I recently finished reading Girls lean back everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the assault on genius, which is a history of American literary and artistic censorship by a lawyer who argued some of the seminal cases before the supreme court, Edward de Grazia. It’s hard to imagine today how delicately sex had to be treated in early 20th century American writing, lest the author and publisher land before a court. This book documents the long legal shift to the freedom that authors enjoy today, where every Borders has a well-stocked “erotica” section. And it really was a long shift — the protagonists in this story fought over decades, one incremental advance at a time, and knew they were doing so. That is, for me, the biggest lesson.

In 1921 James Joyce’s Ulysses was banned in the US, and its publisher criminally prosecuted, for writing that now seems tame. There aren’t even any dirty words in the passage that caused the most uproar; it’s just a girl leaning back to watch the fireworks, leaning back to show more and more of her stockings and garters and underthings to a man she fancies, and it’s poetic as hell.

A few decades later Allen Ginsburg’s Howl landed the poet before a judge. Books by D. H. Lawrence, William Burroughs, and — my personal favorite — Henry Miller were also banned as obscene at one point or another. All of these works are free today, but it took decades of legal battles.

At first, there were many subjects that simply could not be talked about at all. One of the very first novels to deal frankly with lesbianism, Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 The Well of Loneliness, contained no sex at all other than the sentence “and that night, they were not divided” but was ruled obscene because it depicted “inverts” in a positive light. But even heterosexual sex was illegal to depict, if the writing was sufficiently explicit.

All of this gradually changed. By the mid 50s, American judges had ruled that discussion of sex in itself was not obscene. In 1964, de Grazia defended Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and the Supreme Court ruled that any work “not totally without social value” could not be held obscene. This decision effectively freed the written word entirely, and in subsequent decades, plays and photographs and films would be freed to.

But it took 80 years.

And that’s what struck me most: deep social change takes a long time. The book is a legal history, so it is full of the arcana of American obscenity legislation and long-forgotten legal tactics. But these excruciating details show that the players took a deliberately long view in many cases. Their game was played out over decades. Also, the conflict wasn’t anything so simple as authors versus cops; this is not an underdogs vs. establishment story. Judges played a pivotal role in the freeing of artistic speech, particularly supreme court Justice Brennan who patiently transformed the law, piece by piece as the appropriate cases arose, over almost 20 years. The opposing villains, if they can be called that, included conservative politicians, state prosecutors, and citizen pressure groups.

I think of this now as I ask the question: how do societies change?

I could not understand the speeches over the loud-speakers during the two hour presentation. I have few close Chinese friends, and I have never managed to have a candid conversation about what happened in 1989. Many of the people in Victoria park were not even born when the Chinese military opened fire on its own people. I know the history, from documentaries and books, but I don’t know why it should matter so much on a balmy Friday night, 21 years later.

But a hundred thousand people weeping over candles says it still means something.

I began to ask people why they were there.

“We came to learn about the history,”  three young girls told me in halting English. They were secondary school students, and their teacher had encouraged them to come.

That history is not taught in mainland schools, and all mention of what happened in June 1989 is elaborately censored online — including web pages, online forums, IM conversations, and personal emails. Last year a former Chinese solider was arrested and taken from his home in the middle of the night for publishing an open letter calling for a review of the incident.

Hong Kong operates under a different constitution, and you can talk about Tiananmen here — most of the time. Last week a group of activists tried to display a statue called the “Goddess of Democracy” in front of the Times Square mall, a sort of faux Statue of Liberty that mimics a famous paper-mache figure erected by the original protesters in Tiananman square in 1989. Thirteen people were arrested and the statue was confiscated.

“It wasn’t hurting anyone,” said a man in his late  20s, who would only identify himself as “a worker.” “It’s not right for them to take it away.”

He said this was his first June 4th vigil, as it was for many others I spoke to. In fact it’s estimated that this was the biggest turnout ever, exceeding even the very first vigil in 1990, when Hong Kong citizens openly feared what the 1997 handover to China might mean for their freedoms.

This demonstration would be impossible in Beijing. Officially, the students who were calling for “democracy” remain dishonored; the Communist Party of China insists to this day that the military violence was necessary to maintain stability of the country. That’s what they say when they can be forced to talk about it at all — for the “June fourth incident,” as it’s been blandly retitled, is taboo. The June fourth incident does not exist.

There was no coverage of the Hong Kong demonstration in the Chinese media; nothing on Xinhua, nothing in China Daily.

