In a purported effort to cut down on "ID sharing" in Beijing's Internet cafes, the government will require that by the end of 2008, first-time visitors will have their picture taken and ID scanned before being allowed online, according to The Beijing News and the China Media Project.
Users were already required to show identification when they entered, a rule that has been spottily enforced at times but more strictly, by most accounts, since preparations for the Olympics began. David Bandurski at China Media Project writes:
The newspaper quoted Li Fei (李菲), a spokesperson for the Beijing Cultural Law Enforcement Agency, as saying the policy was aimed at preventing "ID sharing" (一证多用). The monitoring platform will allow enforcement officials to target any terminal at any Internet bar in the city to compare the user with registered information.
Perhaps this is indeed aimed at "ID sharing," but another piece that Bandurski quotes, an editorial in the China Youth Daily, sees the new policy as creating the potential for invasion of privacy.
In this monitoring system that renders users "naked," how will the freedom and privacy of citizens using the Internet be protected? The Beijing Cultural Law Enforcement Agency reassures us that these controls end with the enforcement team's monitoring platform and that we "have no need to be concerned about the leaking of personal information."
But aside from worrying that personal information might be leaked to others, we also worry that the freedom of our online communication and the privacy of our conversations will be betrayed by public power.
Under this platform of "monitoring of any terminal at any Internet bar in the city," won't monitoring mean that enforcement officials will have the right or the opportunity to view our chat histories? Can they not read our private correspondence at will? Won't any and all online behavior fall under the eyes of the enforcement officials?
If this is the case, then all Web users really are "entirely naked," if only before a limited number of enforcement personnel.
Read a fuller quote from the editorial in Bandurski's post.
Much has been made of Beijing's decision to keep a lighter version of its Olympics traffic restrictions, not least because whatever the city did to clean the air seemed to have worked in August. But the renewed measures are weaker and the probable effect is unclear.
Alex Pasternack at Treehugger points out that the sustained restrictions, which took effect October 1, will be weaker than during the Games. Only one fifth of cars will be pulled from the road on weekdays, versus half under the Olympics rules.
According to The Beijinger (also via Alex), the city's other restrictions include:
- Restricting the number of car license plates issued for the city every year to 100,000--one fourth of the current rate of new car registration. This may in the long run be the most powerful measure, because it will reduce the extent to which increased wealth leads many people to obtain cars.
- Raising parking prices. If it costs more to park, maybe people will take the...
- Growing public transportation network. Lines five, ten, eight, and the airport express opened in the year leading up to the Olympics. Expansions of existing lines and other new lines are planned in the next two to three years.
But it's hard to tell whether the automobile and transportation efforts were really the core of Beijing's cleaner skies during the Olympics. For one thing, it's useful to remember that before a series of rainstorms, many people didn't feel the skies were particularly clear. Afterward, opinion among those used to standard Beijing air was uniformly laudatory. The rain may have helped clean things up.
It is difficult to assess, too, how important the other measures taken around the Olympics were. Manufacturing was slowed or stopped all over the region. Some of the dirtier power plants were shut. (Some may still be shut, but reports indicate that much of the industry has reopened.)
And significantly, dust from construction, a major fact of life in contemporary Beijing, was halted, because construction was halted. Though the surge of building that led up to the Olympics will probably not be matched in the near future in that city, some construction will restart.
So, to the extent that the sustained restrictions on driving decrease people's emitting behavior, that's great, but only time (and reliable measurements of air quality over time) will give a fair estimate of the effect.
The iTunes Store was blocked in China two weeks after an album released by Tibet activists appeared, but after the Olympics Games concluded, it was available once again.
Silicon Hutong has written a concise summary of what happened:
- The album was featured on the front page of the site - a choice I would wager was made by Apple, not by the activist organization that produced the album;
- The album went live in the days leading up to the Olympics;
- Pro-Tibetan activists have been attempting to leverage Beijing's hosting of the Olympics to draw attention to their cause;
- The activists told the Associated Press that they had contacted athletes directly and provided free downloads to the athletes and urged them to play it in Beijing as an act of solidarity.
- The activists then issued a press release telling the world that this was, in effect, a protest, and that at least 40 athletes in the village had downloaded the tunes.
- The site was then blocked, fifteen days after the album went up.
- The Games ended, the athletes went home, and the site was unblocked.
- The album is available for purchase here in Beijing under the same conditions as everything else on iTunes - got a foreign credit card that bills to a foreign address, and the songs are yours.
The post goes on to examine at great length the ups and downs of Apple's apparent decision to feature this content. It also opines that "the content itself was not a problem - what set the Chinese government off was the concern over a potential protest in the Olympic Village. Apple was a target only to the extent that it was seen by the Chinese authorities as aiding that protest."
I tend to think this particular episode, in contrast to Yahoo China, Google China, and MSN's complicated dealings with Chinese censorship, is really not such a big deal. I also think this degree of examination of possible motivations on the part of the censors is a stretch.
