From time to time, papers which I write do seem to have some relevance to current issues, and may be of some interest to people.
The End of the Internet
(As we know it)
One creation at the tail end of the twentieth century had the chance to change to the face of history. Through its vast capabilities of the almost instantaneous transport of information across the globe, the internet held the promise of unfettered access to knowledge. But against this promise was allayed the interests of entrenched governments who were reluctant to cede control of information. Massive business interests acted as the new brand of mercenary, selling their technological answers to the highest bidder, and endangering the very underpinnings of the internet. Despite the pervasiveness of the medium, the internet is still controlled by 13 high-level domain servers, and a moderate number of Cisco Routers. Through these basic channels, most of the world's information flows. These natural chokepoints spotlight the vulnerability of the internet to intentional interference. Controlled by massive corporations, the hardware and software involved exists somewhat at the whim of host nations. For much of the history of the internet, companies have complacently followed the wishes of host nations, reacting only when negative publicity for censorship actions has become too great to ignore. However, some danger still remains that the internet will be stifled in various locales, degrading the overall reliability and worth of the information available.
The internet, it may be soon said, was doomed from the start. An incredibly complex and far-reaching attempt to connect every person on the planet, no matter how remote their physical location, the internet broke down barriers which had been in place since the beginnings of known life. In its short life span, it led to images beamed live from the heights of the Himalayas to the depths of sub-Saharan Africa, and everywhere in between. Information from any individual could be made available to hundreds of millions across the globe at the click of a button. Government propaganda machines, so long in place, paled at this new onslaught which overran everything which they threw in its path. But, as the twentieth century came to a close, age-old borders began creeping into place, walls started going up on the internet, and governments began using this new tool as another way to infiltrate the lives of their citizens.
Since their creation, governments have been extremely interested in information control. Initially, it was an academic discussion, since pure physical boundaries prevented the movement of information at any great pace. In one infamous historical note from the United States' history, the Battle of New Orleans was fought two weeks after the peace treaty had been signed. But that was soon to change. The invention of the telegraph, and the subsequent laying of cable across oceans and land, brought a new impetus to information exchange. No longer would communication be locked to the fastest horse, ship, or even train. Events in California could reach halfway around the world to London in a matter of minutes, with relays. But even there, and with the telephone which joined it within a few decades, there was an inherent weakness. Communications were still tethered, still attached to a few solid lines, and governments could still control the information flowing through them.
The discovery of radio waves enabled, for the first time in recorded history, a method of communication which was entirely un-tethered from messenger or line. And the war to contain it has been in operation ever since. Governments were immediately enamored of the potential uses of this new technology, which promised the capability to reach their entire populations with propaganda quickly and easily. Even more important, they could now effectively reach across borders, and attempt to press their propaganda onto enemy territory. As a prime example of how relevant this remains, air drops and smuggling of radios into North Korea continued at least into the late 1990s, and are probably continuing through the present day. Additionally, SIGINT is a primary part of the United State's measures against Cuba, with the U.S. suppressing Cuban radio and satellite communications, and replacing some of them with pro-U.S. channels. The examples are endless, but one thing was certain with radio, and its later brethren, television. Operating the signals at any significant strength required backing, either of the local government, or another moneyed source. While small-time `pirate' signals have existed, their reach usually couldn't extend more than a few city blocks.
Then, ironically a gift from the U.S. military, a new beast appeared on the telecommunications market which had an unprecedented promise to it- the internet. With this strange new beast, every phone line on the planet became a potential link to every other phone line, and whatever computer happened to be attached to it. Originally an unfriendly creature, the Internet was slow to grow until the 1990s. The appearance of Netscape, the first user-friendly browser, revolutionized the internet, and made it accessible to the average, non-technically inclined person.
And it was an explosive revolution. Tools such as Microsoft's FrontPage and Macromedia's Dreamweaver translated people's plain-text input into Hyper-text Markup Language (HTML), the basic software code for web-pages, making it ever easier for people to create new material on the internet. Servers proliferated across the globe, giving extensive remote storage to people without the funds to host their own site.
