--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: ignition-point@majordomo.pobox.com X-Sender: believer@telepath.com Date: Sun, 25 Oct 1998 07:54:22 -0600 To: believer@telepath.com From: believer@telepath.com Subject: IP: Internet Police on the Prowl in China Mime-Version: 1.0 Sender: owner-ignition-point@majordomo.pobox.com Precedence: list Reply-To: believer@telepath.com Source: Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/digest/wtech001.htm Internet Police on the Prowl in China By Michael Laris Special to The Washington Post Saturday, October 24, 1998; Page A12 BEIJING - As head of the Shanghai Police Department's Computer Security Supervision office, Qing Guang is in charge of ferreting out "harmful information" on the Internet. He has to look only as far as his own in box. Qing is an unwitting subscriber to Chinese VIP Reference, an electronic pro-democracy magazine run by Chinese students and scholars from a small office near Washington's Dupont Circle. Every 10 days, editors e-mail their magazine -- with its essays on "thought liberation," bulletins on democracy activism, and reader-inspired reports on corruption -- to more than 100,000 Internet users in China. Qing is one of them. And that makes the tough-talking Shanghai cop crazy. "For me, this kind of information is useless. When you put it in my mailbox, it's a type of spiritual pollution. All the users don't want to receive these kinds of things," Qing said in a rare interview. "If there was something you didn't need, and I sent it to you by force, could you accept that? Would you be disgusted or not?" The Internet is slowly coming of age in China, prompting a showdown between Communist Party officials who seek to maintain their media monopoly, and upstart Internet publishers relying on powerful technology and their uncensored news coverage to appeal to China's best and brightest. The number of Chinese Internet users has jumped 75 percent this year to 1.2 million, and it is expected to reach 10 million in five years. Eighty-five percent of users are under age 35, and they represent an influential elite of students, intellectuals and officials. VIP Reference reaches at least 10 percent of Chinese users and perhaps a greater percentage if reader surveys about how often it is forwarded are accurate. The Chinese government is ambivalent toward the Internet. Telecommunications officials have been investing millions of dollars to increase Internet access, and national policy supports its swift growth, but propaganda and security officials oppose its unfettered expansion. As Chinese at home and abroad have become more effective at spreading their ideas online, police and state security agents have launched a campaign to train "Internet police" and pursue those responsible for "hostile magazines." "The water that carries the boat can also tip it over. The Internet is also like this," the People's Daily, the most authoritative voice of China's Communist Party, wrote on Oct. 12. "Going online is inevitable, but tremendous economic benefit requires an assurance of safety." China's leaders are not alone in their concern. New York-based Human Rights Watch is looking into reports that governments in Malaysia, Turkey and Bahrain have persecuted their citizens for distributing political information online. "It is precisely because of the Internet's potential for increasing the civil and political participation of the disenfranchised that regulators are seeking to control it," said Jagdish Parikh, online researcher for Human Rights Watch. But China's government, which relied heavily on underground propaganda to build support for taking power in 1949, is especially sensitive about keeping its own censorship structures in place. Authorities boast that China was the first country to require Internet users to register with the government, and police are institutionalizing the monitoring of the country's networks. In Shanghai, for instance, Officer Qing has trained more than 200 employees from government work units to be the eyes and ears of the police on local networks. In three-day seminars, Qing describes the dangers of "black guests," the Chinese term for hackers, and explains Internet security. He also explains China's stringent Internet regulations, which went into effect last January. "No one is allowed to release harmful information on the Internet," Qing said. "You cannot send out harmful information which attacks our nation's territorial integrity, attacks our nation's independence, or attacks our socialist system." Qing would not say how many Internet cases are being prosecuted in China, nor how many police are surfing China's networks. But in interviews, Chinese Internet users who have had run-ins with security forces say the pressure is growing. Lin Hai, a computer entrepreneur in Shanghai, was arrested in March for allegedly providing his database of 30,000 e-mail addresses to VIP Reference. Although Lin had not been active in politics, and had openly sold and exchanged e-mail addresses as part of his online headhunting business, he has been charged with "inciting the overthrow of national power." Xu Hong, Lin's wife, said trading e-mail addresses is considered as sinister as trafficking in postage stamps, and she believes authorities are using her husband to send a message. "It's 'killing a chicken to scare the monkeys,'" she said, using an old Chinese expression. Feng Donghai, a co-founder of VIP Reference who works as a telecommunications researcher at Columbia University, said his parents and friends in China have been visited by state security agents four times in the past several months to investigate him. "I also received a lot of reader messages that they were visited by national security police because they received our magazine," Feng said. But, like Officer Qing, many have an alibi. "When police question our readers, they can claim they never subscribed," Feng said. The magazine has editors and contributors around the United States and in China, and is part news source and part network. Democracy campaigners in China have used it as a forum for discussing reform, and to locate the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of fellow travelers. VIP sends copies of its magazine not only to police officers but also to Chinese lawmakers and government officials, as well as thousands of citizens. VIP also e-mails a smaller-circulation daily update on dissident activities. Readers e-mail the magazine 500 times each day. About 30 of those are requests to be removed from the mailing list, but many others write to talk politics. The Chinese government has set up e-mail filters to block distribution, but editors send the magazine from different addresses each time and have an elaborate system within China to ensure the messages reach their destination. Feng said he gets several dozen e-mail threats a day and has also been hit by e-mail "bombings," which fill up his in box with large files. Several of VIP's other key editors are trying to keep their identities secret to escape similar trouble and to avoid being blacklisted. The chief editor of "Public Opinion," an electronic journal edited in China that focuses on government abuses of power, said he went into hiding after police investigated his company. "I was scared. Many people like me, who say things they shouldn't, have been struck," said the editor, who gave his name as Li Yongming in an e-mail interview from an undisclosed location in southern China. But Li has continued working on the magazine. "I will not let others cover my mouth," he said. © Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company ----------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ----------------------- **************************************************** To subscribe or unsubscribe, email: majordomo@majordomo.pobox.com with the message: (un)subscribe ignition-point email@address or (un)subscribe ignition-point-digest email@address **************************************************** www.telepath.com/believer **************************************************** --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'