It's very possible that rather than concerns specifically about a protest, the album (and whole store) was blocked after the activists' press release merely because that was the first the censors heard of it. Unblocking the store after the sensitive political period of the main Games is pretty standard behavior, just as many sites were restored after the actual unrest in Tibet earlier this year.
Tests at the main Olympic press center and on other connections around Beijing have shown that both journalists and regular Beijing Internet users are getting less restricted access than usual.
That's according to the OpenNet Initiative's assessment of online censorship after the first week of the Games.
After journalists spent a lot of energy complaining about their inability to reach many Web sites without the use of a proxy, the international and Beijing Olympic committees both seemed to respond, and many restrictions disappeared.
ONI notes that the bulk of the opening occurred for foreign-hosted Chinese-language Web sites, while "the majority of advocacy sites and politically 'sensitive' organizations remain blocked."
It may be nice that these sites have come available, but content is still filtered by keyword, if not encrypted during transmission, and there's no way to know whether this increased availability of Chinese Web sites will outlast the Olympic pageantry.
The Beijing Olympics: Are They A Trap?
The International Olympic Committee has acknowledged that it acceded to Chinese government demands that some Internet censorship be kept in place during the Olympics, The New York Times reported Thursday.
Nevermind that IOC promised journalists could "report freely" from the games. Still, is this really a problem for reporters?
Long story short: this isn't much of a problem. Journalists arriving in Beijing without regularly being stationed there have already spent however much money to get to China and stay in hotels. They can afford a VPN service, which will completely circumvent the government restrictions--that is, if their newsroom doesn't have one already. Journalists will just have to learn how to use the Internet under less-than-ideal circumstances.
The long story: for the unaccustomed, the restrictions will be a pain in the neck. Certain things will be blocked in certain places. You'll never know exactly why something was stopped. Not-so-savvy reporters or those with old computers may have trouble using proxies and VPN.
But this doesn't really stop reporters from "reporting freely."
What would stop that is denial of access, denial of free travel, and threats or actual detainment or deportation after publishing something the government doesn't like.
I can say from personal experience that certain towns in the northwestern province of Xinjiang were being treated as off-limits to foreigners and some Chinese from out of town as recently as 10 days ago. We've already seen Beijing police acting violently against reporters from Hong Kong and breaking camera equipment at an Olympics news event.
Reporting freedom will not be complete in Beijing, but Internet censorship is not the reason. When foreign journalists are the target of restrictions, that's not much of a civil liberties problem for Chinese people, who face a restricted internet whether or not a bunch of reporters get a free pass this summer.
Perhaps reporters should get over their own selves and write more about Chinese people.
UPDATE July 31, 2008 17:23 GMT: The AP reports that an official who guaranteed free access to journalists was surprised by the shift:
Gosper said he first learned of China's backtracking on Internet access when Beijing organizing committee spokesman Sun Weide announced Tuesday that journalists would have only "sufficient" -- not unrestricted -- access to the Internet.
Since then, Gosper said he has felt "a bit isolated" within the IOC and was surprised at being left out of the loop.
Despite advertised measures to decrease pollution, as the one-month countdown to the Beijing Olympics approaches, the government's numbers rank Beijing as having the dirtiest air in China.
With a rating of 98, officially a "blue sky day" but only by two points, Beijing yesterday had the dirtiest air among monitored cities according to the Chinese government Web site that releases daily pollution figures.
Only four other cities, including the capitals of Sichuan, Qinghai, and Liaoning Provinces, ranked above 90 on the scale.
This does not mean that the air will not get cleaner this month. Large numbers of personal vehicles, as well as cargo trucks that do not have Beijing license plates, will be taken off the roads in efforts to reduce car pollution. Additionally, the hyperactive construction with huge numbers of buildings scheduled for completion or undergoing rushed renovation before the Games will stop completely late this month when a citywide construction freeze goes into effect.
The government is planning drastic measures. I hope for the sake of the athletes, visitors, and Beijing residents that they have clear, clean skies. But let's not kid ourselves: the pollution problem in Beijing is not going to go away any time soon. Cleaning up for two weeks may be a nice show, but the city really needs drastic measures. My favorite option: even bigger car taxes than exist now, and get that subway going.
Sinobyte commenters have raised two good questions about Internet freedom during the Olympics, set for August 8 to 28 in Beijing. I'm going to give the best kind of answer available for each: an educated guess.
I had written about "free Wi-Fi," which hasn't yet really started working, but is slated to be available during the games in some key areas of the city.
Commenter DangerousOffender asks: How "free" will the access be? Will users be able to access the entire internet, or will it be censored?
I was referring, of course, to "free of charge," but this is a good question. In recent years, no public internet connection has been completely unfiltered. Censorship works in a few different ways: some Web sites are simply blocked at the IP level, making it impossible to access them without a proxy; certain sensitive terms in pages, if detected by filters, can cause the connection to be disrupted; and sensitive terms that appear as part of a URL can trigger a similar disruption.
