huridocs-tech Asia's Cyber Censors

Edited/Distributed by HURINet - The Human Rights Information Network
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## author     : mwark@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au
## date       : 30.04.00
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Web of intrigue: Asia's Cyber Censors
Louise Williams
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0004/29/spectrum/spectrum1.html

The freedom of the Internet threatens Asia's
information-controlling authoritarian states. Yet, as Louise
Williams reports, they also want to be at the forefront of
the IT revolution sweeping the world.

Information is power, or so the enduring dictators of
history have understood. The authoritarian, or
quasi-authoritarian regimes, of the post-colonial era in
Asia have understood well the relationship between control
over information and political power.

In so many of Asia's capitals - from Beijing to Jakarta,
from Rangoon to Hanoi, the scene was much the same. In
obscure back rooms, rows of desks were lined up, their
surfaces rubbed smooth by years of diligent effort, as the
faceless agents of authoritarian states dutifully pored over
newspapers and magazines.

Carefully, the swarms of censors cut out "subversive"
articles from abroad, one by one, or bent low over
"offensive" captions and photographs and blacked them out by
hand. They laboured over their own newspapers, too, erasing
hints of rebellion and allusion to unpalatable truths tucked
within the reams of propaganda which served as their
societies' only sources of information.

When the Soeharto regime came to power in Indonesia in the
mid-1960s it shipped 10,000 of its artists, writers,
unionists and activists off to a barren, isolated island
called Buru where it imposed total censorship. Inmates, many
of whom spent more than a decade eking out a living from the
poor soil, were denied reading material and access to the
tools of writing - pens, pencils, paper, typewriters - so
that they would be unable to transmit their ideas even among
themselves.

Take a leap forward three decades to last May when the IT
Security Unit of Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs
quietly wandered into the files of 200,000 private computers
in what was later explained as an effort to trace a damaging
virus.

The breach was detected by a private computer enthusiast,
forcing the Government to announced that SingNet, the
Internet arm of the largely state-owned telecommunications
giant, SingTel, had been "wrong" to use the state security
apparatus to conduct the scan without first seeking
permission from individual users. Better security was
promised in the future.

But for the citizens of a nation accustomed to government
intervention in almost every aspect of their daily lives,
the scanning scare had already aptly demonstrated the
potential for any one of their business or home computers to
be externally monitored without their knowledge.

Similarly, in 1994 an over-zealous technocrat had instructed
another local Internet provider to scan 80,000 email
accounts of university researchers, an unlikely group to be
specifically targeted in a remote hunt for pornographic
material.

Within the high-rise towers of Singapore's economic success
sit hundreds of thousands of computers in one of the world's
most technologically advanced nations. Recent government
statistics claim 42 per cent of Singaporean households are
linked to the Internet, and 59 per cent have home computers,
the highest participation rate in Asia. In Australia 22 per
cent of homes have Internet access (47 per cent of them with
home computers) and in Japan 13 per cent (42 per cent with
home computers).

Just completed is a nationwide broadband Internet system,
called Singapore One, delivering bedazzling at-home services
such as immediate access to traffic speeds on any street,
thanks to global positioning systems set in all the nation's
taxis, online schools, movies on demand and live news which
the system "remembers" and can be rewound.

Conventional narrow-band Internet connections, such as the
ones most of us use, are free, various government agencies,
libraries and private companies offer banks of PCs to anyone
who walks in off the street and regular community education
programs are held to encourage Singaporeans to embrace the
IT age.

For decades Singapore has fascinated political observers
with its apparently contradictory mix of free-wheeling
market capitalism and political controls; with information
controls to match. Tough press licensing regulations,
internal security provisions and the use of punitive
defamation laws have fashioned a local media which often
looks and sounds like a government mouthpiece, and a society
built around the smooth swoosh of escalators within
expansive shopping malls, not the abrasive clamour of public
debate.

At present, the Singapore Government blocks 100 Internet
sites, but admits this is only a token, and highly
ineffective, effort to control a technology which is the
equivalent of information chaos.

The Internet is clearly the most profound challenge yet for
national governments which have used information control as
one of the key pillars to maintaining political power.

And now, as Singapore gears up to transform its economy into
one of the world's key IT hubs, it is proving a crucial test
case for other like-minded regimes in the region - China,
Vietnam and Malaysia, for example - as to how governments
might handle the threat from cyberspace.

Has information technology - which has taken the control of
communication outside national borders and thrown it into an
anarchic global arena - already effectively defeated
censorship? As such, will the power of the remaining
governments of the region which continue to use censorship
as an important political tool inevitably be eroded?


