Global Internet Freedom Consortium Founder Dr. Shiyu Zhou on Internet Freedom
|
||||||
|
DEFENSE FORUM FOUNDATION TEARING DOWN THE CYBERWALL: HOW HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS ARE DELIVERING INTERNET FREEDOM WELCOME/MODERATOR: SPEAKER: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2009 SUZANNE SCHOLTE: Good afternoon, I’m Suzanne Scholte, president of the Defense Forum Foundation, and I’m very pleased to welcome you today to our forum. First, I just want to acknowledge some of the special guests that are with us this morning: Dr. Lily Zhang, the director of public relations for NTD-TV, is here with us; Caylan Ford, who’s an analyst for the Falun Dafa Information Center – Caylan; Jim Geheran, the director of Initiatives for China. And if you’re not on his e-mail list you need to be. (Chuckles.) Jared Ford who’s the program director for Asia Vision Foundation, which is launching a campaign to support the work that you’re going to be hearing about today, the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, but also Jared’s foundation also helped to make today’s forum possible. Jared, thank you so much. And then from DFF, our Henry Song, our projects and grants director there in the back of the room. Now, our speaker today, Dr. Shiyu Zhou, is deputy director of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium and a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University. His work on Internet freedom has been featured in reports by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and CBS News. He has testified on this issue before the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Congressional Executive Commission on China. Dr. Zhou began a cyber war against China as a result of what he witnessed first-hand as a college student during the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989. As John Markoff of The New York Times described it, “Dr. Zhou first understood the power of government-controlled media when overnight, the nation’s student demonstrators at Tiananmen were transformed from heroes into killers. ‘People believed the government; they did not believe us,’ Dr. Zhou said.” This brutal crackdown on the students was followed 10 years later by a brutal crackdown on the Falun Gong. This further inspired Dr. Zhou’s efforts as he and his colleagues have developed the widely used anti-censorship tools in order to provide their countrymen and countrywomen in mainland China free access to information about the country’s human rights practices. Their software now provides free and secure Internet access to millions in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Burma. Because many believe that Internet censorship is the Berlin Wall of the 21st century, his work is vitally important to the expansion of freedom and human rights around the world. I just want to mention that for those of you that were here last month, we had Aminatou Haidar, who’s a Sahrawi human rights activist who had recently won the Civil Courage Prize. She was arrested as she returned to occupied Western Sahara last night, and I just wanted to mention that because we see this happening to those that are righting for human rights, who are putting their lives on the line. There’s a terrible backlash that is occurring against those that work for human rights around the world. And people like Dr. Zhou are people who are putting their lives on the line, as his colleagues, people who are associated with his work have been beaten and attacked and we have to not only listen to the words that he’s going to say to us about this very critical issue, but we need to work more aggressively to protect the people on the front lines, the human rights defenders like Dr. Zhou. And it’s a very great honor to introduce our speaker, Dr. Zhou, to talk about tearing down the cyber wall. Thank you. (Applause.) SHIYU ZHOU: Good afternoon. Thank you, Suzanne, for inviting me to address the Defense Forum Foundation. I thank everyone for taking the time to come to this luncheon. I will first speak on three aspects of Internet freedom. Then we will open the floor to discuss any questions you may have. The first issue we need to discuss is how Internet censorship is carried out, and for this we’ll use China as a model. Secondly, we’ll discuss the growing challenge to online restrictions in authoritarian countries and the efforts of people like myself and the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, who work via the Internet to tear down the censorship firewalls. And the third part of today’s discuss will focus on the implications that arise as more and more people begin using anti-censorship tools as well as the challenges that face us moving forward. Besides the technological aspect, there is a whole other dimension to censorship on the Net. It is the human component of the great firewall. At the top is an army of tens of thousands of cyber police engaging in monitoring and surveillance of Internet users, some of whom end up in prison for voicing their opinions online. Down below are countless website administrators who sift through the blogs, forums, and bulletin boards they are managing to delete any