And I think that’s why people keep coming. Occasionally someone I talked to used  words like “freedom” and “democracy,” but when I pressed them it always came down to specifics. The statue was taken away. The Chinese government won’t talk about what happened. There was no grand ideology uniting the people in Victoria Park, no deep ideals other than this: we want to talk about it, and you will not let us.

When it comes down to it, the 1989 protestors didn’t know what they were doing. They wanted change, and they boldly called out the crimes and repression of their government during the horrors of the cultural revolution and after. But they also wanted to force students to attend demonstrations, according to later interviews. The protest movement was hardly democratic or even organized; it had no coherent philosophy and was riddled with internal power struggles. It’s easy to make the students and workers of 1989 into heroes or martyrs, but the truth is messier.

“I’m willing to keep an open mind,” one Hong Kong medical student told me. “Maybe there was no way to finish the affair without blood. But many mainland students don’t fully understand what happened that day. They need to know so they can make a careful judgement.”

Maybe that’s the sort of diplomatic language that will be necessary for reconciliation. But the history isn’t so bloodless. People died. Lots of them. People lost limbs and family and friends, and then lost friends again when everyone connected to the protests was quietly rounded up, silenced, or exiled. A series of laminated yellow posters recalled the victims, with the name, photograph and whatever is known of the story of each one. We know that some people were shot or crushed by tanks; others simply disappeared that night.

Does it help to imagine a woman sitting alone in her Beijing apartment, grieving silently for a long-lost lover? She can’t even write an email to a friend to say how she feels (try; it will bounce.) There will be no commiseration. It is not yet allowed.

And here, at last, I began to see what was denied to me as an outsider. I am not Chinese. I do not have family on the mainland — family who disappeared 21 years ago, and family who live still with the threat of a government that cannot talk about what it did. For me Tiananmen is abstract; I can make it about ideals like “freedom of speech” or “human rights” but I have no faces to attach to the violence. It was not my statue they took away.

“For me it’s a memorial,” said a middle aged man there with his wife. He wore glasses and a white polo shirt, with a camera slung around his neck. He had a slight pot belly. He said he had two children.  ”I have to keep coming every year until the Chinese government admits what they did, and that it was wrong,” he said.

“I may not live to see that day.”

]]> http://jonathanstray.com/they-remember-because-they-are-told-to-forget/feed 0 http://jonathanstray.com/internet-as-information-democracy-or-new-media-news-monopolies http://jonathanstray.com/internet-as-information-democracy-or-new-media-news-monopolies#comments Sun, 30 May 2010 08:42:27 +0000 Jonathan Stray http://jonathanstray.com/?p=1933

There was a dream that the internet would mean the end of the media gatekeeper; that anyone could get their message out without having to get the attention and approval of the media powers that be. This turns out to be not quite the case.

I took data from the Project form Excellence in Journalism’s State of the News Media 2010 report to create this chart showing the market share of the top 20 news web sites. In theory, the internet busts media monopolies by allowing anyone to publish for free. And there’s no doubt it’s been disruptive. But according to data from Nielsen, the top 7% of 4600 news and information sites get 80% of traffic (from American viewers.) We see a big concentration of power, as the rapid falloff in the chart above shows, and much of it still belongs to “old media.”

Organizations such as CNN, Fox, the New York Times and USA Today rank in the top 20. But so do new media giants AOL, Google News, The Huffington Post and Yahoo.com, which is the biggest news site of all.

(It’s also interesting to note that many of the top 20 new media news sites produce little or none of their own news; in the extreme case Google News produces no stories at all of its own. While some see aggregation as parasitic, I think it’s obvious that it delivers a tremendously valuable service to readers.)

For better or worse, the ability to publish anything nearly for free hasn’t meant the end of big media monopolies. It’s simply shifted the landscape and the power balance.

The limiting factor to getting your message out is no longer having access to an expensive printing press or a TV station. It’s attention: how many minutes of time can you get from how many people? In this game, brand still matters hugely. There are only so many URLs a person can remember, only so many sites they can check in a day.

You have an audience, or you don’t. Mindshare is now the barrier to entry in the media world. Perhaps it always was, though I daresay it was easier to get viewers to check out your new television network when there were only 13 channels. Online, the number of channels is infinite for all intents and purposes; a single person will never exhaust them all.

Which is not to say that the internet has changed nothing. We have seen over and over that bottom-up effects can propel something to mass attention, with no big company behind them. This is often called “going viral,” but that’s not quite a broad enough description of the effect. In many cases, what happens is that something becomes just popular enough to get picked up by mainstream media, who then propel it into the spotlight.

And what this PEJ top 20 list doesn’t take into account is that people now get online news from lots and lots of sources other than news websites.

