Annual report : everyone's interested in the Internet - especially dictators

The Internet has revolutionised the world's media. Personal websites, blogs and discussion groups have given a voice to men and women who were once only passive consumers of information. It has made many newspaper readers and TV viewers into fairly successful amateur journalists.

Dictators would seem powerless faced with this explosion of online material. How could they monitor the e-mails of China's 130 million users or censor the messages posted by Iran's 70,000 bloggers? The enemies of the Internet have unfortunately shown their determination and skill in doing just that.

China was the first repressive country to realise that the Internet was an extraordinary tool of free expression and quickly assembled the money and personnel to spy on e-mail and censor "subversive" websites. The regime soon showed that the Internet, like traditional media, could be controlled. All that was needed was the right technology and to crack down on the first "cyber-dissidents."

The Chinese model has been a great success and the regime has managed to dissuade Internet users from openly mentioning political topics and when they do to just recycle the official line. But in the past two years, the priority of just monitoring online political dissidence has given way to efforts to cope with unrest among the population.
The Internet has become a sounding-board for the rumblings of discontent in most Chinese provinces.

Demonstrations and corruption scandals, once confined to a few cities, have spread across the country with the help of the Internet. In 2005, the government sought to counter the surge in cyber-dissidence. It beefed up the law and drafted what might be called "the ten commandments" for Chinese Internet users - a set of very harsh rules targeting online editors. The regime is both efficient and inventive in spying on and censuring the Internet. Other government have unfortunately imitated it.

The Internet's jailers

Traditional "predators of press freedom" - Belarus, Burma, Cuba, Iran, Libya, the Maldives, Nepal, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam - all censor the Internet now. In 2003, only China, Vietnam and the Maldives had imprisoned cyber-dissidents. Now more countries do.

A score of bloggers and online journalists have been thrown in jail in Iran since September 2004 and one of them, Mojtaba Saminejad, has been there since February 2005 for posting material deemed offensive to Islam. In Libya, former bookseller Abdel Razak al-Mansouri was sentenced to 18 months in prison for making fun of President Muammer Gaddafi online. Two Internet users have been jailed and tortured in Syria, one for posting photos online of a pro-Kurdish demonstration in Damascus and the other for simply passing on an e-mailed newsletter the regime considers illegal.

A lawyer has been in jail in Tunisia since March 2005 for criticising official corruption in an online newsletter. While a UN conference was held in Tunis in November 2005 to discuss the future of the Internet, this human rights activist was in a prison cell several hundred kilometres from his family. A grim message to the world's Internet users.
Censorship of the Web is also growing and is now done on every continent. In Cuba, where you need permission from the ruling party to buy a computer, all websites not approved by the regime are filtered.

The situation has worsened in the Middle East and North Africa. In November 2005, Morocco began censoring all political websites advocating Western Sahara's independence. Iran expands its list of banned sites each year and it now includes all publications mentioning women's rights. China can now automatically censor blog messages, blanking out words such as "democracy" and "human rights."

Some Asian countries seem about to go further than their Chinese "big brother." Burma has acquired sophisticated technology to filter the Internet and the country's cybercafés spy on customers by automatically recording what is on the screen every five minutes.

Complicity of Western firms

How did all these countries become so expert at doing this? Did Burma and Tunisia develop their own software? No. They bought the technology from foreign, mostly American firms. Secure Computing, for example, sold Tunisia a programme to censor the Internet, including the Reporters Without Borders website.

Another US firm, Cisco Systems, created China's Internet infrastructure and sold the country special equipment for the police to use. The ethical lapses of Internet companies were exposed when the US firm Yahoo! was accused in September 2005 of supplying the Chinese police with information used to sentence cyber-dissident XXX XXX to 10 years in prison.

China is now passing on its cyber-spying skills to other enemies of the Internet, including Zimbabwe, Cuba, and most recently Belarus. These countries will probably no longer need Western help for such spying in a few years time.

Democratic governments, not just the private sector, share responsibility for the future of the Internet. But far from showing the way, many countries that usually respect online freedom, now seem to want to unduly control it. They often have laudable reasons, such as fighting terrorism, child sex and cyber-crime, but this control also threatens freedom of expression.

Without making any comparison with the harsh restrictions in China, the Internet rules recently adopted by the European Union are very disturbing. One of them, requiring Internet service providers (ISPs) to retain records of customers' online activity, is presently being considered in Brussels and seriously undermines Internet users' right to online privacy.

The United States is also far from being a model in regulation of the Internet. The authorities are sending an ambiguous message to the international community by making it easier to legally intercept online traffic and by filtering the Internet in public libraries.

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China

China was one the first repressive countries to grasp the importance of the Internet and of controlling it. It is also one of the few countries that has managed to “sanitise” the Internet by blocking access to all criticism of the regime while at the same time expanding it (China has more than 130 million users). The secret of this success is a clever mix of filter technology, repression and diplomacy. Along with effective spying and censorship technology, the regime is also very good at intimidating users and forcing them to censor their own material. China is the world’s biggest prison for cyber-dissidents, with 62 in prison for what they posted online.

European Union

The EU is responsible for regulating the Internet and rulings often apply to member-states. A European directive on 8 June 2000 about e-commerce proved a threat to freedom of expression, by making ISPs responsible for the content of websites they host and requiring them to block any page they consider illegal when informed of its existence. This creates a private system of justice, where the ISP is called on to decide what is illegal or not. Technicians thus do the job of a judge. The EU is now studying a proposal to oblige ISPs to retain records of customers’ online activity. The proposal could limit Internet users’ right to privacy.

Iran

The information ministry boasts that it currently blocks access to hundreds of thousands of websites, especially those dealing in any way with sex but also those providing any kind of independent news. A score of bloggers were thrown in prison between autumn 2004 and summer 2005. One of them, Mojtaba Saminejad, 23, has been held since February 2005 and was given a two-year sentence in June for supposedly insulting the country’s Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Nepal

King Gyanendra’s first reflex when he seized power in February 2005 was to cut off Internet access to the outside world. It has since been restored, but the regime continues to control it and most online opposition publications, especially those seen as close to the Maoist rebels, have been blocked inside the country. Bloggers discussing politics or human rights do so under constant pressure from the authorities.

Saudi Arabia

The government agency in charge of “cleaning up” the Web, the Internet Service Unit (ISU), boasts that it currently bars access to nearly 400,000 sites with the aim of protecting citizens from content that is offensive or violates Islamic principles and social standards. The sites blocked deal mainly with sex, politics or religion (except those about Islam that are approved by the regime). This censorship regularly affects blogging, and blogger.com was made inaccessible for several days in October 2005.

United States

US policy towards the Internet is important because it is the country where the Internet began. But its laws about interception of online traffic do not provide enough privacy guarantees for users. Leading US Internet firms such as Yahoo!, Cisco Systems and Microsoft are also working with censorship authorities in China, thus throwing doubt on the US commitment to freedom of expression. The United States, home of the First Amendment, the Internet and blogs, should be a model for respecting the rights of Internet users.