]

In China’s cities, the fines for having a second child can run up to 200,000 yuan (£20,000). The payment is intended to cover the schooling and healthcare costs of additional children.
However, wealthy parents are now either paying the fines outright, finding a way around them, or travelling to Hong Kong where no permit is needed, according to the government.
Between 2001 and 2008, nearly 78,000 babies were born in Hong Kong to parents registered as living on the mainland.
There have also been thousands of cases of government officials circumventing the policy in order to have more children.
Zhang Weiqing, the former director of the State Family Planning Commission, the office in charge of implementing the one-child policy, told the China Daily newspaper that there is now a huge shadow over the policy, and growing resentment from poorer families.
“Due to the rising mobility of Chinese citizens and the social transformation from the country’s reform and opening up from the late 1970s, it has become tougher to regulate the policy,” he said.
The cost of travelling to Hong Kong to give birth is around 80,000 yuan (£8,000). In response to the stream of women arriving at Hong Kong hospitals, the local health authority put a three-month ban on mothers from the mainland at the end of last year.
It said the “maternity tourists” were costing Hong Kong millions of pounds and preventing it from offering adequate care to Hong Kong residents. A permanent ban on the practice is now being considered in Beijing, according to the China Daily.
In addition, the government has gone on the offensive against public figures with multiple children, in order to set an example. “The fine is a piece of cake for the rich, the government had to hit them harder where it really hurt, at their fame, reputation and standing in society,” said Zhai Zhenwu, a sociology professor with Renmin University of China.
Celebrities have been barred from public shows or television programmes and businessmen have been blocked from receiving government contracts.
The one-child policy was enacted in the late 1970s to halt China’s soaring population growth and has cut the fertility rate from over three children in 1980 to 1.8 in 2008. Without it, China’s population would be some 400 million greater, it is thought.

…all the better to harvest your organs…

Beijing recently announced that “all criminals sentenced to death in Beijing will receive a lethal injection instead of being executed by gunshot.” Lethal injection, explains the director general of the Supreme People’s Court’s research bureau, is “more humane”.

In order to prepare for the switch, Beijing’s No. 1 Detention Center has built a ~~death factory~~ “lethal injection site” which is “equipped with rooms for execution, observation and the storage of bodies.” Training will soon begin for the judicial police, “who will deliver the prisoners and administer the injections” as well as “medical staff who will supervise the use of the drugs” and then ~~harvest the prisoner’s organs~~ “confirm the deaths.”

Beijing’s death factory as a permanent fixture contrasts the use of several “high-tech ‘deathvan[s]‘” by other cities. According to the Daily Mail, “in chilling echoes of the ‘gas-wagon’ project pioneered by the Nazis to slaughter criminals, the mentally ill and Jews,” the death penalty in many Chinese cities takes place with prisoners “strapped inside a vehicle that has been specially developed to make executions more cost-effective and efficient.” Besides being “efficient”, the van is touted as being more “humane”.

China’s hi-tech ‘death van’ where criminals are executed and then their organs are sold on black market [Daily Mail, 3/27/09]

Death will come soon for Jiang Yong. A corrupt local planning official with a taste for the high life, Yong solicited money from businessmen eager to expand in China's economic boom.

