Zhong Guo, Middle Kingdom
The Overseas Press Club of America ran an article about the blogger guide, in the interview I extensively discussed the roles of US companies in building the infrastructure of the filter in China – which really is the bane of my feelings on the whole thing. China will do what China will do, what I really hate is that investment from the free world is behind the technology that allows Chinese people to be oppressed and part of the profit stock holders receives is on the back of killing the only medium for free flow of information in China. This article was great as it gets to the heart of the matter, which is that the capitalistic system reinforces repression in a form of information appeasement for the sake of profit. I really liked the quote about the Cisco lifestyle helping people go to jail. I was thinking if one could actually pick an epitaph for a blog, if a headstone was ever needed for Glutter the entity, I think it would be quite fitting.
"Sham-Shackleton, who herself once worked for a censor , argues that ethical issues should override the obvious economic incentives for corporations.
“Just because something is a reality doesn’t mean that fact overrides moral questions” she remarks. Recalling the case of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist sentenced to ten years in prison after Yahoo provided Beijing with information, Sham-Shackelton also poses a question: “Why shouldn’t Yahoo! be raked over for putting someone in prison?” she asks. “Why is it ok for the U.S. to do this in China?”
Companies like Yahoo, CISCO, Google, Nortel and Microsoft are “building the infrastructure” that make its censorship possible, says Sham-Shackleton.
“The ‘CISCO lifestyle’ is helping people go to jail,” she comments, an ironic reference to the company’s promotion of the ‘internet lifestyle’ at the beginning of this decade."
New
blog guide highlights growing influence
By
Joscelyn Jurich
October
26 , 2005
Blogging
allows me to keep my promises to the dead,” writes artist and Hong Kong
based blogger Yan Sham Shackelton in Reporters
Without Borders‘
(RSF) new “Handbook
for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents.”
Sham-Shackleon began her blog glutter in part as a tribute to those who died in the Tianamen Square
Massacre.
“Today
we understand Marshall McLuhan’s observation that ‘the world is a global
village’ better than he did” notes Iranian journalist and blogger Arash
Sigarchi, who got a 14-year prison sentence for criticizing Iran ‘s government
online.
Sham-Shackleton
and Sigarchi are two of several bloggers profiled in the handbook, a first-of-its-kind
attempt to help bloggers in repressive countries to be strident advocates
for free speech and democracy without winding up in prison.
“The
guide was important to release now because people need it,” says Julien
Pain, Director of the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders Internet Freedom
Desk.
RSF
lists
seventy ‘cyber-dissidents’
who have been imprisoned since 1999, with 98 per cent of those jailed
hailing from China. The Committee
to Protect Journalists
reports that already this year three Chinese Internet journalists have
been sentenced to jail. According to Pain, the RSF handbook has already
been downloaded more than 2,000 times in Chinese.
Ironically
just three days after the guide’s publication, China’s State Council and
Ministry of Information imposed new restrictions on Internet users that
will severely limit news organizations’ editorial freedom to post news
and commentary independent of government approval. Individuals and organizations
will also require approval from the State Council Information Office as
a prerequisite news or commentary to e-mail distribution lists. RSF detailed
the government’s further restrictions on content, which included bans
on news that “destroys the country’s reputation and benefits” or that
might encourage “illegal gatherings, strikes, etc to create public disorder.”
Censors
find American help
While
the Chinese, Iranian and other governments sanction online censorship,
the tools that make it possible largely originate in multinationals like
Yahoo,
CISCO,
Google,
Nortel
and Microsoft.
As the OPC
press freedom committee notes,
these and other US firms are instrumental in helping China censor the
internet. Saudi government censors also have reblocked access to important
software tools, including Blogger, the photo sharing program Flickr, and
the diary service LiveJournal. RSF reported that the Saudis used a filter
provided by the US company, Secure Computing, to do so.
According to an October 6 RWB
report, Blogger was only temporarily barred and is now accessible, but
Flickr and LiveJournal remained blocked. A 2004 report by the Open
Net Initiative,
a collaborative organization dedicated to monitoring internet filtering,
says the Iranian government also has used Secure Computing’s SmartFilter
to block sites hosted in English and local languages.
Press
freedom groups now are trying to get the U.S. Congress and investment
groups to pressure the companies providing technology that allows China
and Saudi Arabia to restrict site access.
David
Perlmutter, Senior Fellow at Louisiana State University ‘s Reilly Center
for Media and Public Affairs and an Associate Professor of Mass Communications,
is less hopeful. The realities of the free market, says Perlmutter, impede
change originating from the business sector or the federal government.
“Microsoft
is not going to give up everyone having the Internet for the sake of Falun
Gong,” says Perlmutter, mentioning a group subject to severe repression
in China. “And I hardly think we’re going to get a congressional movement
to punish China.”
Sham-Shackleton,
who herself once worked for a censor , argues that ethical issues should
override the obvious economic incentives for corporations.
“Just
because something is a reality doesn’t mean that fact overrides moral
questions” she remarks. Recalling the case of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist
sentenced to ten years in prison after Yahoo provided Beijing with information,
Sham-Shackelton also poses a question: “Why shouldn’t Yahoo! be raked
over for putting someone in prison?” she asks. “Why is it ok for the U.S.
to do this in China?”
Companies
like Yahoo,
CISCO,
Google,
Nortel
and Microsoft
are “building the infrastructure” that make its censorship possible, says
Sham-Shackleton.
“The
‘CISCO lifestyle’ is helping people go to jail,” she comments, an ironic
reference to the company’s promotion of the ‘internet
lifestyle‘
at the beginning of this decade.
RSF’s
guide provides practical advise on how to get the information from the
guide through firewalls and how to translate it into other languages.
At present the guide is available in Chinese, Arabic, Persian, English
and French. The organization hopes to translate it into Spanish and Russian.
Blogs
go mainstream
There
are many signs that blogs are a transformative force for the media, human
rights, and freedom of speech. Last May, Amnesty
International declared
2005 the "year of the blogosphere” describing blogging as “a phenomenon
that has profound implications for press freedom and human rights.” Earlier
this month, Yahoo decided to include a selection of blogs in its news
section.
"Traditional
media doesn’t have the time and resources to cover all the stories,"
said Joff Redfern, product director for Yahoo! Search, quoted in a Reuters
article on the Yahoo decision. Blogs “add substantially” to stories readers
are able to find in the other news sources available on the site, Redfern
explained.
In
September, Google launched search tool that allows users to find blogs
by topic. Numerous newspaper websites have also launched blogs including
The
Christian Science Monitor,
The
Guardian,
and Le
Monde.
Bloggers,
writes Pain in the guidebook, “are often the only real journalists in
countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure.”
Yan Sham-Shackleton Online 