Who Lost China's Internet?
GUTMANN, ETHAN
Who Lost China's Internet? Without U.S. assistance, it will remain a tool of the Beijing government, not a force for democracy. BY ETHAN GUTMANN Beijing It's not easy being the father of the...
...But if the Chinese take this tack, they are of course being dishonest about their own motives...
...On the third go-round, it dawned on Michael that his fellow computer geeks wanted to end the meeting, too...
...But it will be worth it...
...He admitted that Yahoo...
...American technologies of surveillance, encryption, firewalls, and viruses have now been transferred to Chinese partners—and might even one day be turned against our own ludicrously open Internet...
...And of course the great promise of the Internet in China was supposed to be that it was unfettered, not selective...
...The game is to make sure that they don't complain...
...Michael confirms: "Cisco made a killing...
...The Chinese government uses it to wage political campaigns against Taiwan, Tibet, and America...
...Incidents such as this have mushroomed in China, suggesting that Cisco may not be the only one capable of looking deeply into the packets...
...E-mail to Tibet now took three days to get through, if at all, and Falun Gong e-mail was completely eradicated...
...Big brother Internet...
...Michael asks...
...It's normal...
...Management had fudged the hit rate, because "we were viewed as extremely aggressive...
...Nor can we expect the U.S...
...Associations could flourish among the patrons of the cybercafés, using anonymous monikers...
...AOL, Netscape Communications, and Sun Microsystems all helped disseminate government propaganda by backing the China Internet Corporation, an arm of the state-run Xinhua news agency...
...Nortel provides software for voice and closed-circuit camera recognition— technology that the Public Security Bureau has already put to good use, according to the Chinese press...
...We were seen as too foreign...
...And those whose dream is democracy in China are operating with diminishing points of entry...
...BY ETHAN GUTMANN Beijing It's not easy being the father of the Chinese Internet...
...In fact, AOL signed a landmark deal with a Chinese station at the end of October...
...The minute Bush went airborne, the blocks were back in place...
...I spent a day watching Stephen Hsu diagram the Chinese web and its weaknesses...
...The crackdowns come in waves...
...Chinese whiz kids could still surf through the firewall and beyond...
...State security was said to be lax, corrupt, full of holes...
...Resistance would be futile—even the Chinese Borg could not stop it...
...David Zhou, a systems engineer manager at Cisco, Beijing, told me flat out, "We don't care about the [Chinese government's] rules...
...Not surprisingly, the most common search words in China were not "Britney" and "hooters," but "free" and "proxy...
...Cisco does not deny its success in China...
...news websites were magically lifted by Chinese authorities...
...I treated a top Chinese engineer (who wishes to remain anonymous) to a 30-course imperial meal in Beijing...
...Creative engineers, unleashed to solve the problem of bringing Internet freedom to China, might take any number of approaches...
...it's just the issue du jour...
...The former Yahoo...
...Zhou relaxed, then confidently added that the capabilities of Cisco's routers can be used to intercept information and to conduct keyword searches: "We have the capability to look deeply into the packet...
...We funded, built, and pushed into China what we thought was a Trojan Horse, but we forgot to build the hatch...
...To force compliance with government objectives— to ensure that all pipes lead back to Rome—they needed the networking superpower, Cisco, to standardize the Chinese Internet and equip it with firewalls on a national scale...
...The Great Firewall might be vulnerable to a few physicists at the University of Oregon...
...The business press has painted a picture of a thriving, home-grown Chinese market for portals and search engines—mirroring such companies as AOL, Google, and Excite—with names like Sohu, Netease, and Sina fighting for the top spots...
...But for VOA to justify an anti-blocking effort on a scale that will make a difference, it will need to be seen as carrying out an important plank of American foreign policy, not just acting on the margins as it is now...
...It's hard to "sniff" packets of information, particularly coded packets...
...According to the Chinese engineer, Cisco came through, developing a router device, integrator, and firewall box specially designed for the government's telecom monopoly...
...no one else will react to your comment...
...The Internet remains the strongest force for democracy available to the Chinese people...
...Think of it also as a way around the university students and the intelligentsia, who are overrated as agents for democratic change in China...
...After intercepting it and preventing its transmission, Mother Yahoo...