For a few short, glorious years, the internet was truly a wild-west place of freedom and debauchery. Countries across the globe struggled to understand this new beast in their midst, and often failed. Laws of censorship lost their bite, as countries could not control content on servers outside of their borders. One unlikely country, the Principality of Sealand, even became a true no-mans land, promising virtually no oversight of materials contained on server farms which they installed in their `country'. And businesses and individuals lined up to take advantage.
But alas, that period was very short-lived. Germany, which has powerful anti-Nazi laws, challenged companies like Yahoo and eBay for offering Nazi memorabilia on their websites (since the sale of such items is banned in Germany). Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries strictly controlled access, attempting to ban sites offering pornography and other things which violated local laws. And one sleeping giant, a late-comer to the internet party, would soon take issue with the perceived vulgarities of the uncensored speech flowing across the internet- China. It was, perhaps, a natural reaction, since Chinese repression was a favorite topic in many subsections of the Web.
As the internet began making inroads across the country, China became increasingly nervous about the potential impact of international web-pages, over which they had no control. The major search engines were becoming increasingly accurate in their searches, enabling Chinese citizens to read websites set up by such banned groups as Falun Gong, Tibetan exiles, and others. Events which had been glossed over or misrepresented by the government, such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, could now be read in uncensored, non-propagandized versions. Because of the totalitarian nature of the official government propaganda machine, the Chinese government could not afford even the slightest chink in its armor. So, in 2002, it blocked Google and AltaVista's sites from China (Einhorn).
Unfortunately, the blocking (and subsequent partial unblocking) of the search engines was a minor blip on the news-radar screen, heavily overshadowed by the march to War in Iraq by the U.S. Unfortunate, because that action has had heavy repercussions on events in the digital world ever since. Previously, the Chinese government had taken the same approach as many Western nations, blocking the IP addresses for specific sites on the internet (For example, due to local laws against hate speech, neo-Nazi web-sites are blocked in Germany). While IP and Domain name blocking work well for limited lists, the rapid proliferation of websites in the late 1990's made keeping lists current an ever harder task.
Thus, China essentially threw down a gauntlet to the search engines. Either the search engines could become directly involved in censorship, or they would have to forget about doing business with China. This was truly a watershed moment for tech companies. Prior to this, they were able to claim that any censorship practiced with their products was done by individual governments, in alignment with local laws and regulations. Now, the companies would provide those services to individual governments.
Businesses had been long shy of dealing too openly with repressive regimes. The judgments against IBM and others for their involvement with Nazi Germany, decades after the fact, helped to keep the companies from obtuse violations of Human Rights. But the requirements of China would place them in this position, and they ultimately went along. In addition to the moral issues opened up by these events, key technical capabilities were revealed, along with their weaknesses. By shutting down the search engines wholesale, China was admitting that their internal censorship capabilities were useless against the reach of technology, thus granting a rare snapshot of their technical prowess in 2002. Full internal development since that time cannot be measured, but their `surrender' to Google at that point clearly shows that they were far behind Western tracking capabilities.
China has worked very hard to improve their censorship capabilities in the interim. According to the BBC, approximately 30,000 Chinese police are now dedicated to monitoring internet traffic, with the aid of Western filtering technology (Taylor). Despite these numbers, they still pale against the estimate 100 million Chinese citizens with Internet access (either at home/ office or through one of the over 100,000 internet cafes across the country). So, China relies heavily on public pressure against dissidents, frequently spotlighting heavy sentences for people who `misuse' the internet. Interestingly, this tactic mirrors the approach taken in the United States to counter peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing. Lacking the resources to target the tens of millions of P2P users, the Recording Industry has heavily publicized the few thousand cases and settlement demands against alleged file sharers, hoping to induce the other millions to halt their activities. Although this reliance on public pressure is indicative of a resilient inability to use technological solutions, China is pressing heavily in that regard also, and using the Western companies as their tools. Google, Yahoo, and MSN are now operating their search engines in China again, censoring websites deemed illegal by the Chinese authorities, deleting websites set up by Chinese citizens, and turning over identifying information about `dissidents' to the government.
