Defeating Big Brother's censoship, one Bluetooth reach at a time

A woman checks her mobile phone on a Beijing subway line, July 19, 2007. (AFP)

Bluetooth Breaches Firewall

2009-10-01
Radio Free Asia

Cell phone technology provides a new method for exchanging information in Internet-censored China.

HONG KONG — As Beijing redoubles its efforts to censor Internet content during sensitive National Day celebrations, netizens are turning to an existing form of mobile technology to exchange information, according to residents in southern China.

Many netizens are now making use of Bluetooth, an open wireless protocol for exchanging data, to create personal area networks with a range of up to 10 meters [30 feet] on their mobile devices and share information.

Xingzai, a netizen in China’s southern Guangdong province, said the technology helps him to spread news from media organizations that are otherwise censored in China.

“I just want to spread the news to others…so they won’t feel they have been left out. We download the news every day and transmit it to others,” Xingzai said.

Most modern cell phones are equipped with Bluetooth technology, and when two or more cell phone users have the feature enabled, it is easy to share data such as downloaded audio or text files between devices.

Once a user offers to share files from his or her device, other devices in the area will receive a transmission request that they can either approve or reject.

If approved, the file will transmit to the device in a format that allows it to be read or listened to.

Xingzai said he offers to share files at bus stops and subway stations, where commuters are crowded together in an area serviceable by a Bluetooth network and are often looking for information to read as they wait.

“There are streams of people at bus stops or subway stations. Some of them are curious and want to receive real information… A good mobile phone can transmit data over a distance of 50 meters,” he said.

Bluetooth is also an ideal method of sharing sensitive material anonymously, as no information about the sender is transmitted beyond what has been specified as a name for the device of origin.

Still, Xingzai said that, based on his own experience, the method is not without security concerns.

Only two out of every ten users are willing to receive the information, as the cell phone number and identity of the sender is hidden during transmission.

“When I’m doing this on a bus or a subway train, people always wonder who has sent them the information,” Xingzai said.

'The right to know'

Liu Shihui, a human rights lawyer in Guangzhou, said that transmitting news in public places through Bluetooth on mobile phones is not against the law if copyright issues are not involved.

“Every citizen has the right to know what’s going on politically, economically, or socially, and news provides them with political and social information,” Liu said.

Liu added that spreading information is in the interest of the public.

“I think it is legitimate from the legal perspective, as it is not used as a source for private gains but to spread truth to more people. Also, it is a step forward, as it directly promotes the people’s right to know,” he said.

But Li Renbing, another human rights lawyer, cautioned there could be issues of intellectual property rights violations if music is being transmitted between mobile phones via Bluetooth.

Though Chinese authorities are unable to use censorship technology to control Bluetooth, they can monitor the content being exchanged. And people are always at risk of being charged with illegally spreading news.

“People can easily produce their own videos or other multimedia, as the technology is no longer a limitation. The problem is content. The existing administrative edicts strictly ban the reproduction and publication of news or programs from overseas,” Li said.

Liu Shihui said that using Bluetooth on mobile devices to transmit news does not violate the law.

“Presumption of innocence is stipulated in the 1997 penal code. This means a person remains innocent until the court pronounces him guilty. But I can’t guarantee that using Bluetooth on mobile phones to transmit news will not be investigated,” Liu said.

“In China, many things are unpredictable. Even if one has done nothing wrong, one could be framed or persecuted,” he said.

Increase in online censorship

Many of China’s netizens are disgruntled at the increasing failure of Internet circumvention tools to get around the sophisticated set of blocks and censorship filters known as the “Great Firewall.”

Chinese netizens and overseas technology experts say the authorities are now successfully undermining key software used to get around the Great Firewall, such as U.S.-based software developer Andrew Lewman’s Tor “tunneling” software and U.S.-based Dynamic Internet Technology’s Freegate software.

Netizens have also reported problems using Chinese versions of the micro-blogging service, Twitter.

Twitter equivalents Fanfou, Jiwai, and Digu were recently shut down, forcing many Internet users to migrate to Twitter, bloggers said.

And when leading Chinese Internet portal Sina.com launched its own Twitter-like service, Sina Micro Bo, users complained of too many controls.

To sign up to the service, users must receive a registration invitation containing a password.

The operators further limit users’ freedom by strictly monitoring comment boards and through the use of automatic filters.

The controls on Sina Micro Bo are consistent with attempts by Beijing to impose real-name user registration on all of China’s netizens, making anonymous Web surfing much more difficult.

