Posted on 06/08/2003 3:39:59 PM PDT by maui_hawaii
Testimony before the US-China Commission SARS in China: Implications for Media Control and the Economy
June 5, 2003
Kenneth Berman Manager, Internet Anti-censorship Program Broadcasting Board of Governors Washington, DC
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Commission:
I am very pleased to have the opportunity to address the Commission today on the issue of Internet information control and censorship by China. I have been involved with developing solutions to this vexing problem for the past several years and hope to share with you some of our findings and conclusions. I would like to discuss some our technical efforts to allow users in China to get unfiltered, uncensored access to news about SARS and about other key issues of the day.
The Office of Engineering and Technical Services is responsible for delivering program content for the various services that report to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). These services include the Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio and TV Marti (to Cuba) and several other services. The traditional way for distributing these programs has been via radio: shortwave, AM, and FM. Our Office works closely with fellow international broadcasters and the International Telecommunications Union to coordinate the appropriate broadcast frequencies to ensure that there is no intentional interference between broadcasters. Before I tell you about my work with Internet "jamming", I did want to inform you that the Chinese regularly jam all of the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia programs, in clear violation of accepted international rules and regulations followed by almost all other nations. This jamming consists of playing endless loops of Chinese opera music at the same time and on the same frequency as the VOA and RFA broadcasts. Despite numerous official protests by BBG via the FCC and State Department, the radio jamming continues unabated. The technical capability of the FCC in observing the Chinese jamming is absolutely unambiguous. There is no doubt that the origin is in China. The nature of the transmissions emanating from the identified locations in China have no useful telecommunications purposes, and it can only be concluded their purpose is for jamming.
The Internet is becoming a critical component in distributing program materials to those countries that are - or are becoming — "wired". And China is the most "wired" of all the large countries to which VOA and RFA send their programs. I just attended a conference on China and the Internet at the University of Southern California, and it was interesting to hear the various US and China scholars debate how many Internet users there were: estimates ranged from 39 to 63 million. In any event, what the numbers do tell us — unequivocally — is that China has the most Internet users after the United States, and considering their huge growth rate of new users and the small fraction of their population that currently has an Internet connection, it is clear that they will be the largest Internet audience in the world in the not too distant future.
As has been discussed by many experts more knowledgeable than me on the subject of China and the Internet, the Chinese are attempting to have it both ways: use the Internet as a driver for knowledge transfer and business development, while ruthlessly suppressing any attempt to question the policies of the Chinese Communist Party, to discuss the rulers in any but glowing terms, or use the Internet for issues as diverse as Tibetan Freedom, Taiwan independence, pro-democracy movements, or religious groups such as Falun Gong. VOA and RFA came under the cross hairs of this censorship effort when they tried to send email summaries of the news specifically requested by Internet users in China. These same users, when they could get a message through, informed us that the VOA and RFA web sites could not be accessed from inside China, whether it be from home, office, or an Internet café.
As a result of this censorship, and considering the critical importance of China to U.S. policy interests, a special unit was developed to devote technical resources to this problem. What we have essentially instituted is a two prong "push-pull" program, that consists of separate but related efforts. The "push" component consists of pushing email news to those users in China who would find the news interesting, useful, or a necessary complement to the official, approved news stories. The "pull" component consists of allowing users the ability to access the VOA and RFA web sites and pull Internet content into the browsers of their computers. I would like to give you a few comments on these two efforts, and then inform you of some of the other activities we are working on.
The email component of the program allows the VOA and RFA journalists to assemble summaries of critical Chinese, US, and international news stories each day into an easy to read Chinese language email. The email is distributed by our Office using techniques that will do the most to ensure the message will get through the filtering mechanisms of the Chinese Government. Originally, the VOA emails were sent from one of VOA’s openly labeled voa.gov email servers. It was discovered about 18 months ago that very few of the messages were getting through. The Chinese were in the early stages of developing their censorship technology, using computer technologies primarily provided by US companies. Over the past year, they have continued to buy this equipment, and have also started indigenous manufacturing of these computer network routers. At this time, before I continue with the discussion on the email program, let me say a few words about the actual techniques of their censorship.