In the lead up to the Olympics, many online limitations have been relaxed. Access to BBC News was restored. Blogspot has been unblocked, blocked again, and is presently available from this connection in Beijing. English Wikipedia is available, but Chinese Wikipedia is still blocked. After pressure from the International Olympic Committee, the Beijing committee has promised fewer restrictions, but since some ISPs do the censorship themselves to avoid trouble with authorities, any "opening" may not trickle down to every connection.
Rumor has it, anyway, that top hotels full of foreigners and journalists will have unfettered access. I doubt this will be a citywide phenomenon, let alone a national loosening.
JeffW42 asks: How monitored will it be? Will your e-mails be reviewed for "offensive" material, and username and password stored for later reference?
While we have some guesswork to do on censorship, there's even more to do on surveillance. Let's focus on capability and relevance.
Capability: Chinese authorities are viewed by many around the world in governments and other fields as highly capable in infiltrating computer systems. While the Chinese government denies it every time, U.S. authorities say attacks of various kinds have come from China. What's more important is this: We know the government has access to the gateways between China and the rest of the Internet. It should be assumed that, just as any traffic can be filtered for keywords, any traffic can be more closely monitored.
Relevance: The fact that authorities could capture your traffic does not necessarily mean your passwords could be captured. A properly configured SSL-based password system, standard on most websites, should make password capture very difficult if not impossible. Though I am not a security expert, my sense is that this sort of surveillance would be a very low priority for Chinese authorities.
On the question of reviewing e-mail for content, it seems highly unlikely that e-mail would be blocked. If you're planning a big protest or something, however, expect that you and your buddies are on some kind of list for closer monitoring. Simple measures can make all communication much more smooth and quick during high-filtering periods. Users of Gmail, for instance, found that while a normal HTTP connection was extremely slow during the recent unrest in Tibet, using SSL by typing in https://mail.google.com/ (the added "s" is the key) made the connection faster, and e-mails containing sensitive terms were delivered more consistently.
A little perspective
Much is made of China's Internet restrictions. A few things of note, before one seizes on this as unique. I'm not trying to argue that the restrictions are good, but I think a lot of people take this phenomenon and turn it into an anti-Chinese trope without placing it in a bit of a context.
- A study found that most Chinese approved of government controls over the Internet.
- Several students at elite universities I have met in Beijing had no idea there was any censorship.
- The U.S. government, for example, is not exactly free of programs to monitor its citizens' communications.
- China has a lot of surveillance cameras, but so does Britain.
Now, if you can get a visa to China, come on over and enjoy the games. I hear lots of the hotels are wide open.
Anticipated wireless coverage areas in Beijing. If they work, they are advertised to be free until after the Olympics.
(Credit: Wicity via Sina)Beijing Wicity is setting out to cover several key parts of Beijing with Wi-Fi access, and it is supposed to be free until after the Olympics, which will take place August 8-28, but service is spotty in advertised coverage areas.
Danwei reports that Wicity, not to be confused with WiiCity (which doesn't exist, but would be a pretty fun place), is a project of Chinacomm (中电华通). Wednesday is the first day of the test stage.
People in an office in Beijing's Central Business District, or CBD, report that they see the network but cannot get online. I'm sitting in a cafe in Sanlitun, and I don't see the network on either my MacBook or my HTC Touch.
The system for ordering, paying for, and issuing Beijing Olympic tickets has had many kinks, the latest of which may be the middle name question.
A Wall Street Journal blog reports that people found a Bank of China branch unwilling to issue tickets to some foreigners because the registered name lacked the middle name present on the required passport. Without an exact match, you're nearly out of luck. Just like getting on a plane in China.
The iconic Olympic sites in Beijing
(Credit: Graham Webster)Or that's what the report says. It's a blog post based on a single anecdote from an anonymous foreign friend in a foreigner-rich neighborhood in Beijing who ended up arguing for two hours and is still a little paperwork away from getting the tickets. The post also contains a claim that Monday was the first day that tickets ordered online could be picked up, which does not seem to be true based on anecdotes I've heard from other foreign friends, whom I will keep anonymous.
Either way the issuance of tickets has been quite a trial for some. At least a few friends who live in Beijing found that their U.S. bank cards flagged the purchase when they charged Olympic tickets, thereby canceling the transaction and, you would think, nullifying the tickets. That would be fine if it weren't unusually hard to get tickets in the first place.
People waited online in virtual queues for ticket orders to be issued just after individual batches became available. If you were lucky enough to get a ticket, you would hope Visa, one of the Olympics' primary sponsors ("but they don't take... " well you know the rest), would be more inclined to accommodate unusual transactions in the form of tickets to the Games.
But after all, the oddest story I have heard is that one person went in to collect the tickets anyway, despite the bank having canceled payment. And, with no apparent dispute over middle names, the tickets were issued. It's just that no one ever paid for them. Oops.
The Journal post I am sure is based on a real incident, but the mistake is in thinking any individual experience is generalizable. These things just aren't going consistently.