Facebook is now the most widely used news reading program. It’s also now the #1 site on the internet. Should it top this chart of news sources? Meanwhile, Twitter has become a primary news source for very many people. And then there are mobile news apps, some of which belong to old media news organizations and some of which don’t. The richness of news distribution systems today is well captured in another PEJ report on the “participatory news consumer.”

So has the internet made it easier to get non-mainstream messages out? I think the answer can only be yes. But don’t expect that anyone will be reading your alternative narratives just because you’ve put them online. Your best bet to to be heard still lies with a small number of very large companies. And although the internet per se is relatively uncensored in many countries, commercial gatekeepers like Apple and Facebook own important dedicated channels, and both of them engage in censorship (1, 2).

We are witnessing the birth of a new kind of internet censorship in the Xinjiang province of Western China: the kind where a web site must be specifically allowed, instead of specifically disallowed.

China’s largest province was disconnected from the world completely, including a shutdown of phones and SMS, after hundreds of people were killed in separatist protests by the Uyghur minority people in July. Today, the Far West Blog reports that 27 more web sites have been allowed through the previously complete internet block. Wow. A whole 27. That brings the total number of extra-provincial sites accessible to Xinjiang residents to 31, and all of them are inside China.

The Chinese government maintains that the US-based “World Uyghur Congress” instigated the riots from overseas using the internet and SMS. No communications, no riots, the logic goes. And perhaps this is true, if myopic (fascinating debate on this here).

But there is something very wrong about opening up sites one by one like this, despite the fact that state-run Xinhua news agency is playing it up as communications being “restored”. The current Xinjian policy represents a new and extremely troubling flavor of censorship: rather than some sites being blocked, some sites are allowed. This is a white list, as opposed to the usual black list; the default is now “no”. Bearing in mind that personal satellite dishes are illegal in China, this means the government has complete control over the information that people are exposed to. This is just like the pre-internet era in any number of times and places, really, but that doesn’t make it any better.

At least text messaging, including international text messaging, was restored two weeks ago.

According to Far West Blog, here is what you now get from the outside world if you live in Xinjiang:

• 7 News Sites (including China Daily and CCTV)
• 4 Travel Sites (including Ctrip and Air China)
• 3 Business & Finance Sites
• 3 Telecom Sites (all three major Chinese carriers)
• 2 Shopping Sites (including Taobao, China’s version of eBay)
• 2 Computer Service Sites (so you can update your anti-virus)
• 2 Gaming Sites (more flash games…yippee)
• 2 Education Sites (study materials for students and help for teachers)
• 1 Fashion Site

Yes, this also means no IM, no Skype, no email, no nothing outside of the province. “I have had to sit here and endure a frustrating feeling that we are now living in the stone ages,” says Far West Blog writer Josh.

These 31 sites seem ridiculously limited, and these limits (no email!) would severely hamper business in the affluent Eastern provinces. Xinjiang has only 20 million people, so perhaps China can more or less do without it for a while. But what if the national firewall let through only, say, the top 10,000 or 100,000 currently uncensored international sites? How much easier it would be to prevent some pesky overseas message board from cropping up to corrupt Chinese minds! Why, your world-censoring work would practically be done for you, and almost no one would be the wiser.

Let’s hope that this isn’t a precedent.

UPDATE: There are rumours, based on government statements in December, that a national whitelist is planned. Nothing definitive yet.

(Click for larger.) As opposed to most of the other “blocked site” screens, you don’t actually have to be in country to see this, just go to http://www.censor.qa/.

Next up, Bahrain:

Lest the Westerners in the audience get the impression that blocking internet access is all about silly little theocracies in the desert, note that Australia just passed an internet censorship law. The blacklist is secret. Stay tuned for “What Internet Censorship Looks Like in Australia”!

The “Pillar of Shame” is faces: faces in agony, anonymous faces, dead faces. It stands in the plaza of the Student Union of the University of Hong Kong as a monument to the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in which hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators were killed by the Chinese government. It was installed by students on the tenth anniversary of this sorry event, and the police did not stop them.

This would never fly on the mainland. In China, web searches, blog posts, foreign news broadcasts, and even instant messages about the Tiananamen Square massacre are very closely censored. To erect a monument to something that officially did not happen is unthinkable, not to mention severely punishable.

But Hong Kong is different.

The island was a British colony by treaty with the Chinese for 100 years. The 1997 handover to the Chinese government was peaceful, and Hong Kong became the “Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.” This means that it is under different law. In effect, the Hong Kong Basic Law — drafted jointly by the British and Chinese in the late 1980s — is a completely different constitution for the region. Hong Kong and China even require different entry visas and have different immigration procedures. In particular, mainland Chinese residents are not allowed to live here permanently.