While many companies, libraries, and organizations exert some form of restriction on their users ability to access any and all sites, the Chinese use every possible technique and are continuing to refine their methods. Internet locations are defined by a numerical address, know as the IP (or Internet Protocol) address. Since people, unlike machines, find numbers difficult to remember, a naming system has been developed whereby people use names, and computer systems translate those names into numbers. This way the machines can connect to each other while human users simply use normal names. This known as the Domain Name System and, like the airwaves, is governed by rules and regulations, but also a certain amount of trust; more about that later.
The Chinese Government can easily find the IP addresses of VOA and RFA and enter them in their computer router tables, with the instruction to block any traffic from the servers or any requests for information to those servers. These computer routers serve as electronic "gatekeepers" at the country’s border, and are known as border routers. They are a brute force solution to the problem of censoring unacceptable site. They do work in keeping the Chinese user separated from computer sites that have been "black listed," so to speak. But, since several, sometimes many, organizations share an address or group of addresses, this kind of blocking may keep out traffic for which there is no fear by the Chinese. This is the reason some sites that are completely harmless to the Chinese may not be accessible: they share an address or group of addresses with a censored site.
To improve their ability to focus their blocking efforts, they will also filter the actual word name of the site, as in www.voanews.com or www.rfa.org. This way, anyone coming or going to the name VOA or RFA will be denied access. This is generally accomplished by finding what Domain Name Server does the translation from name to IP address and blocking that. Thus, the user will be denied the ability to find out how to convert www.uscc.gov into an actual address computers can use, and will not be connected. In an even bolder move, if that is the right word, the Chinese have started using DNS redirection, or "hijacking". This phenomenon was first noticed by Bill Xia of Dynamic Internet Technology, who will be speaking to you this afternoon. It is a severe violation of the "trust" various computer systems use to communicate with each other, and consists of going into the DNS system and inserting one’s own lookup listing; this is similar to rewriting selective pages of a phone book, inserting them under cover of darkness, and letting unsuspecting users be directed to the wrong address or phone number.
The latest developments have been URL filtering and content filtering. URLs (Universal Resource Locators) are the addresses that we read. But, a full URL, especially when doing a search, consists not only of the URL, but text following the URL. For instance, if you were doing a search on www.google.com for "US Congress", you would generate a URL that might be www.google.com/word:US+word:Congress. This way, with URL filtering, the filter could allow traffic to google to pass, except when some of the key words that the user was searching for were included. This is exactly what happened during the "google" blocking controversy several months ago. Initially the Chinese Internet censors blocked access to all of google, using the more brute force methods described above. After an outpouring of protests from students, business leaders, and anyone else using the English or Chinese versions, the Chinese introduced their refined techniques. Essentially, this consists of looking not just at the site, but at the page or search one would like to do at that site. If it passes the test, the request is allowed to go through. If not, the user is not only denied the request, but is put in what I call the "penalty box" for twenty minutes to days at time. Reports differ, but our experience is about one hour for the first violation, two hours for the second, and a day for the third. Thus if one did a google search on apples, the search goes through. If the search is on "pro-democracy", the request is denied and the user is disconnected, i.e. prevented from making any more request to or from any part of the Internet.
The latest and most sophisticated element of filtering that is now in place is content filtering. Even if the IP address, the basic URL address, and the full URL address contain no "objectionable" material, but the returned web page has some forbidden word buried deep within it, the communication is blocked. For instance, if one went from China to an overseas LexisNexis database and was researching the history of the USA, and the word "democracy" appeared on page 10 of a 12 page document, the overall communication would be prevented. Our latest research, observed on a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences web page (since removed) mentioned "emotional context sensitive" filtering. This would mean that if the sentence read "I hate Falun Gong", the page could go through, but if the sentence on the web site said "More information on Falun Gong", i.e. a neutral or favorable emotional context, the page would be blocked. This would make the Chinese efforts less noticeable to many Chinese Internet users, but would be much more insidious in its ability to closely regulate specific types of speech and expression.
Back to the question of our email program, you can now see that all emails from VOA’s or RFA’s IP address, its URL name, and any controversial content was being blocked. This was not acceptable, and working with some state of the art experts from think tanks and industry, we developed techniques to get the emails through to their intended audience. We also do key word substitution to make sure that the contents of the message would get through. To do this, we change some words, but keep the meaning. For instance, to use an example in English, "democracy" might be changed to dem0cracy" and neither dem, 0, or cracy would trigger the content filtering. In addition, we take extraordinary care to make sure that these VOA and RFA emails only go to users inside China. After all, there is no need to devote the elaborate resources to Chinese readers in Singapore, Taiwan, or any other areas with Chinese readers and no technical censorship issues.