Disguised: The execution vehicle looks like a normal police van

Showering gifts on his mistress, known as Madam Tang, the unmarried official took more than £1 million in bribes from entrepreneurs wanting permission to build skyscrapers on land which had previously been protected from development.
But Yong, a portly, bespectacled figure, was caught by the Chinese authorities during a purge on corrupt local officials last year.
He confessed and was sentenced to death. China executed 1,715 people last year, so one more death would hardly be remarkable.
But there will be nothing ordinary about Yong's death by lethal injection. Unless he wins an appeal, he will draw his final breath strapped inside a vehicle that has been specially developed to make executions more cost-effective and efficient.
In chilling echoes of the 'gas-wagon' project pioneered by the Nazis to slaughter criminals, the mentally ill and Jews, this former member of the China People's Party will be handcuffed to a so-called 'humane' bed and executed inside a gleaming new, hi-tech, mobile 'death van.'
After trials of the mobile execution service were launched quietly three years ago - then hushed up to prevent an international row about the abuse of human rights before the Olympics last summer - these vehicles are now being deployed across China.
The number of executions is expected to rise to a staggering 10,000 people this year (not an impossible figure given that at least 68 crimes - including tax evasion and fraud - are punishable by death in China).
Developed by Jinguan Auto, which also makes bullet-proof limousines for the new rich in this vast country of 1.3 billion people, the vans appear unremarkable.
They cost £60,000, can reach top speeds of 80mph and look like a police vehicle on patrol. Inside, however, the 'death vans' look more like operating theatres.
Executions are monitored by video to ensure they comply with strict rules, making it possible to describe precisely how Jiang Yong will die. After being sedated at the local prison, he will be loaded into the van and strapped to an electric-powered stretcher.
This then glides automatically towards the centre of the van, where doctors will administer three drugs: sodium thiopental to cause unconsciousness; pancuronium bromide to stop breathing and, finally, potassium chloride to stop the heart.
Death is reputed to be quick and painless - not that there is anyone to testify to this. The idea for such a 'modern' scheme is rooted in one of the darkest episodes in human history.
The Nazis used adapted vans as mobile gas chambers from 1940 until the end of World War II. In order to make the best use of time spent transporting criminals and Jewish prisoners, Hitler's scientists developed the vehicles with a hermetically sealed cabin that was filled with carbon monoxide carried by a tube from the exhaust pipes.
The vans were first tested on child patients in a Polish psychiatric hospital in 1940. The Nazis then developed bigger models to carry up to 50 prisoners. They looked like furniture removal vans. Those to be killed were ordered to hand over their valuables, then stripped and locked inside.
As gas was pumped into the container and the van headed towards graves being dug by other prisoners, the muffled cries of those inside could be heard, along with banging on the side.
With the 'cargo' dead, all that remained was for gold fillings to be hacked from the victims' mouths, before the bodies were tipped into the graves.
Now, six decades later, just like the Nazis, China insists these death vans are 'progress'.
The vans save money on building execution facilities in prisons or courts. And they mean that prisoners can be executed locally, closer to communities where they broke the law.
'This deters others from committing crime and has more impact,' said one official.
Indeed, a spokesman for the makers of the 'death vans' openly touted for trade this week, saying they are the perfect way to 'efficiently and cleanly' dispatch convicts with lethal injections. Reporting steady sales throughout China, a spokesman for Jinguan Auto - which is situated in a green valley an hour's drive from Chongqing in south-western China - said the firm was bucking the economic trend and had sold ten more vans recently.
The exact number in operation is a state secret. But it is known that Yunnan province alone has 18 mobile units, while dozens of others are patrolling in five other sprawling provinces. Each van is the size of a specially refitted 17-seater minibus.
'We have not sold our execution cars to foreign countries yet,' beamed a proud spokesman. But if they need one, they could contact our company directly.'
Officials say the vehicles are a 'civilised alternative' to the traditional single shot to the head (used in 60 per cent of Chinese executions), ending the life of the condemned quickly, clinically and safely - proving that China 'promotes human rights now,' says Kang Zhongwen, designer of the 'death van'.
It seems a perverse claim, but certainly the shootings can be gruesome. Once carried out in public parks, these executions -sometimes done in groups - have seen countless cases of prisoners failing to die instantly and writhing in agony on the ground before being finished off.
There are other concerns: soldiers carrying out the shooting complain that they are splashed with Aids-contaminated blood. After the shooting, relatives are often presented with the bullet hacked from the condemned's body - and forced to pay the price of the ammunition.
While posing as a modernising force in public, Chinese leaders remain brutal within their own borders. They are, however, anxious to be seen to be moving away from violence against their own people, stressing that all judicial decisions have been taken out of the hands of vengeful local officials and must be ruled on from Beijing.
China has traditionally always taken a ruthless, unemotional view of crime and punishment. Before injections and bullets, the most chilling sentence was death by Ling Chi - death by a thousand cuts - which was abolished only in 1905.
The condemned man was strapped to a table and then, in what was also known as 'slow slicing', his eyes were gouged out.
This was designed to heighten the terror of not being able to see what part of his body would suffer next. Using a sharp knife, the executioner sliced at the condemned's body - chopping off the ears, fingers, nose and toes, before starting to cut off whole limbs.
Traditionalists insisted that exactly 3,600 slices were made. The new mobile execution vans may, indeed, be more humane than this, but their main advantage in official eyes is financial.
According to undercover investigations by human rights' groups, the police, judiciary and doctors are all involved in making millions from China's huge trade in human body parts.
Inside each 'death van' there is a dedicated team of doctors to 'harvest' the organs of the deceased. The injections leave the body intact and in pristine condition for such lucrative work.
After checking that the victim is dead, the medical team first remove the eyes. Then, wearing surgical gowns and masks, they remove the kidney, liver, pancreas and lungs.
Little goes to waste, though the heart cannot be used, having been poisoned by the drugs.
The organs are dispatched in ice boxes to hospitals in the sprawling cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, which have developed another specialist trade: selling the harvested organs.
At clinics all over China, these organs are transplanted into the ailing bodies of the wealthy - and thousands more who come as 'organ tourists' from neighbouring countries such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan.
Chinese hospitals perform up to 20,000 organ transplants each year. A kidney transplant in China costs £5,000, but can rise to £30,000 if the patient is willing to pay more to obtain an organ quickly.
With more than 10,000 kidney transplants carried out each year, fewer than 300 come from voluntary donations. The British Transplantation Society and Amnesty International have condemned China for harvesting prisoners' organs.
Laws introduced in 2006 make it an offence to remove the organs of people against their will, and banned those under 18 from selling their organs.
But, tellingly, the law does not cover prisoners.
'Organs can be extracted in a speedier and more effective way using these vans than if the prisoner is shot,' says Amnesty International.
'We have gathered strong evidence suggesting the involvement of Chinese police, courts and hospitals in the organ trade.'
The bodies cannot be examined. Corpses are driven to a crematorium and burned before independent witnesses can view them.
A police official, who operates a 'multi-functional and nationwide, first-class, fixed execution ground' where prisoners are shot, confirmed to the Mail that it is always a race against time to save the organs of the executed - and that mobile death vans are better equipped for the job.
'The liver loses its function only five minutes after the human cardiac arrest,' the officer told our researcher.
'The kidney will become dysfunctional 30 minutes after cardiac arrest. So the removal of organs must be completed at the execution ground within 15 minutes, then put in an ice box or preservation solution.'
While other countries worry about the morality of the death penalty, China has no such qualms.
For the Beijing regime, it is not a question of whether they should execute offenders, but how to do it most efficiently - and make the most money from it.

