"While we look at the Chinese government's decision, maybe around the world we should be looking at all of the governments instead of focusing on China, where we have as much effect as humans on tanks. Or do we feel we can talk more effectively about censorship in distant countries because we worry about it within our own countries?"
>From The Media Center at API
morph The Media Center blog
Tuesday, June 14, 2005 China Makes Bloggers Register: Who's Next?
http://mediacenter.blogs.com/morph/2005/06/china_makes_blo.html
Some news that slipped by my radar, and those of a few others, was a story that got published last week. I kicked myself a bit over it (my excuse was being tied up in WIPO's Online Discussions ). While we're talking about China's Free Speech Crackdown, we should also mention the fact that China has also ordered bloggers to register with the government.
That caught my attention today via email from the DigitalDivide.net email list. Few things surprise me these days, but that link had my heart in my throat for a second. It wasn't because of what some may think, either - it wasn't that I saw civil liberties go down the drain in a very highly populated country.
The truth is that I am not Chinese, and that I have no voice for China, and the people I do know from China aren't in China anymore. China's actions in this regard could be equated to what people have to suffer in American airports these days. I'm equally uncomfortable with both, but the latter is something that I contend with from time to time - and it's almost normal now. So that wasn't what caused my reaction.
What caused my reaction is why it happened. The mechanics and the logic are easy to follow:
(1) China wants to know who these bloggers are.
(2) ICANN doesn't even have dependable information which China could have gotten. Try doing a WHOIS on the spam e-mails you get (spam is so common now we type it in lower case), and try to track down who it is that is sending you these e-mails. Then try to contact them.
(3) China, and probably the rest of the world, knows that WSIS isn't going to have much effect on ICANN, if any effect at all.
So the logical thing to do (never mind why) is to have bloggers register with the government. The logic in that is chilling, but what's more chilling is not that China is doing it. It's that it is happening all over - if that looks ominous, then consider this quote from Cory Doctorow:
...Before the 2004 [US] elections, internal memos from Diebold leaked onto the Web detailing the company's illegal responses to the failures of its voting machines. Diebold didn't deny the memos, instead it targeted the ISPs of the activists who republished them, claiming that the notes were copyrighted works and demanding that they be taken offline immediately... And here's another:
...In 2001 the FBI imprisoned Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov the day after he gave a presentation at a Def Con hacker conference demonstrating the incompetence of Adobe's e-book protection. Charges were eventually dropped, but on Sklyarov's return to Russia, the Russian government issued a warning to its scientists to steer clear of American conferences, as we'd (the United States) turned into the kind of nation that threw people in jail for talking about math...
So maybe China's required registration of bloggers with the government is something that we consider normal. Both quotes of Cory Doctorow are effective censorship - and by the Chinese government requiring bloggers to register, it can sway people from blogging. It could effectively be censorship. And that's OK for many, it seems, but is it OK that it's OK? Put the politics out of your mind if it's there, and ask whether or not it's OK that we view this sort of thing as normal within the United States, but we might react differently when China does something that is more openly subtle?
But it goes beyond the United States. It goes beyond China. Have we forgotten the mystery of the Indymedia server seizures? Or the Civil Society Plenary lists for WSIS, that was discussed for maybe a week, and seems to be largely forgotten?
Meanwhile, on my own personal Web site, the entry "Crime In Trinidad and Tobago" is the most visited page on my site. I have a lot of questionable e-mails on that, a lot of supportive e-mails, and I also have the advantage of not being there. Some claim positions in government, but the ones that would worry me most are not the ones that say that. The ones that do worry me a bit are the ones that say, "Take it down or else," from strange Yahoo (and yes, gmail) accounts. Or else?
Or else what?
We know Microsoft changed it's Chinese portal so that they could get customers. Who else do they change their portals for? Who else alters their information to bypass governments? It's an iceberg, maybe, and the tip is all we see. It's the silences that are most worrisome. We give up our liberties, perhaps because we see the value of our ability to communicate or report effectively as lower than the cost of other people's same ability.
In the words of the Guardian Unlimited Article: ..."Those who continue to publish under their real names on sites hosted in China will either have to avoid political subjects or just relay the Communist party's propaganda," the group said. "This decision will enable those in power to control online news and information much more effectively."...
While we look at the Chinese government's decision, maybe around the world we should be looking at all of the governments instead of focusing on China, where we have as much effect as humans on tanks. Or do we feel we can talk more effectively about censorship in distant countries because we worry about it within our own countries?
But while we still look at Tiananmen Square's Protest in 1989, maybe what we should be focusing on is the Tank Man, the anonymous man whom the crowd sheltered after he stopped 17-plus tanks - where a human did have an effect on the tanks. A.J. Liebling once said, "Freedom of the Press is limited to those who own one."
I'd like to modify that. Freedom of the Press belongs to those who maintain one. Sadly, it seems, they don't come with maintenance instructions.
Posted by Taran Rampersad on June 14, 2005 at 10:02 PM
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