We send millions of emails a week, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive to the VOA and RFA language services’ news summaries and information on local Chinese and international news. Related to this "push" component is the "pull" component. On each of the emails we include from 2 to 6 different "proxy" sites. Just as in "proxy" voting, a proxy computer or server is simply one that is standing in for another computer. Proxy computers have many purposes, such as making communications more efficient and helping organizations keep out bad/malicious users. In our case, we are using the proxy sites we have developed to stand in for forbidden sites. By that I mean that, even though RFA and VOA are blocked, chances are that www.kenberman.com is not blocked (at least not yet!). So, if we distribute the name www.kenberman.com to our Internet users via our emails, the users will be able to click on this presumably unblocked site. Once they hit the site, a Secure Socket Layer connection is established. This is the same type of secure connection that is made when you make a credit card sale - virtually unbreakable. So, upon connecting to the proxy site, the user is given a secure connection (the same kind used in e-business, and not by itself incriminating) and landed on either a VOA or RFA Chinese language home page. From there, the user can explore the VOA or RFA news and feature stories in detail and can stream audio programs. Moreover, in line with our desire to promulgate global information freedom, we have a "jump" bar in all of our proxies. These allow the user to explore any other site in the world he or she can connect to, including controversial political sites, religious sites, business or school/educational sites (MIT was recently blocked by China because there was a Falun Gong student information link). We do filter pornography, however, and also have geographic tracking to make sure that only IP addresses that originate in China are able to use these services, and not individuals elsewhere who may want to use these tools to avoid paying for these services.
We have received thousands of unique visitors each day on each of the proxy sites, and most of the traffic has been to VOA and RFA, with Chinese alternate news and social sites running second. As I described above, eventually the Chinese Internet police learn the name and address of the proxy and then we change it, distributing the new proxy name via the daily emails. So, the email and web proxy techniques work hand in hand to break through the Great Firewall of China. But, as proxy hunting and methods to distinguish e-business traffic from other types of secure traffic get better, this method can only go so far. Which means we are engaged in a continual process of evaluating new technologies. One of the most promising is the so called peer to peer, or P2P, technology. The most famous example was Napster, though Napster had a main control computer that, when shut down, killed off Napster. True P2P lets thousand of individuals set up their computers as mini-web or file servers. Just as in a large crowd (one P2P system is called Crowds), messages can be passed via numerous different paths and stopping a message is virtually impossible. The two things to worry about in that situation are message integrity (i.e. did it inadvertently change form during the course of transmission) and trust (i.e. did one or more people in the crowd intentionally change the meaning to further their ends). We support research on systems such as Freenet-China, 6/4, and others to ensure that the systems are efficient and trustworthy. Once those systems are in place, it is virtually impossible to block or filter. That means if we can help establish such a system and can access one node, the news and information can propagate freely through the system.
Another promising area is Short Message Text (SMS) cellular telephone networks. Per Duncan Clark of BDA China, a leading China based telecommunications consulting firm, China now has the largest number of cellular phones in the world: 220 million and growing by millions each year. Most of the existing, and all the new phones, are SMS capable. This means that news can be potentially streamed to the phones. Another application is to text message to individuals the proxy address of the day, who can then use that address to access the news via their computer. Streaming of audio and video programs; using Instant Messaging; and taking advantage of the huge numbers of on-line game players also present promising avenues of research.
As unfortunate as SARS is, it has been a boon to the freedom of Internet information movement. Our news is anxiously followed, the VOA and RFA Chinese language traffic has doubled, and has allowed Chinese citizens free/unfettered access to a wide range of previously censored information. Email news now includes daily SARS reports and statistics, and links to WHO and other sites.
We feel we are making progress in this attempt to break through the Great Firewall, but it is truly a cat and mouse game, and only by continuing to explore, test, and implement new techniques will we be sure we can stay successful. Our program has generated a wide range of support from academia, business, NGO’s and think-tanks, and we look forward to leading the effort to allow people in censored regimes to have free access to news and information.
Yahoo, for one.
Yahoo made a deal with the devil.
Why do you come here and spew your lies? Everything you say is an overt lie.
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