WASHINGTON, D.C.-Today, the Internet reaches across countries whose governments enforce strict censorship and repress their citizens' Internet use with persecution and imprisonment. Human rights groups have accused Internet companies like Yahoo!, Google and Cisco, who provide Internet technologies and services, of being complicit in the severe measures taken by some repressive regimes in suppressing Internet freedom of speech.
To sort out the controversy and consider what actions the Congress should take, on May 20 the Senate Committee on the Judiciary (Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law), held a hearing, entitled: "Global Internet Freedom: Corporate Responsibility and the Rule of Law."
The Subcommittee had obtained a disturbing 2002 Cisco PowerPoint presentation that appears to connect Chinese Internet monitoring (the "Golden Shield Project) with "Cisco Opportunities" for marketing their products to the Chinese regime, said Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), who chaired the hearing. Cisco was called upon to explain the PowerPoint presentation.
"The Internet has empowered people who have never before had access to power, to challenge and influence public policy. It provides access to information and an ability to communicate…," but, has become "a prime target of governments of oppressive regimes," offered the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), in a written statement to this hearing.
Some examples of foreign government suppression of Internet free speech, sometimes with American companies' cooperation, were mentioned by Senator Leahy and Arvind Ganesan from Human Rights Watch (HRW).
• On May 7, a 27-year-old engineer was beaten by Egyptian officials for using Facebook to support a general strike, according to HRW.
• In Russia, a man posted on a blog a "harsh critique of corrupt police," said Ganesan, and is being charged as an "extremist," in the government's first test case to use a law that restricts freedom of speech on the Internet. The Internet is one of the few open forums remaining in Russia, but is now coming under government control, according to Ganesan.
• In June 2007, Syria's military intelligence arrested a man because, he "insulted security services" online, said Ganesan. He was held incommunicado and in May 2008, sentenced to three years imprisonment for "weakening the national ethos," said Ganesan. In an obvious effort to discourage writing critical of the regime, in July last year, the government required website owners "to display the name and e-mail of the author of any article or comment on their website," said Ganesan.
• "During its crackdown, following protests by monks, Burma's military junta shut down the country's Internet connections to make sure no information got into the country and more importantly, that little information got out of the country," said Ganesan. In September 2007, the junta stopped the flow of information by apparently disconnecting the main telecommunications lines.
"…people perished in part because they lacked basic information about Cyclone Nargis, stated Senator Leahy on the devastating consequences of government censorship in Burma (officially, Myanmar).
China is in many ways the model of Internet repression with its 30,000 or more Internet police and Great Firewall. In 2005, Chinese journalist and writer Shi Tao was sentenced 10 years for an email sent to a pro-democracy site, outside China that contained information the regime called "top secret." His identity from the IP address was provided to the Chinese authorities by Yahoo!.
In October 2007, China blocked Google's YouTube at the time that the Dalai Lama was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.
Cisco appears to be selling router equipment to the Chinese police authorities "by offering censorship training and other services," said Dr. Shiyu Zhou, Deputy Director of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium. The Consortium is composed of companies that work together in developing anti-censorship software to combat China's and other repressive countries' blocking, monitoring and tracing of online activities of users.
Dr. Zhou noted, "The infrastructure of China's Great Firewall shown by our research coincides with the layouts in Cisco (China)'s PowerPoint document."
The 2002 PowerPoint presentation states, as a main objective of its support of the Golden Shield Project, something straight out of Communist Party rhetoric: "combat the Falun Gong…"
"…the PowerPoint document raises obvious and profound concerns about Cisco's culpability in [how Internet monitoring and censorship]…has…added to the power of a powerful dictatorship, and…caused the arrest and frequent murder on [Falun Gong practitioners]," said Dr. Zhou.
Cisco maintains that it sells the same products to everyone and does not customize or develop specialized filtering to different regimes. However, Dr. Zhou said: "Cisco's routers are supercomputers. They can be used as a toy, but they can also be made into an A bomb to do whatever Golden Shield needs."
Google, Yahoo!, and Cisco Respond
The Internet companies claim they are providing services in countries that are hostile to free expression. Representatives of the Internet companies Google and Yahoo! said at the hearing that they are in the business of providing platforms for free expression and access to information and expanding free communication, but have to operate in countries that make some communications illegal.
"Since 2007, our You Tube video sharing site has been blocked in at least 11 countries including China, Thailand, Turkey, Pakistan, Morocco, Brazil, Syria, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Myanmar," said Nicole Wong, Deputy General Counsel for Google, Inc.
Google created a special search engine for China—Google.cn—that censors information according to the wishes of the PRC. The same self-censorship is true of Yahoo!.
Ms. Wong defended Google.cn by declaring that the Chinese language interface on Google.com is uncensored and still remains available within China, when it is not being blocked by the regime. While the filtered version, Google.cn, is "imperfect," it still contributes "to the overall expansion of access to information in China."
Additionally, whenever access is blocked on Google.cn, the user is notified, and sometimes even snippets of the blocked page are shown. Ms. Wong said that this indicates to users that there is more relevant information which is being blocked.
"Even in countries that restrict people's ability to communicate with one another or access information, people are still finding meaningful ways to engage online," said Michael Samway, an attorney for Yahoo!
Google and Yahoo seem to be saying that a half glass of water is better than none.
Ms. Wong explains the difficulty of Google senior executives who wrestled with the question of what they can offer: Would it be better to be there to provide some level of information rather than being completely blocked off in China? She explained that the Internet users in China said that "You will do more for us by being here than by staying out."
Dr. Zhou disagrees. "For companies like Google and Yahoo!, their self-censorship in China is more damaging than other kinds of censorship because the Chinese people in such a closed society take Google and Yahoo! as role models of freedom of information," he said. When the Chinese people look on both websites by Google and Yahoo! and see that the information is consistent, they will tend to believe that they are true, and that is "deceiving," he said.
Opponents Say Voluntary Measures Don't Work
Other written testimony offered at the briefing rejected Google, Yahoo! and Cisco practices for opposing censorship and protecting user privacy as ineffective or illegal.
"They will claim that they must follow the laws of the countries in which they do business, without acknowledging that they are aiding and abetting those countries to violate international human rights laws…This argument disregards the legal obligations that corporations have to uphold all fundamental human rights, not just some," wrote attorney Morton Sklar and Theresa Harris, World Organization for Human Rights USA.
"…it is difficult to point to a company within the voluntary standards process that has robust human rights policies and procedures in place more than two years after the problems in China were disclosed," said Arvind Ganesan. "Google, for example, has actively resisted such efforts," he added.
While acknowledging that Google and other companies notify users when censorship is occurring, "they still decide what to censor and whether they will even challenge the government's actions."
The voluntary company initiatives taken so far have done little to improve Internet freedom and are not likely to do so, Ganesan said. The voluntary company initiatives are least likely to withstand the pressures from the Chinese authorities or other repressive regimes, when seeking user information about cyberdissidents. Some kind of regulatory framework applied to all is going to be needed, he said.
Independent third party monitoring is required, according to Ganesan. The latter would assess company policies and whether they were "diligently implemented" and "effective in curtailing human rights problems." When companies do not respect the standards, there would be penalties. This arrangement would make it more difficult for governments to force companies into becoming complicit in human rights abuses," said Ganesan.
Du Won Kang contributed to this report.
Feeds