...Possible permanent loss of career, family, and freedom...
...It appears on your screen, but only you and Yahoo!'s big mama actually see your thought crime...
...The State Information Bureau was in charge of watching and making sure that we complied...
...is actually the most popular portal in China by a mile...
...Smaller American companies and smaller nations smell the blood...
...If we don't, his progeny may not forgive us...
...By October 2001, when President George W. Bush flew to Shanghai for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit, he was entering an Internet police state...
...Control the means of communication...
...The Chinese engineers working with him suddenly convened a special meeting, demanding to know if it would be possible to do keyword searching inside e-mails and web addresses on the Chinese Internet...
...has disabled searches for select keywords, such as "Falun Gong" and "China democracy...
...rep also admitted that the search phrase "Taiwan independence" on Chinese Yahoo...
...In the United States, Cisco is known (among other things) for building corporate firewalls to block viruses and hackers...
...At the moment it is a laughably small priority...
...I now realize that it was a warning...
...One day sticks in his mind...
...the right decision would clearly speed Chinese approval for AOL to offer Internet services and perhaps get a foothold in the Chinese television market...
...But as surely as Triangle Boy works to liberate the surfing Chinese masses, you can bet State Security is looking for a way to pounce on this latest proxy rebellion...
...As the father of the Chinese Internet Michael Robinson notes, "In the Chinese Internet's infancy, the first three sites that the government blocked were two anti-government sites—and one Maoist site...
...five of the top twenty Triangle Boy search sites are in the Chinese language...
...According to James Mul-venon of Rand Corporation, Network-1 Security Solutions, a U.S...
...Hsu and his company, SafeWeb, have developed a proxy server system called Triangle Boy...
...The heartland...
...By this logic, when Yahoo...
...Political...
...Just for good measure, Anonymizer was finally blocked as well...
...The Yahoo...
...The former rep defended such censorship: "We are not a content creator, just a medium, a selective medium...
...rejected an attempt by Voice of America to buy ad space, they were just helping the Internet function smoothly...
...They might exploit the fact that Chinese Internet addresses were originally configured in peculiar blocks...
...Ethan Gutmann, a visitingfellow at the Project for the New American Century, is completing a book, Beijing Boot Camp...
...Fill it with Chinese voices...
...As long as the foreigner assured them that down the road the Chinese would be able to build an Internet firewall against the world and conduct surveillance on its own citizens, the engineers could continue working with him...
...Nor does it deny that it may have altered its products to suit the special needs of the Chinese "market"—a localization scheme the company avoided elsewhere in the world—but it categorically rejects any responsibility for how the government uses its firewall boxes...
...Enter Yahoo...
...Everything he does on the web might conceivably be used against him...
...any savvy Chinese user would have sensed it instantly...
...Around the same time, Chinese authorities announced near completion of a "black box" to collect all information flowing across the Internet...
...Is it destined to be a tool of surveillance and repression, managed by the Chinese government and serviced by cynical Western partners...
...Faced with being left behind technologically, the Chinese authorities dropped their demands...
...The Voice of America, whose website has been a highprofile target of Chinese blocking, last summer began funding Triangle Boy to the tune of $10,000 per month...
...But consider, for example, the arrest of veteran activist Chi Shouzhu last April...
...Is China's Internet beyond redemption...
...But what is "normal" in China can be altered under duress...
...AOL is quietly weighing the pros and cons of informing on dissidents if the Public Security Bureau so requests...
...But at a higher level, someone required assurance...
...The triangle refers to the Chinese user, to a fleet of servers outside of the firewall, and to a mothership which the servers report to, but the Chinese government cannot find...
...January 2001 saw the criminalization of Internet transfer of "state secret information," such as reports of human rights violations...
...That vision has now been called into question, not by a failure of the Internet's architecture, but in several cases, by a failure of American corporate values...
...Does Cisco allow the PLA to look into packets...
...He won't expect to get through, and if he does, it will be cause for alarm, for the site may be a tripwire—not for spam, but for state security...
...He admitted that Cisco is under the direct scrutiny of State Security, the Public Security Bureau, and the People's Liberation Army (PLA...
