Chinese Internet censors blamed for email chaos

[R.A. Hettinga]

<http://ca.today.reuters.com/misc/PrinterFriendlyPopup.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=uri:2007-07-18T124822Z_01_PEK91855_RTRIDST_0_TECH-CHINA-INTERNET-COL.XML>

Reuters

Chinese Internet censors blamed for email chaos

Wed Jul 18, 2007 8:48 AM EDT


BEIJING (Reuters) - Internet users and company officials in China on
Wednesday blamed a series of disruptions to cross-border email traffic on
adjustments to the country's vast Internet surveillance system.

IT company executives offered varying explanations for the email
disruptions, but agreed they were not a result of standard technical
problems.

China is in the midst of a highly publicized campaign to rein in "unhealthy
content" in its rapidly growing Internet, whose rapid spread of information
regarding incidents of government corruption and rural unrest not reported
in conventional media has alarmed China's stability-obsessed leaders.

"We have had hundreds of complaints from our clients in the last couple of
days," said Richard Ford, technical director of Candis Group, a
Beijing-based IT company that processes hundreds of thousands of emails a
day.

"It would have been nice if the authorities could have warned us about this."

Ford said clients complained of emails being returned with error messages
that could only have been placed by a "third party" between local and
foreign mail servers.

"At first we thought this was our problem ... but after investigations, we
are certain it is related to China's great firewall," Ford said, referring
to the elaborate system of filters China maintains to intercept and block
sensitive content from entering its sprawling Internet.

Several other IT companies managing email servers confirmed Internet users
and clients in China and overseas had complained of having trouble sending
and receiving emails.

"This often happens but usually only for a few hours, maybe a day at most,"
Gao Miao, IT manager at Beijing-based consultancy BDA China, told Reuters.

"But this has gone on for four days now ... Everyone knows that this is
related to the government work on the great firewall," Gao said.

Several Chinese Internet service providers, including 263.com and Sina.com,
have sent out warnings to email users about problems at the "international
gateway" that could affect users' "overseas communications."

An executive at a Shanghai-based media company who asked not to be
identified said his company had been advised by its email server managers
to use local emails as a "new firewall system" was being installed at China
Telecom and China Netcom, two of China's state-owned Internet service
providers, and that this had led to "some overseas email being scanned and
cleaned off."

The source said the new firewall system was to allow authorities to
"temporarily" intensify their "monitoring and control" ahead of a key
international meeting.

"He told me that it was related to a big meeting in August, the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization ... After that, the controls would be lifted," the
source said.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which unites China, Russia and four
Central Asian states against terrorism and cross-border crime, meets in
early August in Urumqi, capital of China's northwestern Xinjiang region,
before a major anti-terrorism exercise gets under way in Russia on August 9.

Officials contacted by telephone at China Telecom and China Netcom said
they were unaware of email issues or of any work on China's international
Internet gateway.

An official contacted at China's Internet industry regulator, the Ministry
of Information and Industry, said he "had not heard" about work on the
firewall.

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.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'