Making the Web Safe for Democracy

What the United States can and should do to spread Internet freedom.

BY DANIEL CALINGAERT | JANUARY 19, 2010

With this week's news that the Gmail accounts of foreign journalists in China had been hacked, coming on the heels of last week's brazen attacks on the accounts of Chinese human rights activists and the broad, sophisticated cyberattacks on about 34 U.S. companies, the Chinese assault on Internet freedom is now out in the open for all the world to see.   

The challenge to Internet freedom posed by China is formidable and calls for a bold response. To this end, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will unveil a new technology-policy initiative on Jan. 21. But merely stressing the importance of Internet freedom will not be enough. The U.S. government must be prepared to back up its ideals with bold action.

The Chinese government censors the Internet in multiple ways, using extensive, multi-layered systems. It blocks social networking applications at critical times, as it did with Twitter on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre; it filters politically sensitive content; and it uses human censors to shut down online discussions about human rights abuses, official corruption, and other forbidden subjects. The regime also pressures private companies, such as blog hosts, to police their users.

But the assault goes well beyond censorship. The Chinese government also conducts pervasive online surveillance and uses sophisticated technology to monitor and intercept emails. State security has forced detained dissidents to give up their passwords, allowing agents to access their address books and identify all of their contacts. It has also subjected cyber-dissidents to arrest, prosecution, and harsh jail sentences. Through this combination of censorship, surveillance, and retribution against dissent, the Chinese government maintains the world's most extensive system for stifling political speech online. 

Clinton's Internet freedom initiative will have limited effect if it merely re-packages existing policy. The importance of Internet freedom is well known -- it was often articulated by the George W. Bush administration -- and $20 million is already allocated for programs to help human rights and democracy activists evade censorship and maintain their privacy in countries such as China, Iran, and Syria. Moreover, as part of this year's appropriations bill, Congress has pumped another $30 million into these programs.

PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP/Getty Images

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Daniel Calingaert is deputy director of programs at Freedom House, which receives funding from the U.S. State Department, Google, and other sources to promote Internet freedom.

TOMHE

8:28 PM ET

January 19, 2010

unqualified

I agree that China needs to improve its record of democracy. But, your startting point is acturally what you think, not what you can prove, or what you can labell as outrage in comparison with similar acts by other governments.

Your starting point reads as:
\With this week's news that the Gmail accounts of foreign journalists in China had been hacked, coming on the heels of last week's brazen attacks on the accounts of Chinese human rights activists and the broad, sophisticated cyberattacks on about 34 U.S. companies, the Chinese assault on Internet freedom is now out in the open for all the world to see.

I wonder how a legal officer of Google can have adequate facts to support the claims. It needs industrious effort to reach the conclusions.

 

TIAN

5:59 PM ET

January 20, 2010

Tomhe, the Google incident

Tomhe, the Google incident happened, as I recall, in mid-December, so they had a few weeks to dig into it. Further, they notified the other companies involved as they discovered they had been infiltrated, too.

Whatever else we may think about Google, it does have some of the finest folks for this stuff on the face of the planet. Therefore, it's not as if they got hit at 9:00 A.M. then ten minutes later started screaming "CHINA SPIES HIT US!!! WE'RE PULLING OUT!!!"

In a sense, I'm glad journalists got violated -- this makes it more personal, more visceral, for those best place to aid everyone else in exposing this stuff. (Journalists, I don't mean I'm "happy" you had this awful experience -- but you know what I mean.)

It's also good that now the U.S. government has had a second jolt -- or a third, if you count the Rio Tinto incident a few months ago when Australia and China got into a major dogfight. Obviously, the stakes have moved from the merely high-altitude to orbital.

This article is right: reaction, especially merely verbal reaction, is no longer enough. Though I would guess (and that's all I can do) that the NSA and NRO, among other of our intelligence agencies are monitoring China, maybe now's the time for them and any other relevant agency to step up their efforts. With the aim of getting the goods -- the smoking gun. Then trot off to the World Court or WTO -- whoever.

Secretary Clinton sure does seem ready to stride right into the middle of the fray, sword drawn -- and good for her.

 

TOMHE

7:49 PM ET

January 20, 2010

just an assumption

TIAN: Just a wild scenario: China suspects that CIA is assisting some of the so called dissidents, so they try to hack the email accounts of those guys to find out certain fingerprint. Now, the question is: is China the end of evil, or a means to end evil.