Yahoo recently came in for heavy criticism for turning over the identity of one of its Chinese users, of whom the Chinese authorities had only a Yahoo-based e-mail address. Shi Tao, a journalist, was sentenced to ten years in prison after forwarding an e-mail to Western news agencies regarding the 15th anniversary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square. His identity was revealed only through Yahoo records, as the e-mail address was otherwise anonymous (Zeller). Interestingly, some of the harshest criticism came from a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations- normally a reliably right-wing, business-friendly group. In an editorial in the Los Angeles Times, Max Boot said that, "What if local law required Yahoo to cooperate in strictly separating the races? Or the rounding up and extermination of a certain race? Or the stoning of homosexuals?" (Zeller).
This type of rhetoric is not entirely unfounded. After all, business has a history of aligning itself with despot regimes. The involvement of IBM and other major corporations with Nazi Germany during WWII helped propagate the crimes of the Nazi power. Iran-Contra involved businesses as well as the U.S. government. The oil-for-food fiasco in Iraq, which propped up Hussein's regime throughout the 1990s, included most of the major American oil companies, as well as such established government contractors as Halliburton. When the bottom line is money, ethics and moral values tend to take a back seat.
And this time, the stakes are even higher. The censorship is no longer contained within China's borders, which might be considered within their rights as a nation (although still distasteful for Western corporations to aid and abet the actions). Just a few weeks ago, according to the New York Times, Microsoft's MSN Spaces deleted a blog run by a Chinese citizen, Zhao Zing, at the request of Chinese authorities (Barboza). As the article notes, "The MSN Spaces sites are maintained on computer servers in the United States." This singular action re-draws the lines of censorship. No longer content to merely block their own citizens from potentially negative views, the Chinese government has moved on to deleting that information from the entire internet, ensuring that the censorship also exists in places which claim Freedom of Speech, such as the U.S.
As Stephan Faris notes in his essay "Freedom: No Documents Found", "The Chinese government's "Great Firewall" blocks access to whole domains such as Human Rights Watch, the Taiwanese government's home page, and BBC's news site. Algorithms also screen for keywords. Sites that repeatedly mention the spiritual movement Falun Gong, for instance, are blocked. The Harvard study found that 90 of the top 100 Chinese-language Google results for "Tiananmen Massacre" and 93 of the top 100 for "Chinese Labor Party" were inaccessible from within China. In other countries, a censored site is usually labeled as such. In China, the pages simply fail to load. [emphasis added] Too many keyword hits and the user's access shuts down completely." When documents are declassified by the U.S. government, they frequently have been victimized by the infamous "black highlighter". Many times, the black highlighter obscures page after page. However, in this scenario, the censorship is a known quantity. It is obvious to any observer that there is information missing. In the case of the Chinese censorship, however, there was no such indication. Banned URLs merely returned a 404 Page Not Found error, telling the user nothing of any significance.
The danger of such a breed of censorship should be obvious. To take it to its logical extremity, if every reference to the Holocaust were wiped out, every Concentration Camp leveled and replaced with housing or farms, and not even the slightest piece of paper existed to reference that something indeed was wiped out, then it would be as if it never happened. Extremist, true, but things much along those lines are a daily occurrence in China. Tiananmen Square, a massacre which has received much attention in the West, practically doesn't exist in China. And its minor existence is twisted and bastardized by the Communist Party such that it retains little relationship with the reality of events.
But the confluence of the 'old' and 'new' styles of censorship is hardly a coincidence. The Communists in China are merely taking a very old page out of Stalin's workbook for the Soviet Union. Stalin, rather infamously, choppily edited out disfavored personnel from group photographs, trying to make it seem as if the person never existed. But that was a crude edit, which left the trails of its existence. Earlier copies of the photographs still existed, and have been used in the ensuing decades to prove the changes. China's censorship attempts leave no such paper trail.
If these actions were merely internal to China, then they would remain relatively minor issues. However, the collusion of Western corporations ensures that the inherent issues will be spread world-wide. Cisco routers, Microsoft Windows, and Google are pervasive across the globe. Containing the restrictive technology to China is not only highly unlikely, but would also be fiscally imprudent for the companies to engage in. After all, much of the technology is of great interest to Western Nations.