And they might want to! Hong Kong residents enjoy freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and guarantees against unwarranted search or detention. The chief executive is not democratically elected, but the legislative council is. The internet is not censored and the economy is officially capitalist.

This arrangement provides a strange vantage point for China observers; it’s China, but also not-China. It’s free, and you can do things here you could never get away with on the mainland. For example, Rebecca MacKinnon of the University of Hong Kong has published some wonderful research on the Chinese internet censorship regime.

The Basic Law is guaranteed by the PRC for 50 years, until 2047. What happens then is anyone’s guess.

[Update May 6 17:00: added information on the context within China's overall internet censorship.]

The thing about censorship is that, when done well, no one really knows what’s being censored. This is why last week’s leaked documents from Baidu, the largest Chinese-langauge search engine and blogging site, are so titillating. Maybe someone screwed up bad, or maybe someone on the inside had an attack of transparency; whatever the reason, we now have a huge pile of documents detailing Baidu’s censorship policy during the period from November 2008 to March 2009. 

Whee!

The documents, now safely ensconed in a permanent home on Wikileaks, reveal for the first time a detailed inventory of the Chinese government’s priorities for, er, harmonization. There is a blacklist of 798 specific URLs, most of which seem to be recent news articles and discussion forum posts on sites both inside and outside of China. Far more interesting is a long list of sensitive keywords. Included policy documents suggest that the appearance of any of these terms in a blog post triggers a manual review by the staff of Baidu’s censorship team — whose names are listed in another of the leaked documents! While some of these topics have long been outright censored, such as “Tiananmen Square,” others are more general categories to be watched. Taken together, these sensitive terms are a fascinating portrait of China’s institutional paranoia.

Some categories are obvious, such as “Taiwan” and “naked chat”. Other areas are shockingly broad, such as “power” and “tyranny.”  Certain media outlets such as Voice of America are considered unacceptable, and “SMS the answer” is forbidden within the “exam information” section. Also, China does not have any ketamine, AIDS, or ethnic conflict, and frowns upon one night stands. The main document of interest begins,

近期重点监控信息

中办发 国办发 温州 鬼村 段桂清 四川广安 广安事件
中组部前部长直言 动物园 集会 涿州 饲养基地 中石油国家电网倒数 张文中 华闻 王政
假冒 记签 校园改造工程 雍战胜 死刑现场 冯巩 陶虹 高勤荣

And I can’t read that either, so below is an automated translation, via The Dark Visitor who clearly used something more formidable than Google Translate. Still, machine translation really doesn’t work as well as one might like, or perhaps “electric chicken” makes perfect sense in context.

To put this all in the larger view, I recommend Rebecca MacKinnon’s excellent research on Chinese blog censorship, where she shows how each blog company implements its own self-censorship regime. The results are very non-uniform, with individual posts allowed or deleted seemingly at random, and certain blog sites censoring much more than others. This is one part of the overall Chinese internet censorship strategy which includes URL keyword blocks, email scanning, shutdowns of certain sites during political events, and of course the Great Firewall which prevents Chinese citizens from accessing Wikipedia, among many other things. (Baidu also runs an equivalent encyclopedia service called Baike which is no doubt heavily sanitized.) It’s not possible to get a complete picture of China’s internet censorship regime from just this one leak, however extensive it might be. Instead, what we have is a narrow but deep window into a previously opaque process.

Note that the 798 blacklisted URLs cannot be considered comprehensive by any means; even Australia has an 1100 URL blacklist, and the 798 URLs seem to be missing porn entirely. The sensitive keyword list likewise cannot be considered definitive; for example, it does not include “Charter 08″ in reference to last year’s pro-democracy manifesto. Hopefully, we will soon have good translations of the leaked policy and personnel documents which will give us a better idea of how these keywords are applied.

More on the leak at the China Digital Times. (And yes, the lead image to this post really does concern censorship in China; see here, or watch the video.)

Without further ado, the leaked list of sensitive keywords, in machine translation with a few manual cleanups.