Or will governments be able to limit the impact of the
Internet by using "national security" laws, building higher
and higher "firewalls" or turning the technology back on its
users, employing it as a giant surveillance device?

Already one regional government has fallen, with the help of
the Internet as a mobilising tool for student demonstrations
and a source of daily alternative information: the Soeharto
Government of Indonesia in May 1998.

Everyday in Malaysia, opposition opinions speed across the
Net; sites such as freeMalaysia.com offer the juiciest
rumours around on corrupt business deals with personal
scandals to match.

>From the United States, China is bombarded with
anti-Beijing propaganda on the Net; senior politburo members
feature prominently on the mailing lists just to demonstrate
that the tables are being turned on a regime which has
specialised in propaganda itself. Vietnam is busy trying to
screen all incoming and outgoing email through a central
censor. Hanoi has bought "firewalls" designed in the US for
corporate use and installed them across the national
network. Yet in cybercafes, groups of computer geeks have
discovered they can occasionally breach them by simply
hitting cancel over and over again.

The hermit state of Burma has responded by banning the
Internet altogether, choosing autarchy for its already
impoverished citizens over the risk information technology
poses to the military regime.

In Communist Party-controlled Laos, the official local
newspaper recently made a serious tactical error in the
battle for its readers' minds. A group of Lao dissidents in
the US had "borrowed" the newpaper's masthead and set up an
opposition version of the daily news, posting it on the Web.
The Vientiane Times disowned the copycat with outraged
announcements in its own pages, merely sending more and more
curious readers off to the Internet.

While the power of information might be a grave threat to
many of Asia's rulers, it is also economic growth.

Modern economies require sophisticated communication
technology and the transmission of sophisticated ideas.
Clumsy attempts at information control have been recorded
along the way in the most authoritarian of states.

The invention of the facsimile prompted Hanoi's communist
leaders to order each outgoing and incoming fax to pass
physically through the hands of the censors, who sat out of
sight upstairs in "fax centres" waiting for trays of letters
to be sent up using pulleys. In Burma, where fax machines
must be registered before use, the acting honorary consul
for several European countries, Leo Nichols, is still
languishing in jail, convicted of owning an unregistered
machine.

But the spectacular advances in information technology have
rendered the censors of the past, with their quaint armoury
of scissors and thick black pens, and their "secret reading
rooms", obsolete. New battle lines are being drawn for
control of the Internet, but the speed and mode of
transmission and the sheer volume of information flashing
around the globe means this is a much more difficult line to
hold.

In the evolution of information controls the Internet is not
just the next incremental development in information
technology.

"It is an astonishingly large, quantum leap," said Geoff
Huston, one of Australia's foremost Internet experts and a
member of the Internet Architecture Board.

"All the other forms of communication are simple, one-trick
ponies compared with the Internet. The telephone is just for
voice, TV is just for TV, but the architecture of the
Internet means it is for any of these things - sound,
images, video - and the network itself doesn't interfere
with what is moving across it."

For national governments built on information control the
challenge is immense, argued Roland Rich, co-editor of the
recent book Losing Control: Freedom of the Press in Asia
(Asia Pacific Press) and director of the Centre for
Democratic Institutions at the Australian National

University.

"The Internet allows people to bypass the political
leadership of the country and to speak to each other
directly. It is by definition anarchic, and of course it is
often inaccurate, but nevertheless it gives people freedom
of expression.

"What we are seeing in the region is a spectrum of responses
from governments that fear the Internet, from outright bans
in North Korea and Burma, to a range of ways of attempting
to control what information is available on the Net.

"China has recently announced all sites must be registered
and is using criminal laws to try to control access.
Singapore has adopted a more sophisticated approach by
working through the servers to enter people's individual
computers."

National governments have built systems of information
control around national borders and using national
telecommunications systems.

The Internet is borderless, allowing groups from outside to
beam message into individual nations. It is also an
English-based technology dominated by Western ideas.

Most of the huge volumes of information whizzing around the
world is not political, nor of any interest to governments
or most Net users.

Some is of interest to censors because it exceeds the limits
of moral tolerance within societies, such as pornography and
violence. And some of it is of interest because it is
perceived to undermine government's hold of power, either by
promoting opposing ideas or by specifically seeking to
mobilise opposition.

"Clearly the most comfortable situation for a one-party
state is to monopolise all information. But the problem with
the information-based economy is that new ideas will be
lateral. You can't try to corral information flow so that
you only let through ideas about food production technology,
for example," said Rich.