posts deemed “sensitive” according to certain arbitrary rules. In addition, Internet service providers (ISPs) are told to keep an eye on the sites they are hosting and be ready to shut down the sites that cross another arbitrary line drawn by the state. Internet content providers such as search engines and portal sites also devote significant time and effort in preemptive self-censorship. China’s model of Internet censorship is now being emulated elsewhere. The repressive governments such as that of Burma, Cuba, Iran, and now some Central Asian states of the former Soviet Union, are increasingly adopting technologies to stifle dissent, control information, and block citizens from communicating with the outside world. The Internet censorship firewalls have become the 21st century versions of Berlin Walls that isolate and dispirit the citizens of closed society dictatorships. The GIF systems that we run are fully scalable. It is our belief that with 50 million dollar per year for two years, for a total less than half of the cost of a fighter-jet F-22, it is enough to scale up GIF systems and operations through purchasing equipment and expanding network capacity, to bring about Internet freedom around the globe. Congress is now considering a $30m appropriation for Internet freedom that, if passed, could allow us to increase our current user capacity from 1.5 million people per day up to 50 million per day. The enhancement in operations – which GIF protocols could make possible within months of such support -- could make it almost prohibitively expensive for any repressive government to counter our efforts. “I’m from Iran. Thank you very much. (Applause.) MS. SCHOLTE: We’re now going to open up for Q&A. I just wanted to ask for the Congressional staff. I know we have reporters here. If we could have the Congressional staff ask their questions first because they’re on a more limited schedule. And if we have time, we can take some press questions too. If you could just identify your name and the office that you’re with and I will turn them back over to you for Q&A. Do you want to ask a question? Okay. Q: (Inaudible, off-mike.) ..I was in China last year and was able to communicate on the internet but then all of a sudden everything was blocked. MR. ZHOU: That was last year, right? Q: Yeah. I got there in July of 2008. And then before Christmas, all those sites were blocked. MR. ZHOU: That’s right. Q: And for – (inaudible, off mike) – primarily looking for news. We were just trying to speak with our friends – (inaudible). And then I returned in the summer from China and since then, I’ve heard from all my friends – (inaudible) – are now all blocked. MR. ZHOU: When did that happen? Q: Before the anniversary – MR. ZHOU: Before October 1st? Right. Q: I’m wondering with you – (inaudible, off mike). MR. ZHOU: Usually VPN should work in a censoring environment. For many other communication ways, it would be safer and easier to get access to the outside if they operate on an anti-censorship platform. However, as you mentioned, this past September, right before the 60th anniversary of the PRC, China indeed launched the fiercest attacks on Internet anti-censorship platforms over the past decade. It seemed that they strengthened their censorship efforts by multiple times, and used much more resources to block the Internet, satellite TV, and other communication channels. And in Beijing, probably you’ve read from some media reports that, even selling kitchen knives in stores was prohibited, which is kind of amusing. It’s like kitchen knives have also become a kind of threat to what they call social stability. Due to the unprecedented fierce attacks, the traffic of our anti-censorship platform from China was also severely cut, and most other tools were basically disabled. So that’s why, probably, you experienced this kind of difficulty to access the outside Internet from China. Afterwards, we have adjusted our protocols. The traffic has now recovered from China. The problem we’re facing is the limited resources. The technology itself is mature and is very hard for China or any repressive country to block effectively, unless they put in tremendous amount of resources. As I mentioned in the presentation, for every dollar we spend, China or other repressive countries need to spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars. If they spend hundreds, then a good amount of traffic can still go through. But if they spend thousands, then less traffic can go through. That’s the situation we are in at this moment. Our system is fully scalable. If we have enough resources, our system can be quickly scaled up to the level that no repressive government can afford to block us. So that will be the time when citizens in those censoring countries can freely access Internet if they use those tools. Q: (Off mike.) MR. ZHOU: We have not worked with other organizations. We hope that there are many, many other tools available to the users because, you know, the more tools we develop, the better it is for the citizens in closed societies to possibly have free access to the Internet. Our ultimate goal is to enable citizens in closed societies to reach out