Reactionary
Communist Party
Producing party
Anti-communist
Anti-G
CPC
Brainwashing
GCD
CCP
GONG Party
Network Special
Tyranny
Dictatorship
China will
Power
Public property party
Voice of America
Free Asia
ddgcd
World War III
Puppet government
Pseudo-big
独夫民贼
Taiwan
A total of X Party
Communist
Do not like party
The demise of socialism
Out a total of
Do not do personnel
Communism sleep
Network blocking
Now the police
Hemosiderosis division
Now the Communist Party
Opposition
The present Government
Shanghai
Today’s society
Land alone
gong chan dang
Total independence
Commemoration of the Cultural Revolution
40th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution
Internet police
National Unification Council
Waste Commission
Guidelines for National Unification
Taiwan du
Taiwan independence
China’s human rights
Suppress
The children of the list of senior cadres
Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Song
Chiang Kai-shek
Human rights protection
Democracy dictatorship
Taiwan independence
Shanghai independence
Beijing independence
Hong Kong Independent
Return to Mongolia
The party now
Zhang Zhixin
China
Hate China
One-party power
Government incompetence
Weak diplomacy
One-party interests
One-party dictatorship
Quit
Dictatorship
Freedom of expression
Olympic outsiders
Capital
Alliance party
Bandits
A total of thieves
Chinese Party
The second capital
Death of the party
Administration
Public Order now
Anti-party
Anti-socialist
Total death
The party now
Hao Xin years
Who is the New China
Anti-party
Min pig
Aparine, as   

Information on various types of human rights petition
Procession
Demonstration
Petition
Assembly
Rights
Strike
Buyout
Aggregation
Of demobilized army officers
Letters
Rebel
Land
Off
Demolition
Investors
AIDS
Sit -
Riots
Democratic
Demobilization
Impact on the masses
Clashes with police
Collective protest
Violence, assaulting a police officer
The use of force to suppress
Armed repression
Dai Jing
Ryan incident
8.18
9.12 events
Yuan Weimin
Migrant workers
Wei said
Forcing people to rebel
Criminal and Law Enforcement
A cops and robbers
A gang officer
Guangan
School burglary action
Everlasting Regret laid-off workers

64 events
Tiananmen Square
HE Xin
Atrocities
Riots
Unrest
The massacre of students
The suppression of students
Zhao Ziyang
89 years
Square incident
Demeanor of blood
17 years ago
89 events
89’s
Goddess of democracy
Bloodshed
tiananmen
2089
The killing of student
Student
Student leaders
89
Events
1989
In a matter
The wounds of history
24 events
64
6 4
Four events
6.4
6 d
4 events
89 storm
liusi
8964
8964
Pro-democracy movement
xuechao
Political turmoil
Beijing storm
tusha
Xidan Democracy Wall
Ziyang
TAM
64 period
Lu IV
CAI Ling
I Fall to open the West
Kaixi
Rivers of Sorrow
Kaixi

Falun Gong and the cult
Eastern Lightning
Li Hong Zhi
Act in a reactive
Made of
flg
Gong FL
Gong wheels
Act X-Gong
Act On
Since the fen
Falun
9 ping
9ping
Lee Hong-X
Possession of stone words
Self-immolation
Cult
LHZ
falun
With nine
Nine Commentaries
9 Comments
Fa Lun
Fa-lun
囵fat
Fat theory
Law theory
fa round
Law lun
Law L
Fallon
9 Ping
Act O-gong
Law 0 Zhigong
The Epoch Times
Big brothel
DJY
DONG Yuan-chen
Falun Gong
Xiao-Ying Li
In reactive
Gong Chinese health puzzle
Zhang Hong Bao
Zhang Hongbao
Shadow government
jiuping
李洪智
Li wheels
zifen
Gao Zhisheng
FL Dafa
Law Lun Gong
Dafa disciples
XX Gong
Li Hong hemorrhoids
Fat round
Cart Lun Law
Unbounded
Free community
Free gate
9 impeach
Sujiatun
Free gate
Check kidney in vivo
Lee x

Relatives of national leaders and important
Hu Jintao
Wu Bangguo
Wen Jiabao
Jia Qinglin
Zeng Qinghong
Huang Ju
Wu
Li Changchun
Luo Gan
Liu
Zhou Yongkang
He Guoqiang
Wang Gang
Xu Caihou
He Yong
Wang
Wang
Hui Liangyu
Liu Qi
Wu Yi
Zhang
Zhang
Chen Liangyu
Yu Zhengsheng
Guo
Cao
Zeng
Deng dog
xiaoping
Tang Dwarfs
Deng Xiaoping
Hu
Ma Ying-jeou
Hu Yaobang
Hu Yaobang
Jiang pig
Lee Teng-hui
刘亚洲
History Jiuwu
Hu Haiqing
Gu Yue Tao金帛