...That implies a need for a highly technical layering operation, involving an endless and ever-changing supply of low-key web-based proxies, mirror sites, and encrypted e-mail and instant messenger services in Mandarin, Cantonese, and English, in sufficient volume to overwhelm the Chinese firewall...
...Fully 10 percent of Chinese users—about two million people—used proxies regularly in an attempt to circumvent government controls...
...The U.S...
...New sites on forbidden topics crop up daily, and with the proliferation of ISPs who just want more subscribers surfing, the lag time between updating the government's list of banned sites and implementation can be erratic...
...web security firm, gained entry to the Chinese market by helpfully donating 300 live computer viruses to the Public Security Bureau...
...friend (in a browser-based Hotmail account, no less, which in theory should be difficult to monitor) with the words "China," "unrest," "labor," and "Xinjiang" in queer half-tone brackets, as if the words had been picked out by a filter...
...It's none of Cisco's business...
...Many saw the Internet as a populist river leading to the ocean of the global community...
...As hoped, the shark's fin soup loosened his tongue— on the subject of Cisco Systems...
...Let's start where Michael left off, with the expansion of the Chinese Internet...
...As Michael Robinson puts it, for the first four years of the Net era, those with paranoid visions of China's government were never quite able to square their suspicions with the rapid expansion of the Chinese Internet...
...The only practical solution to this puzzle is for the Bush administration to make Internet freedom in China a high priority...
...I replied that he has a point: It's not the gun but the way it's used, and how can a company that builds firewalls be expected to, well, not build firewalls...
...representative spoke to me on the condition that I would not use his name or give identifying details other than that he had recently left the company...
...In the wake of terrorist attacks on America, some of the byplay between Beijing and its entrepreneurial suitors has taken on new significance...
...But Chinese military reports on unconventional warfare explicitly advocate coordinated virus attacks to debilitate U.S...
...America may expect a more sophisticated visit from the offspring of a Network-1 sample virus in the future...
...Irate overtaxed peasants with Internet-enabled cell phones ten years from now are the real target market...
...rep again: "You adjust...
...then solicitously generates a friendly e-mail suggesting that you cool your rhetoric—censorship, but with a New Age nod to self-esteem...
...For the engineers, this was just cover-your-ass stuff...
...Then again, there may be a more elaborate game afoot...
...handles things differently...
...If they can block the outside, and block relationships between Chinese forces, no one will listen...
...But credit cards are effectively blocked for Chinese citizens...
...Yes, yes, it can be done, Michael told them, and they went back to work...
...Or the fact that the government's proxy-hunters come from only a few locations...
...It was built to filter "gambling, shopping, job search, pornography, stock quotes, or other non-business material," but the first question from the Chinese buyers is invariably: Can it stop Falun Gong...
...Michael was hired in 1996 by the Chinese government and Global One (a Sprint-France Telecom-Deutsche Telekom joint venture) to build the first network in China providing public access to the Internet...
...communication and financial systems during a crisis...
...A user, frantically typing in proxy addresses until he finds one that isn't blocked, effectively provides the government with a tidy blacklist...
...None of these measures will be cheap...
...Budgeted at $300 million a year, VOA has the means and is wisely looking at several other solutions as well...
...hundreds of e-mails on the controversy surrounding a schoolhouse bombing in Jiangxi disappeared...
...embrace the means of communication...
...When Chinese authorities ordered Microsoft to surrender its software's underlying source codes—the keys to encryption—as the price of doing business there, Microsoft chose to fight, spearheading an unprecedented Beijing-based coalition of American, Japanese, and European Chambers of Commerce...
...In what Michael calls "the first sign of cleverness" by the governThe American business presence in China is deeply, perhaps fatally, compromised as an agent for liberalizing change...
...Cisco's firewall has proven to be far from foolproof...
...businessmen and China hands keep predicting is on the horizon or even imminent...
...A system created to relay U.S...
...Theoretically, China's desire to be part of the Internet should have given the capitalists who wired it similar leverage...
...So Chinese security organs also needed to control the search engines through which new sites can be found...
...For a small fee, expat users could turn to a web-based proxy browser, such as Anonymizer...
...How could they...
...But for Michael, any reservations over complicity with Chinese government objectives were outweighed by a bedrock faith in the Internet's ingenious architecture...
...What threatens them...