"The problem with 20th-century ideas of information control
is that the 21st-century economy is based on information
flow. The same problems we had with central planning and
control over the industrial economy in the 20th century will
recur with the central control of the information economy in
the 21st century.

Technically, said Huston, the concept of control
contradicted the very structure of the Internet.

"With the telephone, the handset was just a piece of plastic
and the lines in the middle were doing the work. The
Internet is essentially a dumb network, it is the computers
at each end that matter, the network itself just shifts data
around the world without knowing what is going on.

"To contol the packets of information on the Internet would
be a bit like trying to find out what was inside individual
cars by controlling the road system; you would have to stop
each car, open it and look inside and so the efficiency and
free flow of your traffic would be wrecked."

In general, private corporations use "firewalls" which
screen out all Net sites, except those being used for their
business, partly to stop employees wasting time and partly
to protect their commercial interests.

Firewall systems used by national governments usually allow
access to the Web with a specific list of exclusions, which
requires the IT security agents to know what they are
looking for. These systems are easy to subvert with tricks
as simple as renaming, then "spamming" the new site to tens
of thousands of users.

"If there is one party on one side of a firewall and another
party on the other side and they want to talk to each other
and they try quite hard, they will probably subvert it,"
said Huston.

"The best solution is not necessarily deploying technology
to answer a social problem. If the wall is made higher then
people will build a higher ladder.

"And blocking sites attaches to them the cache of being
forbidden fruit and then the game of subversion becomes even
more important than the content."

James Gomez knows he is being watched. But, for the
35-year-old former student activist and political scientist
from the University of Singapore, the Net is a "soap box"
which wasn't available to him in the past.

His "politics21" Web site talks about vague democratic ideas
for Singapore; pushing the boundaries of acceptable
political challenges to the Government but staying within
legal limits of various internal and national security
regulations. His main beef these days is that Singapore has
become such a cowed and complacent society over the years
that censorship, as such, really isn't necessary any more
because everyone self-censors as a matter of course.

"I recognise that when you go on the Net you are being
watched. In that sense it becomes a skewed medium because it
allows your opponents to read you and it makes surveillance
easier for regimes which rely on monitoring individuals," he
said.

"But the Net is an open space, you don't have to compete for
space in a newspaper or magazine, for example, you have all
the space you want."

In Singapore, he said, "everyone is playing the game", the
authorities and their critics alike. Government critics
believe some anti-Government material is posted by the
intelligence services, just to monitor who reads it.
Critics, too, make sure they send their views straight to
intelligence officials, just to demonstrate they know how to
find them.

Singapore has always been an interesting case study in Asia.

Its founding prime minister, Lee Kwan Yew, successfully
promoted the idea of "Asian values" in politics in the 1980s
and early '90s by arguing that Western democracies did not
understand the structure of Asian societies nor what
political systems were appropriate for them.

Lee's view was essentially that developing economies could
not afford the disruption that individual rights of free
speech entailed. "What is the use of screaming in the
slums," he was fond of saying, singling out the democratic
Philippines as an example of the failure of a Western
political model in Asia which had brought only dire poverty
to the people.

In Singapore, as in Malaysia and Indonesia, Taiwan and South
Korea, individual rights were suspended in the name of
economic development; the right of an individual to housing,
employment and food was greater than the right of an
individual to criticise the regime in power. Communist
Party-controlled regimes in China and Indo-China felt no
such compunction to respond to their Western critics.

Naturally, combined with economic success came the downside
of regimes who are accountable only to themselves; in
varying degrees corruption, a growing gap between the rich
and poor and systems of advancement based on connections not
merit have marred Asia's one-party states.

Since the mid-1980s the political map of Asia has changed
dramatically; with pro-democracy forces pushing out
authoritarian governments in the Philippines, South Korea,
Thailand, Indonesia and Taiwan, leaving Lee's neat theory of
"Asian values" looking somewhat frayed or at least out of
date.

Singapore in 2000, said Associate Professor Bernard Tan,
chairman of the National Internet Advisory Committee, "is
very concerned about what is coming across the Internet".

"But, at the same time we want to make sure that the
Internet flowers as an industry and it is very important
that content regulation is done in an enlightened way so
that Internet usage grows."

Singapore's initial plans for heavy-handed controls on the
Net so alarmed IT companies that its national ambition of
becoming an IT hub - and especially a showcase of e-commerce
- seemed under threat.

"We have advised the Government to use a 'light touch', they
don't have to look at every page every day," Tan said of why
the regulations were loosened to block only 100 sites.