Ethnic issues
Anti-Japanese
Indonesia
屠华
Visit
Japanese
Siege
Yasukuni
A boycott of Japanese goods
Out on
Honker Union
Shina
Tragedy
98 China
Tibet
Xinjiang
Islamic
East Turkistan
Ethnic issues
Whip Man
Return to Mongolia
Ethnic conflict
Back to Han conflict
North Campus BBS
Poor people
Inferior peoples
Jihad
Tibetan shooting

Military secrets
Seven military
7 Military
Navy deployment
Army deployment
Air force deployment
Compiled with the base
Stand and tasks
8023 units
Forces
Army
Fleet Four
Exam Information
Too easy
SMS the answer
Leakage problem
46
Stealth headphones
Volume density test
Cheating in Examinations
Voice transmission
Wireless Headset
The answer examinations
6 answers
Paul had
Help test
Actinoplanes
Generation of test
Send answer
Class answer
Smooth over
4 answers
Test
Gunman
CET
Three answer
Join Us
After the payment test
Packets have been
Test answer
Provide answers
The sale of the answer
With test
Scott
Judicial Examination
Writing paper
Title charge
Fake diploma

The sale of organs
Compensated renal
Transplant
Contributions paid
Kidney health
卖肾
Buy kidney
Kidney Source
For renal
Cornea
The sale of organs
The sale of kidneys
Blood
Paid blood donors

Illegal information
Listening device
One-night stand
Surrogacy
Triazolam
Poppy seeds
Smuggled vehicles
Accreditation
ONS
Ketamine
Slot machine
Ecstasy
On behalf of the development of votes
Selling guns
买枪
Ether
Lonely woman
So bomb
Agency documents
Simulation-like
仿真枪
Electric dog
Gas dog
Electric Chicken
Mass suicide
Employment killer
切腹
Counterfeit money
The sale of guns
Recruitment plan
K powder
Ice
Heroin
Ecstasy
The recruitment of men
Pregnancy to help people
Firearms
Electric baton
To recruit younger
Boy collection
Thanks brother
Social mix
Listener
Recruit people to help
Monitor phone
迷药
嗑药
To buy genuine
Steal qq
Steal password
Stolen card number
Ones
Second-generation ID card
Bank Card
国办发
Made in the Office
The acquisition of antiquities
Unlock
ID cards for sale
蒙汗药

Sex information
Gregaria
Sex
Wife Swap
包养
Sexual partners
Services
Oral sex
屁眼
Milk delivery
肉棒
Vagina
Labia
Bestiality
Dogs pay
Base pay
Evening bag
Full pay
富婆
富姐
Breast
Foam Friends
Mother and son incest
No Code
A night of passion
Sexual intercourse
Dunem force
Show women
Toilet slave
Taiwan do
Paid services
Sexual partners
You pay
See JJ
Passion telephone
Passion Personals
Phone Dating
Nude chat
Slaves
Male slave
Million overnight
Prostitution
Ms. services
口淫
Of interest
Aphrodisiac
Husband and wife exchange
Looking for female
Find M
开苞
Sex
Small film
h Man
h map
陪聊

Liu Xiaobo is now imprisoned at an uknown location for his involvement in the Charter ’08 document

On December 10, 2008, a group of 300 Chinese dissidents published an open letter (english translation) to the Chinese government  calling for wide political freedoms and basic human rights in their country. Although this document has become the vegetarian dinner party topic du jour among Western activists, it’s not at all clear whether it will have any impact in China. For one thing, the Chinese government has censored it, removing it from Baidu and Google and even individual blogs. The internet being the internet, people are reading and talking about it anyway, but this only matters if the Chinese populace in general is sympathetic to the notion of government reform and greater personal rights. They may not be.

The letter, known as Charter ’08, was released on December 10th, the 60th Anniversary of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The truly sad part is, you already know what happened next: those behind it were immediately detained, arrested, imprisoned. The text itself might be considered measured and scholarly in the West, but must be interpreted as incredibly harsh and insolent in the Chinese context, if no other reason than because it is direct criticism in a country where “inciting subversion of state power” is frequently invoked:

After experiencing a prolonged period of human rights disasters and a tortuous struggle and resistance, the awakening Chinese citizens are increasingly and more clearly recognizing that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal common values shared by all humankind, and that democracy, a republic, and constitutionalism constitute the basic structural framework of modern governance.

…

The ruling power monopolizes all the political, economic and social resources. It created a string of human rights catastrophes such as the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, June 4, and attacks on non-governmental religious activities and on the rights defense movement, causing tens of millions of deaths, and exacted a disastrous price on the people and the country.