The West tends to stay with the `safe' areas of censorship. Under German and French law, many things related to the Nazi period are heavily restricted or out-right banned. Neo-Nazi hate speech is banned, as is the trade of pretty much any item with a Nazi Swastika on it. Since, however, this speech and these items are not banned in other countries, much of it still can be found on the web. Just not from Germany or France. The governments force their ISPs to actively block known neo-Nazi web sites and portions of sites where Nazi memorabilia are sold. In several connected cases in 1999-2001, French and German judges consistently ruled that eBay and Yahoo had to remove auctions which featured these materials, and block local people from being able to access these sites.
This ran into numerous roadblocks, and has never quite satisfactorily been resolved. Early proffered solutions included blocking access from German or French IP addresses to the American portals, where the content was legal. Had this happened, the sectioning of the internet by national boundary would already have taken place. Luckily, to some minds, that has not yet happened, leaving most of the internet unblocked regardless of local laws.
Certain other things- child pornography, for example- are generally agreed to be socially abhorrent, and no public figure would be supportive of the access to such material, regardless as to which country they reside in. A BBC poll taken in 2005 showed 89% of respondents in favor of tracking people who visited child pornography sites, and 90% of respondents in favor of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) actively blocking the sites; a typical response level, and wholly expected, given the subject matter (BBC).
But there is a danger to this type of police action. While the singular goals of an action such as blocking child pornography, or even potentially hate speech, are certainly to be applauded, the technology behind such a move scares civil libertarians. The technical capacity to block and track visitors to porn sites can easily be tweaked to track anything else which the government in control wishes to. Just for today is it child pornography, or Islamic terrorists, or neo-Nazis. It could just as well be opposition parties, abortion information, or items embarrassing to the host government.
Lest this sort of warning be dismissed as mere conspiracy theory, it was recently revealed that the U.S. Government is suing Google for the release of search engine data, as part of an overall alleged attempt to revive the Child Online Protection Act of 1998. Alleged, because the request is far more encompassing than a list of pornographic inquiries, for example. What the government is actually requesting is a full week's worth of online searches from Google, a massive data dump which involves potentially tens of millions of searches on a myriad of topics- From the innocuous to the thoroughly criminal- from almost every country on the planet (Millard).
The reasons behind the attempt to collect such far-reaching data, particularly coming from a government which has harbored such data-mining operations as the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program and the Transportation Security Agency's requests for flight data for its Secure Flight initiative, are clearly much more intensive than mundane information regarding online pornography. The pornography is, in this case, merely a politically palatable excuse- a `gateway drug'- for the government's larger interests. Although Google is fighting the subpoena, other search engines, including MSN and Yahoo, have already provided the requested data to the government. Clearly, their skill-sets are transferable from the services which they already provide to China.
But beyond merely blocking what their citizens should not see, governments are also interested in creating content for their people to see- propaganda. The internet truly caught many governments off-balance, in that their standard ways of controlling propaganda were rapidly over-run. So rapidly, in fact, that many are still trying, in 2006, to operate like it's still 1990 and pre-internet, although whether this is an honest mistake, or the governments are operating with more nefarious reasoning is up for debate. As a solid example, recently the Pentagon was caught paying a company to write `positive' news stories to plant in Iraqi papers. Now, since it is illegal for the Pentagon to plant propaganda targeting U.S. citizens, they were, theoretically, in the clear. However, thanks to the miracles of modern internet communication, many of these paid stories ended up in America anyway, posted by right-wing groups attempting to point out positive developments in the country since the invasion.
This sort of blurred line- was the dissemination of propaganda deliberate or inadvertent as a query is irrelevant, since the damage is done either way- has been acted out in many arenas, and nowhere more solidly consistent than in the case of China. China has the propaganda machine solidly working now, particularly in light of the recent successful censures of internet sites outside of their own borders. This allows them to project their propaganda on a global scale, a capability matching the U.S.