At Singapore's high-tech Science Park, officials are keen to
explain that the Western press has exaggerated censorship on
the Net. The discussion is steered towards non-political
blocks on pornography and violence to protect children and
gee-whiz demonstrations of the extraordinary power of
Singapore One. Surveillance, as a control tool, is not
discussed.

George Yeo, Singapore's Trade and Industry Minister, told a
recent conference in Hong Kong: "The Internet will reduce
government's ability to restrain you to a set of behaviour.
We just symbolically block off a few sites to make a point."

Yeo also told the conference that Singapore had been
advising teams of senior officials from China on Internet
controls. Vietnam is also believed to have sent officials to
Singapore.

"I was a student leader 10 years ago, but I didn't have this
opportunity to embrace political issues through this medium,
so now we have to milk it for what it is worth," said Gomez.

The question, though, is whether the availability of new
ideas will be translated into new political challenges to
the incumbent regime.

In Singapore, where rapid economic growth has turned a tiny
island ringed by mangrove swamps into a modern city state in
three decades, complacency is high. Singapore's citizens are
relatively wealthy, the state provides housing, health care,
education and a range of public services; opposition figures
have a lot to lose.

"The idea that by simply availing yourself of the Internet
you are availing yourself of subversive material is far from
the truth. And even if you are accessing subversive material
people have to decide whether or not they want use it," said
Associate Professor Garry Rodan, from the Asia Research
Centre at Murdoch University.

"To challenge a regime people must first be in a position to
decide, that on balance, they have little to lose," said
Rodan.

"I am the Web master of freeMalaysia.com, a Web site which
supports the process of political and social reform in
Malaysia. FreeMalaysia is one of 50 such sites on the
Internet," said an anonymous letter sent to the
pro-Government New Straits Times newpaper in Kuala Lumpur
late last year.

"As a conduit of free expression, the Internet has played a
pivotal role in the recent political awakening of Malaysia.
One measure of the impact .... is the Government's
increasing aggressiveness against the 'reformasi' [reform]
phenomenon and those supporting it."

Shortly before the letter was sent, freeMalaysia was
labelled a "threat to national security" by the Mahathir
Government and the ruling UNMO party announced it had

identified 48 Web sites containing "slanderous and
defamatory" material which would be investigated.

FreeMalaysia promises to provide "the sort of free speech
which is next to impossible to find ANYWHERE in the
traditional print and broadcast media".

But Malaysia has not shut the Net down.

Malaysia, like Singapore, has big high-tech ambitions; in
Mahathir's case a $US20 billion ($33.6 billion)"multimedia
super corridor" which is supposed to end at the Petronas
Twin Towers, the world's tallest buildings in downtown Kuala
Lumpur. International telecommunications companies have
expressed their concerns about potential Net control and the
"super corridor" is lagging well behind schedule, prompting
Mahathir to announce that the Net would be free.

Instead, in December 1998, the Malaysian Government ordered
cybercafes to register users and provide that information to
police.

And, unlike Singapore, where the political waters have been
virtually becalmed for decades, Malaysia is in the throes of
a bitter political tussle over jailed former deputy prime
minister Anwar Ibrahim. The Net, political observers say,
now serves as the main source of news for much of the middle
class; a hotch potch of scandal, opinion, rumour, innuendo
and truth. As such, the staid broadsheets like the New
Straits Times can simply be ignored. Mahathir has the upper
hand but a significant, educated opposition has formed
around Anwar and a new "uncensored" online newspaper
Malaysiakini is already boasting 50,000 hits a day.

Less than two years ago, the Soeharto regime in Indonesia
was suddenly confronted with the power of the Net. For
years, Indonesian oppositionists in exile in the US had been
cobbling together critical stories and sending them back
home to a confidential list of users. In a nation with few
computers, the stories were photocopied and distributed by
hand. A crude anti-Soeharto home page, with a picture of the
old man defaced with blood, was set up by intelligence
officials to catch those on the Net. Most ignored the
warning that anyone accessing the site could be tracked by
military intelligence.

In truth - with the national economy in free-fall and
millions of new unemployed on the streets - the Net could
not be controlled by an underpaid, impoverished Ministry of
Information, itself barely equipped with typewriters.
Instead, the Net and mobile phones became the mobilising
instruments of student demonstrations; times and places were
posted as well as appeals to business people, who could see
the end coming, to show what side they were on and send food
and water for the long, hot protests.

"Power grows out of the barrel of a gun," said Chairman Mao
Zedong of the success of China's communist revolution.

