Inside the Great Firewall - Print Version - International Herald Tribune - The Diigo Meta page

• 19 Apr 08
  

  beth gourley

  Good overview of the moral dilemmas/compromises of living in China when dealing with the interent. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.iht.com%2Fbin%2Fprintfriendly.php%3Fid%3D12136850

  china internet firewall

  • China's Internet is a business opportunity so grand and irresistible that it can blind normally circumspect people to the moral compromises that cooperation with Chinese government authorities inevitably entails.
  • made inquiries at the China offices of a number of American law firms to ask for help in comparing results for Internet searches performed inside China - within the "Great Firewall" of government censorship, as it is called - with searches performed from outside.
  • aw firms demurred, explaining, with commendable candor at least, that they could not risk being observed checking out search terms like "Tiananmen Square" or "Falun Gong."
  • transforms even hardened litigators into wimps.
  • 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 mass scale.
  • China's leaders maintain censorship solely to maintain their monopoly on political power.
  • create a fear that is far more effective than direct regulation.
  • are subject to blocking by the Great Firewall based not on their content, but on their capacity to create, inside China, large, voluntary online communities that are independent of the government.
  • Western 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.
  • t 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
  • should do everything they reasonably can to protect their Chinese customers from the surveillance (and worse) of Chinese authorities.
  • 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.
  • barring of anonymity is the surest means of getting users to appreciate the risks of saying what the government doesn't want to hear.
  • The companies that choose to participate must learn to be both honest with themselves, and honest with their customers.

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