PRESS FREEDOM | Informing citizens, ensuring accountability
15 April 2008
Governments, Companies Impede Free Internet Expression
Amnesty Internatinal USA query relationships of governments and companies
By Erica Razook
Diversified media and improved information technologies expose people to a broader range of ideas. Some governments want to control ideas, however, and attempt to deny their citizens access to them. Amnesty International, a global human rights organization, is working to counter the actions of those repressive governments.
Erica Razook is a legal fellow in the business and human rights program of Amnesty International USA, headquartered in New York City.
A very simple exercise illustrates the broad reach of Internet censorship. Search "Tiananmen Square" on www.google.cn. (the Google self-censoring Chinese Web site) and then perform the same search on www.google.com (the main, U.S.-based version).
The results are strikingly different. On google.cn, results unanimously describe the geographical location of the square, and they are shockingly devoid of any mention of the 1989 massacre of students, an event that is described in the top results of the google.com search. Google is not alone. Microsoft, Yahoo!, Baidu, and other Internet companies operating in China, whether U.S. - or Chinese-based, are heavily filtering search results at the behest of the Chinese government.
In a time when so much of our knowledge comes to us through the Internet and new media, such blatant whiting-out of historic events, and of current information from news services, democratic governments, educators, and human rights organizations, demonstrates a widespread assault on freedom of speech and expression. More troubling than seeing governments repress free speech is recognizing that companies, often U.S. companies, are helping them do it.
Reports from China
Amnesty International first reported on the issue of repression of freedom of expression and information on the Internet in November 2002. In the report State Control of the Internet in China, Amnesty cited several U.S. companies — Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, Websense, and Sun Microsystems — that had reportedly provided technology used to censor and control the use of the Internet in China. Following the publication of the report, several companies dismissed allegations that they may be contributing to human rights violations in China. Cisco Systems denied that the company tailors its products for the Chinese market, saying that "if the government of China wants to monitor the Internet, that's their business. We are basically politically neutral." Microsoft said it "focused on delivering the best technology to people throughout the world," but that it "cannot control the way it may ultimately be used."
Responses like these provided an early glimpse of the maddening semantic maneuverings that have come to define how American technology companies respond when challenged on their complicity with repressive governments. Several companies have fully embraced the requests of governments to directly and actively provide services to surveil e-mail and blogs and to censor and filter Web content and search results. Though their human rights rhetoric has become more nuanced, companies nonetheless continue to go along with the abusive practices of governments that exploit technology to repress free expression.
In July 2006, Amnesty published further research on the role of U.S. Internet companies in the report Undermining of Freedom of Expression in China, which focused on Yahoo!'s, Microsoft's, and Google's cooperation with the Chinese government's filtering of search engines and e-mail and censoring of Web and blog content.
The report described how Microsoft, for example, filters search engine results, producing only what is sanctioned by the Chinese government. Additionally, Microsoft has refused users of MSN Spaces, a blog service, the ability to write and title their blogs on certain topics deemed unacceptable by the Chinese government, such as "Falun Gong," "Tibet independence," and "June 4" (the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre). Chinese journalist and blogger Zhao Jing (also known as Michael Anti), an active critic of censorship in China, posted his blog on MSN Spaces. Zhao's blog was shut down by Microsoft in December 2005, apparently following a request from Chinese authorities.
In another move to crack down on free speech, the Chinese government sentenced journalist Shi Tao to 10 years in prison for sending an e-mail through his Yahoo! e-mail account to a U.S.-based, pro-democracy Web site. The e-mail contained information the Chinese Central Propaganda Department had reported to the newspaper where Shi worked. Shi Tao's prosecution and sentencing was made possible after Yahoo! provided personal account holder information to the Chinese government. While Yahoo! has claimed, and testified before the U.S. Congress, that it knew nothing "about the nature of the investigation" into Shi Tao, released documentation of the request indicated otherwise.
Yahoo! officials appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives in November 2007 to respond to a charge that the company knew it was complying with an unjust request for Shi Tao's information. Representative Tom Lantos, the chairman of the panel, further alleged that Yahoo! lied to Congress when it said it did not know the nature of the request. After members of the committee from both political parties were firm in their critical questioning and condemnation of Yahoo!'s compliance with requests of the Beijing State Security Bureau and its unwillingness to compensate the victims' families, Lantos called the firm's chief executive officer and general counsel moral "pygmies" and their performance "appallingly disappointing."