...Since 1979 that dream has been the fall of the Chinese Communist party and the rise of the world's largest market, an event that U.S...
...In November, commercial news sites were banned...
...Americans make dreams, and every generation carries new ones to China...
...Any attack, especially on the mothership, requires enormous resources...
...To deflect criticism, but perhaps also as a demonstration of power, blocks on U.S...
...Instead, look to the slow-motion crisis of a leadership transition, the release of the Tiananmen papers, the emergence of a cyber-Falun Gong, and a stirring—you could feel it on the street—for greater freedom of expression, if not genuine democracy...
...Instead, the leverage all seems to have China's desire to be part of the Internet should have given the capitalists leverage...
...He replied, "It was a precautionary measure...
...they attempt to send daily news via e-mail to some 800,000 addresses in China, with no guarantee that they are getting through...
...With the genie of free speech out of the bottle, it would just be a matter of time before those predictions of democracy in China come true...
...Or no Internet at all...
...The American business presence in China is deeply, perhaps fatally, compromised as an agent for liberalizing change...
...In December, the National People's Congress decreed all unauthorized online political activity illegal...
...E-mail may be the most risky: Two years ago, working from my office in a Chinese TV studio, I received an e-mail from a U.S...
...Maybe not...
...But we can still repair the damage...
...Yet Michael was not naive...
...In fact, Cisco's ability to thrive in China may well depend on cooperation with the Public Security Bureau and the PLA...
...In October 2000, the State Council ordered Internet Service Providers to hold all Chinese user data—phone numbers, time, and surfing history—for at least 60 days...
...Chairman Mao knew the utility of briefly loosening controls to create a dragnet...
...government to fully manage such a multi-pronged private-and-public defense of Internet freedom...
...Working inside, he sensed the Chinese leadership's true motives in building an Internet...
...fighting terrorism wasn't one of them...
...In China, the government had a unique problem: how to keep a billion people from accessing politically sensitive websites, now and forever...
...command messages over a damaged network after sustaining a Soviet nuclear strike could surely find a way to get messages through, securely, amid the white noise of millions of Chinese users...
...Zhou didn't know or wouldn't say...
...One of his friends, Peter Lovelock, author of the Made For China Internet Update, puts it this way: "These are Marxists...
...Children are running by, boats are paddling, the smell of roast lamb fills the air, and Michael Robinson, a young American computer engineer, sits rigidly, facing an empty café on the shore of Qing-hai Lake, speaking in a low voice of the crackdown...
...The request would then be thrown away, with the user receiving a banal message: "Operation timed out...
...Because the addresses of the servers change constantly, the system is practically unbeatable...
...We can, in Michael's words, "lay down the communication network for revolution...
...They might go through Hong Kong, where illicit cables are said to run to Guangzhou...
...Although it was widely rumored in Beijing that up to 30,000 state security employees were monitoring the Internet in that city alone, the monitoring was also laughed at...
...They might use messages formatted as images to defeat software that sniffs out characters...
...A top Yahoo...
...come up with these policies...
...Then, the Chinese government abruptly built a cyber-version of the Three Gorges Dam...
...During Bush's current visit to China, any attempt to discuss loosening Chinese Internet controls is likely to be brushed aside using the rhetoric of our own struggle against terrorism (what, you're against surveillance...
...How did Yahoo...
...companies to play similar games, but Yahoo...
...policy...
...If in the midst of a discussion you type, "We should have nationwide multiparty elections in China...
...All Chinese chat rooms or discussion groups have a "big mama," a supervisor for a team of censors who wipe out politically incorrect comments in real time...
...Yahoo...
...But it is a critical medium...
...Given the willingness of capitalists to work hand in hand with the Chinese regime, the Internet may be the only force left that is potentially anti-hierarchical...
...Think of it as a way to levy a web-based democracy tax on the Chinese government...
...There were urgent reasons for the Chinese Internet crackdown...
...Already tens of thousands of Chinese users have connected with it...
...He was picked up in a crowded train station minutes after printing out online materials promoting Chinese democracy...
...Even if they back the overall concept, administration officials will inevitably want deniability about certain parts of such an operation...
...was particularly eager to please...
...The way to do it would be this: If a Chinese user tried to view a website outside China with political content, such as CNN.com, the address would be recognized by a filter program that screens out forbidden sites...