China's role in the development of the new generation of censorship technology is critical to its continued existence. Most Western countries are unable to maintain a sizable enough experimental blocking feature such that they can scale it to match hundreds of millions of users. As countries found during the explosion of websites in the 1990s, there was a critical mass of websites beyond which enforcement of normal blocking techniques- keywords and such- was essentially useless. Mass-blocking of the word "breast", for example, would block not only pornographic sites, but also medical/ health sites, news articles, etc. Manually checking sites also became overwhelming with millions of new pages appearing in any given month. Having a scalable algorithmic method for censorship and filtering is the ultimate answer, and rapid progress is being made in that direction. The sheer numbers of potential customers in China is providing very lucrative incentive to Google, Microsoft, et. al. to open up their massive bank accounts and invest in this far-reaching technology.
Where does this take the world? The coming split of the internet would seem to be almost unavoidable. Major countries are working hard to assert their own definitions of acceptable content onto the internet, and their own version of events there as well. If the Chinese version of Tiananmen Square becomes the dominant version, then everything is already lost. More likely, ISPs will come under increasing control and monitoring, with international traffic being especially controlled. The de facto boundaries (based on East/ West language sets) in place will become permanent barricades. It won't be a rapid change, just a slow step-by-step maneuver, in which individual sites wink out of existence. The massive armories of the tech companies will increasingly and rapidly improve their capabilities of sniffing out dissent within the web. Since they are committed more to shareholders than to any morals set, the high bidders- governments- will have dictatorial say over the use of their products. Microsoft's flagship operating system will move to an online offering, tethering every PC to headquarters, making a default identifier whenever a government wishes to look at an individual's activities on the internet.
Along the way, there may be temporary diversions. After much public outcry, two extremely recent decisions by Google and Microsoft may act to temporarily halt the slide. In Google's case, they are finally opening up a Chinese portal of their search page (www.google.cn), which will serve up government-censored search results. However, in a nod to activist worries about invisible censorship, the portal will display a message when search results have been filtered (CNN.com). Microsoft, under heavy fire for its deleting of a Chinese blog from U.S. servers, has announced a two-prong approach. First, any blog deleted will have a message informing users that the blog was deleted at the request of a government. In addition, Microsoft has promised to try to keep material censored by one country available to users from other countries (Linn). Although small compromises, these measures help to mitigate some immediate concerns about the transparency of censorship, but they are by no means a long-term solution.
It remains to be seen whether these steps are the first baby-steps towards reversing a long trend of deference by corporations to government interests, or merely smoke-screens to allay consumer concerns. If the former, there may yet be hope for the internet. If the latter, as is suspect, then these will act as mere speed bumps on the long road to a stifled internet.
References:
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"Internet censorship in mainland China." Wikipedia. 08 Jan. 2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_China>.
"Google agrees to China censorship." CNN.com. 25 JAN. 2006. CNN.com. 25 JAN. 2006 <http://www.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/01/24/google.china.ap/index.html>.
"Money's Nice, but Freedom's Nicer." Wired News. 10 Nov. 2005. 06 Jan. 2006 <http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,69508,00.html>.
Barboza, David. "Microsoft Shuts Blog's Site After Complaints by Beijing ." New York Times 06 Jan 2006. 06 Jan 2006 <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/06/technology/06blog.html>
Einhorn, Bruce. "The Great Firewall of China." Business Week 23 Sep 2002. 07 Jan 2006 http://web15.epnet.com.ezproxy.umuc.edu/
Kalathil, Shanthi. "China's New Media Sector: Keeping the State In." Pacific Review 2003: 489-501.
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Linn, Allison. "Microsoft Amends Blog Shutdown Policies." Yahoo.com. 31 JAN. 2006. Yahoo.com. 31 JAN. 2006 <http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060131/ap_on_hi_te/microsoft_blogging_censorship>.
MacKinnon, Rebecca. "Microsoft takes down Chinese blogger." 03 Jan 2006. 04 Jan 2006 http://rconversation.blogs.com/...
Millard, Elizabeth. "Google Digs in Against Feds." Yahoo. 23 Jan. 2006. 23 Jan. 2006 <http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20060123/tc_nf/41117>.
Zeller, Tom. "To Go Global, Do You Ignore Censorship?." New York Times 24 Oct 2005. 08 Jan 2006 http://ezproxy.umuc.edu/... dweb?did=915579271&sid=1&Fmt=3&clientId=8724&RQT=309&VName=P QD