Ten days after the hearing, Yahoo! settled a lawsuit with the family of Shi Tao and another jailed Chinese journalist. The journalists sought to prove that Yahoo!'s Hong Kong-based subsidiary was responsible for their jailing. The company denied responsibility but agreed to pay the plaintiffs an undisclosed amount. (See following sidebar, "The Dilemma of the Information Industry.")
In between Congress's initial inquiry in February 2006 and the most recent November 2007 hearing, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, and other Internet and telecommunications companies joined an initiative with human rights organizations, including Amnesty, to develop voluntary industry standards on free expression and privacy. But in apparent contradiction of this initiative, Yahoo! (along with Microsoft and some Chinese companies) signed yet another self-disciplinary pledge in China that further impinges on users' ability to express political dissent over the Internet.
The nongovernmental press advocacy organization Reporters Without Borders made public the details of the agreement in which the companies agree to register and maintain the real names of bloggers and monitor and delete "illegal" content. (Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have said they will not implement "real-name blogging," but given their history of complying with Chinese requests for content removal and e-mail account holders' personal information, their signatures on this pledge are not encouraging.) More troubling, Yahoo! could not assure Congress that what happened to Shi Tao would never happen again.
Restrictions Elsewhere
China, though, is certainly not the only country cracking down on free speech over or through the use of the Internet. In Vietnam, where recent laws have restricted free expression on the Internet, Nguyen Vu Binh, is serving a seven-year sentence after publishing criticism, partly on the Internet, about corruption and violations of human rights. Truong Quoc Huy was arrested at an Internet café’ Ho Chi Minh City; his whereabouts are unknown and no public charges have been brought against him.
Burma's military government is reported to be waging a campaign of fear against its own people, detaining thousands of monks and civilians in deplorable and filthy conditions, subjecting them to beatings and terrifying them and their families — even young children and people who were merely bystanders to the peaceful protests in September.
The Burmese repression of political protestors has occurred not only on the streets, but on the Internet as well. For years, the country has engaged in extensive filtering. The height of its censorship efforts, though, may have happened on September 29, 2007, when after eyewitness accounts, photos, and video of raging human rights abuses were beginning to be broadcast to the world through blogs and other online media, the Burmese military junta shut down Internet access altogether and reportedly terminated the majority of cell-phone services.
The political protests and government response in August through October 2007 in Burma demonstrate the power of the Internet to promote both democracy and human rights, as well as to serve the desire of repressive regimes to limit their citizens' ability to communicate with the world.
It is this dichotomy that has given rise to irrepressible.info [http://irrepressible.info/], a Web-based campaign to harness Internet technology to end censorship. The Web is an unparalleled tool of free expression, despite growing efforts to control and censor it and to persecute and imprison people who criticize their governments online and call for democracy, a free press, and human rights protections. Developed by Amnesty International and supported by the U.K.-based Observer and the OpenNet Initiative, irrepressible.org has reported on Internet repression across the globe, in countries including Burma, China, Vietnam, Tunisia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.
Irrepressible.info encourages people to publish content "fragments" that would otherwise be censored by governments and cooperating companies. It asks people to take its pledge to call on governments to stop the unwarranted restriction of freedom of expression on the Internet and on companies to stop helping them do it. It serves as a repository for news of online censorship.
In November 2006 Amnesty presented the signatures of 50,000 people who had taken the irrepressible pledge to the chairman of the U.N. Internet Governance Forum (IGF). Thousands continue to take the pledge, and Amnesty will continue to work towards the realization and protection of free expression online through international frameworks such as the IGF and by supporting domestic legislative efforts to assure that U.S. companies are not part of the unjustifiable denial of open, peaceful speech and expression of ideas over the Internet.
Supporters of free Internet expression look forward to the day that governments and companies will make this article and its concerns obsolete. I urge the reader to try the search experiment in the first paragraph sometime in the future. I hope you find that the described discrepancy of results no longer exists and that everyone has an unobstructed view of the world. The degree to which this article has become antiquated and irrepressible.info irrelevant will be the measure of our collective achievement.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
From the December 2007 edition of eJournal USA.
