p2pnet.net News:- Chinese citizens trying to access web sites carrying information on Taiwanese and Tibetan independence, Falun Gong, the Dalai Lama, the Tiananmen Square incident, opposition political parties, and a “variety of anti-Communist movements,” are frequently blocked by the country’s extensive Net filtering system, says a report from the OpenNet Initiative.

But, “most major American media sites, such as CNN, MSNBC, and ABC, are generally available in China,” it says. Only the BBC was blocked.

Most sites tested in the ONI global list’s human rights and anonymizer categories were also accessible, it says, going on that the country’s pervasive Net filtering regime is the most sophisticated of its kind in the world.

However, it:

• Comprises multiple levels of legal regulation and technical control
• Involves numerous state agencies and thousands of public and private personnel
• Censors content transmitted through multiple methods, including Web pages, Web logs, on-line discussion forums, university bulletin board systems, and e-mail messages.

The implications of this "distorted on-line information environment" for Chinese Net users are both profound and disturbing, says the ONI.

“Our testing found efforts to prevent access to a wide range of sensitive materials, from pornography to religious material to political dissent," it says. "ONI sought to determine the degree to which China filters sites on topics that the Chinese government finds sensitive, and found that the state does so extensively.”

Filtering appears to be carried out at various control points and is dynamic, changing along a variety of axes over time, says the report, continuing:

“This combination of factors leads to a great deal of supposition as to how and why China filters the Internet. These complexities also make it very difficult to render a clear and accurate picture of Internet filtering in China at any given moment."

Keyword searches blocked
Filtering takes place primarily at backbone level, although individual ISPs also implement their own blocking, says the report, which also confirmed claims that major Chinese search engines filter content by keyword and remove certain search results from their lists.

"Similarly, major Chinese Web log (blog) service providers either prevent posts with certain keywords or edit the posts to remove them," says the ONI.

“We found also that some keyword searches were blocked by China’s gateway filtering and not the search engines themselves.

"Cybercafés, which provide an important source of access to the Internet for many Chinese, are required by law to track Internet usage by customers and to keep correlated information on file for 60 days.

"As a further indication of the complexity of China’s filtering regime, we found several instances where particular URLs were blocked but the top-level domain of these URLs was accessible, despite the fact that the source of content appeared consistent across the domain – suggesting that filtering may be conducted at a finer level in China than in the other countries that we have studied closely."

Moreover, China’s Internet filtering appears to have grown more refined, sophisticated, and targeted during the years of ONI’s testing, it says, adding:

“While no single statute specifically describes the manner in which the state will carry out its filtering regime, a broad range of laws – including media regulation, protections of ‘state secrets,’ controls on Internet service providers and Internet content providers, laws specific to cybercafés, and so forth – provide a patchwork series of rationales and, in sum, massive legal support for filtering by the state.

“The rights afforded to citizens as protection against filtering and surveillance, such as a limited privacy right in the Chinese Constitution, that otherwise might provide a counter-balance against state action on filtering and surveillance, are not clearly stated and are likely considered by the state to be inapplicable in this context.”

Download the full report here.

Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net

See:-
OpenNet Initiative - Internet Filtering in China in 2004-2005, April 14, 2005
search results - Google on China censorship, p2pnet, October 1, 2004

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If you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent website blocking outside of China.

Download it here and feel free to copy the zip and host it yourself so others can download it.

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