to the outside world. Q: (Off mike.) MR. ZHOU: The question is if China would censor President Obama’s speech in the planned town hall meeting. That’ll depend on what President Obama would say in the town hall meeting. And that’s a typical scenario that we have experienced in the past when the U.S. presidents visited China, especially when they are in this kind of town hall meetings with the citizens, when the topic comes to a sensitive issue, the TV broadcast would usually be cut. This usually happens. Because what Chinese authorities have been doing in the past is to distance their people from American ideals and values, as these are things that they cannot accept. Freedom, democracy, human rights, and rule of law – these are all considered as deadly threats to the regime. Q: Thank you so much for your comments. (Inaudible, off mike.) MR. ZHOU: Right. Well, the information I have is pretty much from that Wall Street Journal article – there was $30 million appropriated, or proposed by Sen. Arlen Specter and Sam Brownback for the Internet initiative. And I believe it has been passed by the conference of the appropriations committees, and it should be voted by the Congress very soon. Then it will go to the President for signature and become a bill. Then it would go to the State Department for an open-bidding process. Of course, it’s our hope that this fund will be eventually used effectively to bring about global Internet freedom. Q: (Off mike.) MR. ZHOU: Right – they took it [the mandatory installation of Green Dam] back. But some say they still secretly install it on certain computers. Q: Right, if they go forward with that, does it present new challenges for your technology, maybe new challenges to see in – (inaudible, off mike)? MR. ZHOU: That’s a good question. Green Dam was released, as I can remember, in June of this year. It’s a virus type of software that, once installed, can steal information from your personal computers. The software itself is very badly designed, and causes a lot of problems in usage, which incurred a lot of complaints among its users. This could be one of the reasons why the government later dropped the large-scale installation plan. There are other reasons. Previously, what they have been doing in terms of Internet censorship is to censor at the national gateway level – the Chinese Internet system is different from the free countries’ system. They have gateways that can control the traffic going out of and coming into China. Then, they realized that the censorship at the national gateway became a failure in dealing with anti-censorship systems. Thus they cannot effectively control the gateway traffic anymore. Now they want to use Green Dam to move the national gateway censorship to everybody’s personal computer so that they can censor more effectively. At least, that is a perceivable purpose of Green Dam. In fact, according to published online researches, Green Dam only targets at two anti-censorship tools – one is Freegate; the other is UltraSurf. So it targets at our two most popular tools. But then, within two weeks after Green Dam was released, we also released a tool called Green Tsunami that basically can wash out the Green Dam. It has already been downloaded by millions of users in China. That can be another reason that they later decided to not install Green Dam mandatorily. This is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. They will probably improve Green Dam in the future. Of course, we will also improve our anti-censorship tools. Q: (Off mike.) MR. ZHOU: This is just my personal opinion. If you say China now has more harmony and stability, et cetera, that depends on how you compare. In fact, if we look at the past 60 years, 70 million Chinese people lost their lives in different political movements, an amount more than the total number of death tolls in the two world wars. And this happened in a time of peace. So we cannot say it’s a harmonious society in that sense. Even now, there are still ongoing suppressions of large populations in China, such as the ten of millions of underground Christians; and the Falun Gong, which constituted 1/15th of the Chinese population before the suppression; and Tibetans and other ethnic communities – that’s really a very large population in China. So we cannot say, also, in that sense, it’s a harmonious society. And if we talk about stability, just think about they can’t even allow stores to sell kitchen knives in Beijing during their anniversary, you can see how stable that society is. So I would disagree with such a statement saying this is a harmonious and stable society. Probably if you watch a mainland Chinese TV, it is like that. But if you go to the reality, you probably will find a whole different picture. I think your second question is related to the question why China now appears to be so influential in the world stage – almost everybody has to buy what they say and what they do, and remain silent on issues that are challenging in the Chinese society. Many people are wondering why this could ever happen. Everybody knows, Chinese people also know, that the Chinese regime is an evil system. But still, China’s model now seems to