The Charter names freedom, human rights, equality, republicanism, democracy and constitutionalism as “fundamental concepts,” and calls for the immediate provision of 19 different rights and reforms, including such standard (to a Westerner) concepts as election of public officials for all regions and freedoms of speech, press, assembly, association, religion, and political affiliation. It also addresses more China-specific issues, such as “urban and rural equality” and “citizen education: abolish political education and examinations that are deeply ideological and serve one-party rule.”

The arrests last month made international news, although the actual text does not appear to have been widely available until The New York Review of Books published their English translation on January 15th, followed by a more graceful translation by the group Human Rights in China. Although new coverage has fallen off dramatically since then, a search on Technorati shows that the story has percolated quite steadily through the English-language blogosphere for the last month. This is exactly the sort of stuff that Western activists love — but what does it actually mean within China?

Apparently, despite the censorship attempts the document acquired an additional 5000 signatures within the first week, which is, on one hand, a stunning number of acts of sedition. On the other hand, there are over a billion people in China, and so far the government seems to be handily winning the information war. A full month after the letter, Uln Dice of Chinayouren wrote,

The fact is that Charter 08 is still an unknown movement in mainland China. Out of 5 local friends I asked, all with university degrees and fluent English, even today only one of them had heard the term (but knew no details). As for the majority of Chinese who live out of the cities and don’t use the internet, there is no way they can have heard about it.

Ultimately, there are too many factors at play here to tell what the effect of Charter 08 will be, if any. The best detailed analysis that I’ve seen is Rebecca MacKinnon’s piece on her blog. It’s in English, by a Westerner, but one who speaks Chinese and actually has frequent contact with Chinese citizens, and I must recommend it highly. There are many reasons why Charter ’08 might have little effect. One  key factor is perhaps the receptiveness of the population itself: if the document truly resonates with the populace, no amount of censorship can stop it. But as I have written  previously, it’s a mistake to assume that the average Chinese person actually feels any need for Western value imports such as freedom or democracy; the rural poor are more concerned with getting their fair share quick, and the emerging middle class are happy with the status quo, reaping the benefits of China’s growing economy. Further, Chinese culture is firmly rooted in the Confucian “father knows best” ethic and the corresponding reliance on an all-knowing emperor, which can make the notion of “government by the people” sound like anarchy. The authors of Charter ’08 — no fools — are aware of the need for a cultural shift, writing:

The only fundamental way out for China: citizens should become the true masters of the nation, by throwing off the consciousness of reliance on a wise ruler or honest and upright official.

The English text on this page reads: “Access to this web site is banned by ‘TELEKOMÜNİKASYON İLETİŞİM BAŞKANLIĞI’ according to the order of: Ankara 1. Sulh Ceza Mahkemesi, 05.05.2008 of 2008/402″

Just to complete the irony, I was looking for a video of the Oscar Grant shooting when I first discovered this “blocked site” page.

I have previously reported on internet censorship in the United Arab Emirates. Turkey’s “you can’t see this” page is not nearly as flashy, and the censorship may be less severe: I can reach Flickr from here, for example. However, it is not possible to read the website of Richard Dawkins in Turkey; there even appears to be a more specific (and forthright?) banner page.

(Sadly, Google Translate does not support Turkish — dear lazywebs, can anyone out there give an exact translation?)

This suggests that Turkey’s censorship attempts — all of which can be easily circumvented with tools like Tor — are more concerned with social and religious mores of various sorts, as opposed to the efforts of countries like China where there is a clear political motive underlying the censorship pattern (for example, the Tiananmen Square killings never happened, according to Google China.)

For more, please see the fabulous Open Net Initiative, which tracks and reports on internet censorship worldwide, and has an excellent review article on the Turkish situation. Unsurprisingly, Turkey also has had some recent problems with freedom of expression.

Wikileaks is often in the news, but for the wrong reasons. The web site provides a highly public outlet for “classified, censored, or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic, or ethical significance.” It is designed to be a journalistic tool for whistle-blowers and citizens of oppressive government and corporate regimes, a place of first and last resort for sensitive information from sources who need protection. It is a great irony, then, that an organization which specializes in censored information only makes the news when somebody violently objects.

I first stumbled upon Wikileaks about a year ago and have been watching it closely ever since. Despite its mission of openness, the site has a certain mystery about it: nowhere on the site are the principals publicly named. I was delighted, then, to attend a talk by two of the Wikileaks founders at the 25th Annual Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. The 50-minute presentation was titled Wikileaks vs. The World, or “a talk about some conclusions observing Wikileaks.”

You may have heard about some of the things we’ve done in the media, but what you hear about tends to be what is frequently of greatest salacious interest to the Western media and to people in general. That doesn’t tend to be our everyday work.

