When the Net goes dark and silent

BENJAMIN EDELMAN

Late in August, Internet users in China suddenly found themselves unable to
access google.com. No government official had publicly announced a ban, nor
had Google taken any sudden action to provoke China's wrath. Nonetheless, on
August 29, millions of Chinese computer users could no longer access the
world's most popular search engine.

China's filtering efforts are far from unique. For example, Saudi Arabia,
Singapore and Vietnam also filter sites they deem offensive. In the US, the
state of Pennsylvania requires Internet service providers to prevent access
to state-identified child pornography, with other states reportedly
considering following suit.

But Chinese filtering goes further than efforts elsewhere, in part by
keeping secret the very fact that authorities are blocking controversial
sites. Compare China's filtering efforts with the corresponding practice in
Saudi Arabia: when an Internet user in the kingdom tries to access a site
prohibited there, the browser gives an error message, in Arabic and English,
explicitly stating that access has been prohibited. It also names the
government agency responsible.

The Saudi ''access denied'' page also lets the user read more about the
blocking policy. It even provides a form allowing the user to ask the
administration to reconsider its block on the site. In contrast, a Chinese
user requesting a prohibited site gets no explicit report that the site has
been blocked.

Instead, the user receives only a ''host not found'' error message - but
this message could also be the result of a malfunctioning Web server or a
damaged network link. As a result, a user is uncertain that a site is
actually blocked - it could simply be broken or unreachable. A user can only
assume that a site has been blocked through correspondence with foreign
colleagues or through repeated testing over time.

As if prior filtering efforts were not secretive enough, new changes make
Chinese filtering even less transparent. Last month, China's filtering
apparently extended to restrictions on certain key words, regardless of site
or context. In some parts of China, users' Web searches must not mention any
in a list of prohibited terms; elsewhere, the network checks for prohibited
terms in Web-page results, blocking any page that includes those terms.

Finally, such filtering sometimes extends also to e-mail, when messages with
even a single prohibited word or phrase are discarded.

Such crude filtering often fails to accomplish the goals of administrators.
Akey-word block on the name of a sensitive organisation might restrict
access to negative news about the group rather than merely preventing
communication with its members. In addition, like China's earlier filtering
systems, these new developments are secret; users come to anticipate the
subjects deemed off-limits, but there is no known authority to propagate
such rules or receive complaints.

Admittedly, filtering secrecy pales in comparison with the more pressing
problems of filtering restrictions themselves, and of the associated
enforcement efforts. But taking as given China's desire to restrict the flow
of information, an increase in the transparency of filtering might bring
about surprisingly extensive progress on the practical problems with the
policy.

For example, if filtering was open to public scrutiny, the aggrieved
operators and users of filtered sites could complain to the relevant Chinese
authority, expressing their outrage at both intentional and accidental
prohibitions. The accidental blocks and those that were too wide-ranging
would probably be reversed - a clear improvement over the errors caused by
the current lack of formal review or reconsideration.

But China's intentional blocks would remain, and might become increasingly
controversial. If Beijing admitted filtering, it would surely face
objections under the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
a General Assembly proclamation explicitly prohibiting government
restrictions on any form of media. China has already faced numerous similar
challenges. Indeed, there is little practical difference between admitting
to filtering and continuing to deny the practice half-heartedly. China
clearly thinks it is entitled to filter the Internet, UN resolutions
notwithstanding, and with the practice already so well known, China arguably
need not even deny it.

Realistically, it is hard to imagine China coming to see increased
transparency as the sensible way forward, at least in the near future. But
the Internet itself may produce and enforce such transparency. Thanks in
large part to updates received by e-mail from users across China, the South
China Morning Post and others have published scores of reports of
restrictions around the country - despite official denials. Reporters and
researchers worldwide are increasingly discussing the subject - in frequent
BBC despatches and a comprehensive report from the US-based think-tank Rand
Corporation, among others.

My own contribution, with Professor Jonathan Zittrain of the Harvard Law
School, is a Web-based system that allows a remote verification of any given
site's accessibility from China. We are also testing many hundreds of
thousands of sites, yielding an increasingly rigorous sense of what is
blocked and where. We are planning to publish our full results online.

Research aside, some have watched the situation evolve and have decided to
do more than write about it. Taking matters into their own hands,
public-spirited programmers calling themselves Peak-a-booty are designing
software to circumvent filtering systems established by China and others.
Though not yet complete, their software already reflects an arms race and we
will surely see China striving to render it ineffective.

China's recent implementation of key-word based filtering shows all too
clearly the country's apparent commitment to Internet restrictions. China
will not easily give up the filtering arms race, recent developments
suggest, and facilitation of the free flow of information will yet require
renewed effort on all fronts - reporting, analysis, circumvention and
lobbying. Meanwhile, after two weeks in absentia, Google is back in China -
for those users who avoid topics deemed off-limits. But the interested
public ought not rest until key-word restrictions are lifted - or, at the
very least, until Chinese officialsadmit they are tampering.

**[Benjamin Edelman is a student at the Harvard Law School and a researcher at its Berkman Centre for Internet & Society. (cyber.law.harvard.edu/edelman.html)]