be kind of popular, or at least well accepted by the world community. However, there are also other factors below the surface. If we compare the Chinese Communist Party with any other dictatorship or authoritarian regime in human history – including any other communist party in the word, it is very different. Let’s use the former Soviet Union as an example. In the last century we had the Cold War for decades, led by the Soviets and the United States. If there is a war, then there are two necessary conditions: One is that we must have two parties. Second, each party must hold up to its principles. Soviets believed in communism and really fought for communism; and the United States believed in democracy and freedom, and we fought for democracy and freedom. So the two parties could possibly engage a war. But the Chinese Communist Party has no principles. The only purpose of its existence is to stay in power. And for that, they can abandon any principles. For example, as we know, it is supposed to be a communist state – as they say it, a socialist state. But after the Cultural Revolution, when Deng Xiaoping found the social economy was collapsing and the communist party was no longer proper, in order to survive, they can lay out the red carpets to invite the western capitalists to do capitalism in China. This is very different from the Soviets. Tiananmen Massacre is similar. After the Cultural Revolution, when Deng Xiaoping found that they had to gain people’s support to sustain the Party’s power, they indeed gave people some freedoms. So before Tiananmen Massacre, it was probably the freest time in the past 60 years in China. And that’s why there could possibly appear leaders like Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang due to such a social environment. But when they realized what they had given to people became a threat to their power, they would have no hesitation to take it back overnight, even if they had to go onto the streets to kill those innocent students. They can change their principles arbitrarily without rationale. Still another example is the Falun Gong suppression. Before the suppression, the Chinese authorities actually enthusiastically endorsed Falun Gong. From organizing all its teaching classes, to issuing all kinds of awards and proclamations to Falun Gong, to using propaganda to promote Falun Gong in China, they had done it all. This was because, according to their own official, Falun Gong saved billions of dollars of health care money for the government. However, when they realized this had become too large a group that they could not control, they could overnight start the suppression. So we see they compromise their own principles at will just to stay in power. Thus it’s very deceptive. If they treat someone with red carpets, it is for sure not for the good of that person, it is only for themselves to stay in power. And they can change their minds arbitrarily without much rationale. Yet, the Chinese Communist Party’s having no principles is not the worst part. The worst part is that their having no principles has brought the entire world to abandon our own principles. That’s the challenge we’re facing, actually. When we talk about Iran, when we talk about Darfur, when we talk about North Korea, we do have principles. But when we talk about China, it’s tough. That’s the reality, unfortunately. Q: (Off mike.) MR. ZHOU: Right. The only way to stop the effect of our anti-censorship systems is to, indeed, shut down the Internet. North Korea is such an example. North Korea does not have Internet; they only have intranet. Intranet means they can only communicate inside the country, but they cannot go to the outside Internet world. In that case, there is no way to exit the confinement through the Internet. So when Burma cut the Internet in 2007, and when the Uighur region cut the Internet this time, indeed, there was no way for people there to get out or for people outside to get in through the Internet. Q: (Off mike.) MR. ZHOU: No, I don’t think so. Usually, they don’t do that [cut the Internet] for long because it affects the economy. But we’ll do some checking. They probably can only cut the Internet in regions like Uighur or Tibet, because the economy there does not heavily depend on the Internet or communications with the outside world. But I wouldn’t say they dare to do the same for cities like Shanghai or Beijing, or that kind of cities on the East Coast, because that will severely affect its economy – if the economy collapses, they know the regime will be gone. So that’s something they can’t afford to do. MS. SCHOLTE: That was outstanding. (Applause.) Very excellent presentation. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Zhou, that was outstanding. That was great. And I just want to thank everybody for being here, and this is our last forum for this year unless some earth-shattering thing happens. I do understand that Congress is supposed to stay in session until Christmas, is what I’m hearing. But we hadn’t planned on doing a program in December. But again, thank you, everyone, for being here and thank you for your help on the sponsorship. Thank you. (Applause.) (END) |
|||||