"The laughingstock of China"

Not only does Green Dam censorship software contain gaping security flaws, it also (allegedly) contains stolen code from a U.S. software company. According to the Associated Press, “Solid Oak Software of Santa Barbara said Friday that parts of its filtering software, which is designed for parents, are being used in the “Green Dam-Youth Escort” filtering software.” The company plans to pursue legal action, but is still “trying to assess” the situation.

Having been “ridiculed for sloppy programing, possible intellectual property violations and… security holes,” Green Dam Youth Escort has turned into a public relations disaster. An opinion piece in Forbes notes, “This move was so ham-fisted that it provoked exactly what the government doesn’t want: a raging public controversy about government censorship.”

Perhaps Green Dam is just a scapegoat, reflecting years of frustration about repressive controls on freedoms of speech and expression. Or maybe it’s the explicit nature with which the government has admitted its censorship of the Internet that created such an outcry. Whatever the cause, as Rebecca MacKinnon suggests, Green Dam is “certainly turining into the laughingstock of China.”

Company alleges Chinese software has stolen code [Associated Press, 6/13/09]

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A California company claims that the Internet-filtering software China has mandated for all new personal computers sold there contains stolen programming code.

Solid Oak Software of Santa Barbara said Friday that parts of its filtering software, which is designed for parents, are being used in the “Green Dam-Youth Escort” filtering software that must be packaged with all computers sold in China from July 1.

Solid Oak’s founder, Brian Milburn, said he plans to seek an injunction against the Chinese developer that built the software, but acknowledged that it’s new legal terrain for his company.

“I don’t know how far you can try and reach into China and try to stop stuff like this,” he said in an interview. “We’re still trying to assess what they’re doing.”

A phone number for the Chinese developer could not immediately be located. A call by The Associated Press to China’s embassy in the U.S. after business hours Friday went unanswered.