Original reporting by He Shan for RFA’s Cantonese service. Cantonese service director: Shiny Li. Written for the Web in English by Joshua Lipes. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

China's Commercialization of Censorship

May 2, 2009
By Christopher Walker and Sarah Cook
Far Eastern Economic Review (Hong Kong)

More ominously, Beijing's controlling approach to media, particularly of the internet, appears to be gaining traction beyond China's borders. In December 2008, Vietnam's government issued regulations holding ISPs responsible for ensuring that blogs they host do not include content deemed "undesirable." Cambodia's Ministry of Information is reportedly preparing a law that would extend traditional media controls to audio-visual online content, a regulatory path similar to that of its counterpart further up the Mekong. China is already believed to share censorship technology and know-how with a number of governments in the region.

The Chinese authorities continue to be among the world’s most repressive when it comes to press freedom. What may come as a surprise, however, is the growing commercialization of censorship in the country, where the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) is creating a 21st century media model that relies on the market to muzzle free expression.

The irony is that the dominant Western narrative on China has it that market-oriented development would inevitably lead to liberalization, including, presumably, for the news media. This narrative’s assumptions look increasingly flawed, however. Instead, the Chinese authorities are working out a recipe for CCP media values—“watch what you can watch, and don't watch what you cannot watch" as a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson recently explained—to trump genuine market values of open competition, transparency, and rule of law.

Even more impressive is that the “market-based censorship” model has been achieved in the context of a rapidly changing media environment; the CCP is successfully adapting controls from old media to new, including the internet.

For traditional media, market-based censorship intersects nicely with the CCP’s commercialization of the industry. Now, when a publication or editor pushes the limits of permissible coverage, he must not only consider the professional (and personal) risk of being demoted, fired—or sometimes worse; added to the mix is the financial danger of displeasing advertisers or having the publication shut down under pressure from powerful business interests with close official ties.

The three-month suspension at the end of 2008 of Caijing Shibao—a business publication known for its relatively daring investigative journalism—is emblematic of this economically based incentive structure. In July 2008, the newspaper ran a story examining millions of dollars worth of suspicious cash transfers at a branch of the state-run Agricultural Bank of China. The report was quickly deemed by officials to have violated several media regulations and eventually led to the publication being temporarily shut down for “internal reorganization.”

The suspension of Caijing’s operations led to the dismissal of 70 staff and sent a clear message to other would-be, independent-minded news enterprises: push editorial limits at your economic peril.

For new media, the authorities have also been quick to put in place market-based strategies for suppressing news and information of political consequence. A recently released Freedom House study of internet freedom found that unlike some developing countries that enable significantly more freedom on the internet relative to traditional media, China has been at the vanguard of digital media suppression, earning it a “Not Free” rating.

In addition to employing “low-tech” means of repression, such as some of the world's longest prison terms for "cyberdissidents," the Chinese authorities have been at the forefront of a growing trend toward "outsourcing" censorship and monitoring tasks to private companies. As scholar Rebecca MacKinnon notes, "the process of web site censorship by which domestically hosted content [in China] is deleted completely or prevented from being published in the first place ... is carried out almost entirely by Internet company employees, not by 'Internet police' or other government officials."

Such aims are achieved via a sophisticated system that includes lists of taboo topics issued to private enterprises by government bodies like the Information Office of Beijing. If internet service providers (ISPs) or websites fail to comply with authorities' orders, they are subjected to fines, have their servers confiscated by police, and can have their businesses licenses revoked by the authorities.

In this pseudo-commercial environment a news company's success or failure rests on its ability to meet government censorship demands, rather than on the quality of its products or services. In the current economic climate, the vulnerability of private enterprises is likely to grow. As their profit margins shrink, so too does their ability to withstand political pressure.

It is disturbing that such a creeping commercialization of censorship is taking hold in China, home to the world's largest population of Internet users in the world—300 million and counting. More ominously, Beijing's controlling approach to media, particularly of the internet, appears to be gaining traction beyond China's borders. In December 2008, Vietnam's government issued regulations holding ISPs responsible for ensuring that blogs they host do not include content deemed "undesirable." Cambodia's Ministry of Information is reportedly preparing a law that would extend traditional media controls to audio-visual online content, a regulatory path similar to that of its counterpart further up the Mekong. China is already believed to share censorship technology and know-how with a number of governments in the region.

At a time when the democratic idea is being directly challenged in Asia, the "first freedom" represents a critical proxy in a larger values battle. Should the CCP gambit succeed, it would be gravely detrimental to the interests of the Chinese people. But to the extent the values of CCP-managed media set the standard for emerging media markets elsewhere in Asia, the stakes become considerably higher.

Christopher Walker is director of studies and Sarah Cook is an Asia researcher at Freedom House. The organization’s annual global survey of press freedom was released on May 1, in advance of World Press Freedom Day on May 3.