...A shrewd native engineer could probably root out and defeat 99 percent of these government agents...
...Yes, yes, they said, but can you do it...
...February brought "Internet Police 110," software blocking "cults, sex, and violence" while monitoring users' attempts to access such sites...
...Ultimately, it won't be the intellectuals who are key to bringing democracy to China...
...Hsu estimates that supplying one million Chinese users with Triangle Boy (approximately 600 million page views a month) would require just $1 million annually...
...Not to be outdone, Sparkice, a Canadian Internet colossus, splashily announced that it would serve up only state-sanctioned news on its website...
...remained with the government, as Western companies fell all over themselves bidding for its favor...
...Before Internet construction proceeded further, they would need to monitor what Chinese users did with it...
...Not really, Michael replied...
...Cracking the Chinese firewall is at least as technically interesting as strategic defense...
...And why not make this a higher profile U.S...
...Great, but China's leaders had a problem: The financial excitement of a wired China quickly led to a proliferation of eight major Internet service providers (ISPs) and four pipelines to the outside world...
...ment, a proxy pollution campaign began last spring when the Chinese authorities either developed or imported a system that sniffs the networks for signs of proxies...
...In effect, the current Chinese leadership promoted a "hundred flowers" period of relative Internet freedom—again, not to capture terrorists, but to expose anyone who disagreed with the legitimacy of their rule and to attract massive Western investment...
...embassy has already monitored the picture.exe virus, which worms into a user's computer and then quietly sabotages the widely available encryption software Pretty Good Privacy by sending the personal encryption keys to China...
...This means the project will need to attract the support of foundations, human rights groups, religious organizations— any group that cares about a free China...
...By March, the surveillance started to work...
...Before the crackdown one could escape and surf anonymously in a cybercafé or use a proxy server—anoth-er computer that acts as an intermediary between surfers and websites, helping to hide their web footprints and evade the filters...
...You would need to intercept packets as they travel, and then there's the problem of collating the information they contain, actually making sense of it...
...Last August's notorious Code Red worm, which some thought originated in China, appears to have been little more than an amateur nuisance...
...Apparently the bureaucrats liked monitoring pornography so much that they had a massive backlog...
...Triangle Boy is still theoretically vulnerable to spoof sites, authorization problems, or a Code Red-style worm attacking the servers...
...Surviving cafés had to install internal monitoring software...
...Chinese Yahoo!, the American outrider, trails in fifth place...
...Instead, Western companies vied for government favor...
...Along with Chinese officials, they dominate Chinese Internet-security trade shows...
...Chinese xenophobia has led many other U.S...
...Consider a Chinese user in search of an unblocked news site (weeklystan-dard.com, for example...
...The simplest one will be to enlist American companies, still eager to curry favor in Beijing, and get them to develop software allowing the Public Security Bureau to sniff out and block proxies as quickly as they are created...
...He understood the self-serving nature of much of the democracy-is-just-around-the-corner rhetoric...
...After a few of these tedious sessions, many of my Chinese friends simply gave up climbing over the firewall...
...all information that travels the Net is broken up into little packets...
...China Telecom is considering purchasing software from iCognito, an Israeli company that invented a program called "artificial content recognition," which surfs along just ahead of you, learning as it censors in real time...
...At approximately $20,000 a box, China Telecom "bought many thousands" and IBM arranged for the "high-end" financing...
...But it remains a mere potentiality, yet another American dream, unless we first grapple with the question: Who lost China's Internet...
...They might cut some deals with a "loose" Chinese ISP, such as Jitong...
...Well, we did...
...In April, arrests of democracy activists using the web and a nationwide crackdown on cybercafés reached critical mass...
...Pornography...
...They are everywhere...
...would yield no results, because Yahoo...
...Potentially, a two-year sentence...
...What is better...
...Why has there been so little oversight of such corporate activity...
...VOA officials undertook that small effort in frustration...
...Every day, the Chinese user receives an e-mail listing new addresses of Triangle Boy servers, which allow the user to visit websites that they would otherwise be unable to reach...
...Search for VIP Reference, a major overseas Chinese dissident site, and you will get a single hit, a government site ripping it to shreds...
Vol. 7 • February 2002 • No. 23