China has mounted a vigorous public defense of the software, saying it wants it to block violence and pornography. But critics say it censors many more things, and does it on a deeper level than the Internet censorship China currently employs.

China has more than 250 million Internet users and employs some of the world’s tightest controls over what they see, often called the “Great Firewall of China,” which refers to technology designed to prevent unwanted traffic from entering or leaving a network.

Political sites and others the government deems offensive are routinely blocked, but that happens at the network level. Savvy users can get around it by bouncing through “proxy” servers in other countries, but it takes some sophistication. Blocked sites simply won’t load in users’ Web browsers.

The new software blocks sites directly from a user’s machine.

A report released Thursday by University of Michigan researchers who examined the Chinese software supports Solid Oak’s claim that the Green Dam software contains pirated code. The report also found serious security vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to hijack PCs running the Chinese software.

The report found that a number of the “blacklist” files that Green Dam employs were taken from Solid Oak’s CyberSitter program.

Blacklists are lists of Web sites that have been flagged as violent or pornographic or malicious or otherwise offensive. Web browsers on computers where blacklists are in use are instructed to block those sites.

The report’s authors — researchers in the university’s computer science and engineering division — also said they found another clue that Solid Oak’s code was stolen: a file that contained a 2004 CyberSitter news bulletin that appeared to have been accidentally included in Green Dam’s coding.

China Is Not A Kindergarten [Forbes, 6/12/09]

Beijing’s clumsy plan to get filtering software inside every Chinese computer has riled netizens.

If this was some official’s clever idea to show Chinese Internet users who is really in charge, it certainly hasn’t worked out as planned.

The story of the week in Chinese Internetland was the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s directive that computer makers must include a content-filtering program on all computers sold in China from July 1. Government officials say the policy is intended to protect children from pornography, which doesn’t explain why the software also bans sensitive political terms (and can be updated remotely to do much more). By trying to force such intrusive filtering on all Chinese consumers, authorities have angered Internet users who do not want to be treated like children.

“China is a kindergarten, that is the basic logic behind this,” says Michael Anti, a Chinese journalist and popular microblogger. “It’s stupid. It’s so stupid.”

This move was so ham-fisted that it provoked exactly what the government doesn’t want: a raging public controversy about government censorship. The anointed filtering software, Green Dam Youth Escort, has been ridiculed for sloppy programming, possible intellectual property violations and gaping security holes that would allow any Web site visited to take control of the computer.

“It’s certainly turning into the laughingstock of China,” says Rebecca MacKinnon, an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre whose blog summed up many of this week’s critiques.

The emergence of an embarrassing government misstep is not in itself an earth-shaking development. The Chinese people are used to the government issuing edicts and then not enforcing them. Just as onerous and ill-conceived regulations are a part of life, so too is ignoring them. The same could be said of the filtering software itself–there is little doubt that any Chinese netizen who wants to access porn will succeed in their determination to do so, and the same goes for the much smaller minority who want to explore politically subversive topics.

Chinese Interent Censorship A "Breakthrough", Chinese Government Says

The Chinese government is on the defensive after its mandate requiring web filtration software on all computers stirred a huge controversy. In the party’s official paper, the Guangming Daily, a report called “the software a breakthrough in the drive for a ‘civilized Internet’”. State television even claimed that the “filtering was endorsed by a ‘vast number’ of parents and experts.” Who these vast number of supporters are and where they have been voicing their support is anyone’s guess.

Rather, reports about the flaws and the outright absurdity of the mandate are surfacing in great numbers. The Wall Street Journal Blog reports that some internet users have started substituting “the words for Green Dam (绿坝, pronounced lüba in Mandarin) with homophones that translate as ‘filter bully’ (滤霸) or ‘donkey king’ (驴霸).”

Worse, the University of Michigan conducted a study of the software and discovered “serious security vulnerabilities due to programming errors.” Their report continues:

Once Green Dam is installed, any web site the user visits can exploit these problems to take control of the computer. This could allow malicious sites to steal private data, send spam, or enlist the computer in a botnet. In addition, we found vulnerabilities in the way Green Dam processes blacklist updates that could allow the software makers or others to install malicious code during the update process.

In short, the study concludes, “deployed in its current form, [Green Dam] will significantly weaken China’s computer security.”

To see the full University of Michigan report, click here.

Pages