A look at the front page of Wikileaks today shows all sorts of topics: The un-redacted report of Abu Grhiab whistleblower Samuel Provence. The German Foreign Secret Service report on Kosovo, 2005. Alperin vs. Vatican Bank, 2008 concerning Nazi assets allegedly laundered in 1946. A Scientology Department of Special Affairs lecture. Documentation showing that Swiss Bank Julius Baer put USD $300 million through the Cayman Islands in 1999. “The secret internet censorship list of Thailand’s Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MICT).”

Wikileaks posts anything submitted to it complete and unaltered; that is the point. In this policy they represent the purest possible interpretation of the ideals of transparency and freedom of speech. Usually, the documents they post are applauded or at least ignored, but sometimes they draw the ire of those who feel that there is a case for certain secrets. A few weeks ago Wikileaks posted a list of Danish web-sites ostensibly censored for child-pornography; this summer they released a document describing the technical details of the Warlock signal jammers used by American forces in Iraq. They defend both choices, and indeed all of their leaks, with the same argument:

Who’s to judge the relevance, the political relevance? if it’s us who is to judge the relevance, then are we robust enough to judge this for all of society? … This is something for the public to do, and the political groups in the public, and not us.

Fighting censorship is what they’re all about. They believe deeply in the “fourth estate,” the role of the press and public cognizance as a check against tyranny. Like Wikipedia, they place great trust in the intelligence and enthusiasm of the public at large, who are asked to vet, analyze, and publicize the anonymously submitted documents. This ultimately represents a different model of society, an almost ridiculously open and transparent society. I did not hear the Wikileaks speakers ever concede that secrecy sometimes has its purposes, that there are legitimate reasons for knowledge to be hidden; instead, they repeatedly articulated the dangers of censorship.

The question is not what we need to be told. The question is what we need not to be told and who decides. Secret censorship systems are unaccountable and dangerous.

But again we are distracted. The possible mistakes and harm of Wikileaks cannot be judged in a vacuum, but only against the overall activities of the project. And sadly, sometimes it is the successes that draw the least attention.

There are a lot of things we do routinely that are very serious, but still get little attention. For example we have exposed many, many political assassinations. We released only three months ago a very important report on Kenya documenting 500 extra-judicial assassinations that had occurred in the past 18 months. There was some pickup in the Kenyan press, but the rest of the world, nothing. So getting leaked documents out is extremely important, but it’s not the only thing. Sometimes there is no interest group to care to spread the information.

The speakers urged the audience to get involved: to read, to analyze, to disclose. Our collective reality is only information, they said. “Everyone here is what he knows.” Every decision we make about what to say to someone else or what to write on our blogs defines the future world we live in, and defines what actually happened. It is not an absolute world; it is malleable. And, they claim, it is being changed in all sorts of ways with or without our knowledge or consent. Contrary to popular belief, “no medium is easier to censor than the internet.”

There is a complete eradication of certain parts of history going on. This is much easier than anyone in this crowd here most likely will think. We can see that censorship is being implemented systematically and globally. … George Orwell said that ‘he who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future,’ and this is never more true than with electronic archives. We have seen many, many examples of major newspapers pull material from the archives permanently … For example, this year there were seven stories removed from The Guardian, The Telegraph, and the New Statesman, in response to fear over legal costs. If you go to the URLs for those stories, you won’t see that this story has been removed by legal action, you will see ‘not found’, and if you search the index you will see ‘not found’. Those stories not only have ceased to exist, they have ceased to have ever existed. So the centralization that is occurring in archive repositories means that censorship is very easy.

Speaking to an audience of hundreds of hackers, researchers, anarchists and artists at the CCC in Berlin, they reminded everyone that Wikileaks is real. At the CCC I learned about the flaws in proposed cryptographic technologies for electronic voting; I even learned that SSL itself has been compromised. But technology is not people.  And this, perhaps, is the key point of the entire lecture, and the entire project:

All these documents are real. It is hard fact that is documented. And all these documents reflect some facets of something that is happening at some point somewhere in the world. This is reality. … These documents pertain to violence that is caused by truth being told, by documents surfacing to the society. So It is important to understand that is not a hypothetical construct, some project that is dealing with something very obscure. We are actually dealing with information that reflects a very important facet of lives all over the world, and that has an influence on the quality, the freedom, and all other aspects of lives, living beings that we all need to have compassion for, and care for. This is very important in the mission that we try to bring across.

The streaming video of the complete talk has been archived in WMV format (859MB) here and here, and in OGG video format (445MB) here and here.