"Yet it is equally accurate to say that power grows out of,
and is sustained by, the nib of a pen," argued Hong
Kong-based China commentator, Willy Wo-Lap Lam.

"Propaganda, through the heavy-handed manipulation of the
media," Lam said, has been just as powerful in upholding the
"mandate of heaven" of the Chinese Communist Party, as the
army and the police.

By late last year there were an estimated 4 million Chinese
online, a tiny percentage of the population, but enough to
have attracted considerable attention from the security
apparatus.

Many Chinese, for example, knew about the $US10 billion
($16.8 billion) smuggling scandal that was unfolding in
Xiamen because they read about it on the Web, while local
newspapers were banned from reporting on it. As such, even
rumour becomes a potential "accountability" tool for a
regime which cannot be challenged at the polls.

>From Beijing have come all kinds of bellicose statements
such as claims that the Net is being used to leak "state
secrets" and spread "harmful information", thus justifying
the establishment of a committee which is supposed to have
the ability to identify any individual Net user. Just how
that can be done, technically, is a bigger question.

Monitoring equipment has been installed on all of China's
main Web sites, all Chinese portals employ staff to weed out
politically critical statements from chat rooms, Shanghai's
authorities recently shut down 127 unregistered Internet
cafes and individuals have been jailed for crimes such as
passing on email addresses.

But, while China has blocked sites put up by the US
Government - Radio Free Asia and the Voice of America, for
example - it has failed to shut off the thousands of sites
set up by Chinese dissidents in the US and other parts of
the world.

Consider the artful dodging of the US-based VIP Reference, a
"subversive" Internet magazine regularly sent to at least
300,000 addresses in China, including the state security
units. It includes political news censored by the mainland
Government, information about dissidents and exposes of
factional struggles within the party leadership. To escape
detection the New York- and Washington-based organisers
switch providers every 24 hours and recipients are asked not
to forward the files inside China where they can be
monitored.

"We want to destroy the system of censorship over the
Internet," VIP editor Li Hongkuan was quoted as saying by
the Kyodo news service last year.

"The Internet will affect China more deeply than other
societies because

China is a closed society and the Internet is an open
technology," said Guo Liang, a researcher at the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences and one of China's most prominent
writers on the Net, in a recent interview.

"In 1989, I was in Tiananmen Square. We failed then. The
Internet won't fail."

According to Willy Wo-Lap Lam: "It seems fortress CCP
[Chinese Communist

Party] cannot withstand the winds of change for long.
Government propaganda has increasingly lost credibility ...
as more urban intellectuals have access to satellite
television and, in particular, dissident Web sites.

"The growing diversity and irreverence of the alternative
media is paving the way for the end of one-party
dictatorship."

"The face of Asia has been changed, even scarred,
considerably by technology. Why then, the euphoria over the
power of the Internet?" asked Phar Kim Beng, who teaches
conflicts in modern history at Harvard University, in a
recent essay.

"Can the Internet upstage the cumulative impacts of steam,
electricity and nuclear power combined? More pointedly, can
the Net change Asian politics and society?

"This appears to be a tall order. The Internet, after all,
lacks the defining dimension of power called coercion. More
precisely, the Internet does not possess what states
otherwise have in abundance: the monopoly of violence.

"Be that as it may, it would be myopic for anyone to deny
the revolutionary power of the Net."

Phar argued that the Net has both undermined the
restrictions of geography by making physical travel
unnecessary and enlarged the scope of political
participation by offering cheap, fast communication to all
sorts of disparate groups.

The Net is only a tool. But, said Rodan, it now lies at the
nexus of the desire of nations to achieve economic growth in
a globalised economy and at the same time maintain political
control.

Rodan believes that technical controls and the use of fear
of arrest or surveillance can only be partly successful
unless governments can offer their citizens improving living
conditions or other incentives not to rock the boat. As
such, the impact of the Net will be uneven and the success
of governments to control the information coming across it
will be just as varied.

"Regimes that don't have coherent and efficient
bureaucracies and don't have effective means of co-opting
the population are at greatest risk from the Internet," he
said.

"On its own, the Net is of no strategic use. Its power only
comes alive when there is a band of active citizen groups to
promote it. The power of the Net to change Asia - where
three quarters of the population still survives on $US1
[$1.68] a day - should be tempered with realistic
expectations," said Phar.

The power of the Net, he argues, is "corrosive" and cannot
be expected to undermine authoritarian regimes instantly.

"That said, the Net is here to stay. It has already
transformed the economies of the US and Europe. Given time,
Asia will have to live with the power of the Internet."




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