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Title: Secrecy and Silence: The Real Problems of Internet Filtering in China
Byline: Benjamin Edelman (link: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/edelman.html )

Late last month, Internet users in China suddenly found themselves unable to access google.com. No government official had publicly pronounced a prohibition, nor had Google taken any sudden action to provoke China's wrath. Nonetheless, on August 29, millions of Chinese computer users could no longer access the most popular search engine in the world.

China's filtering efforts are far from unique. For example, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Vietnam also filter sites they respectively deem offensive. In the USA, the state of Pennsylvania requires Internet Service Providers to prevent access to state-identified child pornography, with other states reportedly considering following suit. Yet Chinese filtering extends well beyond practice elsewhere, in large part due to an extreme lack of transparency in China's filtering process.

Chinese filtering goes further than other filtering efforts in part by keeping secret the very fact of blocking of controversial sites. Compare China's filtering efforts with the corresponding practice in Saudi Arabia: When an Internet user in Saudi Arabia tries to access a site prohibited in that country, her browser explicitly reports that the requested page is blocked. Indeed, the page gives an error message, in both Arabic and English, that explicitly states that access is prohibited and names the government agency responsible for the policy. The Saudi "access denied" page also lets the user read more about the blocking policy, and it even provides a form for requesting administrative reconsideratino of blocking of the site at issue. In contrast, a Chinese user requesting a prohibited site gets no explicit report of the site's blocking. Instead, the user receives only a "host not found" error -- but this message could also result from a malfunctioning web server or a damaged network link. As a result, a user is at best uncertain that an unavailable site is blocked rather than simply broken or unreachable, and a user can only infer a block through correspondence with foreign colleagues or through repeated testing over time.

As if prior filtering efforts were not secretive enough, new changes make Chinese filtering even less transparent. Indeed, earlier this month, China's filtering apparently extended to restrictions on certain keywords, regardless of site or context. In some parts of China, users' web searches must not mention a list of prohibited terms; elsewhere, the network checks for prohibited terms in web page results, blocking any page that includes the terms at issue. Finally, such filtering sometimes extends also to email, discarding all of any message with even a single prohibited word or phrase. Such crude filtering often fails even to accomplish the goals of administrators: A keyword block on the name of some sensitive organization might more successfully restrict the hypothetical news of that organization's defeat than it would prevent the organization's communications with its members. In addition, like China's earlier filtering systems, these new developments are completely secret; users come to anticipate the subjects deemed off-limits, but there exists no known authority to propagate such rules or receive complaints.

Filtering secrecy admittedly pales in comparison to the more pressing problems of filtering restrictions themselves and of the associated enforcement efforts. But taking as given China's desire to restriction the flow of information, an increase in the transparency of filtering might bring about surprisingly extensive progress on the practical problems with the policy. For example, were filtering open to public scrutiny, the aggrieved operators and users of filtered sites could complain to the responsible Chinese authority, expressing their outrage at prohibitions both intentional and accidental. At least the accidental and overbroad blocks would likely be reversed -- a clear improvement over the errors caused by the current lack of formal review or reconsideration. That said, China's intentional blocks would remain and might become increasingly controversial. Were China to admit to filtering, it would surely face objections grounded in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a General Assembly proclamation explicitly prohibiting government restrictions on any form of media. But China has already faced numerous such challenges; indeed, there's little practical difference between admitting to filtering and continuing to halfheartedly deny the practice. China clearly thinks itself entitled to filter the Internet, UN resolutions notwithstanding, and with the practice already so well-known, China arguably need not further deny it.

Realistically, it's hard to imagine China in short order coming to see increased transparency as the sensible way forward. But the Internet itself may nonetheless produce and enforce such transparency. Thanks in large part to updates received by email from users across China, the SCMP and others have published scores of reports of restrictions around the country -- clearly describing China's extensive filtering systems, despite official denials. Indeed, reporters and researchers worldwide are increasingly discussing the subject -- in frequent BBC dispatches and a comprehensive report from RAND, among others. My own contribution, with Professor Jonathan Zittrain of the Harvard Law School, is a web-based system that allows a remote verification of any given site's accessibility from China. We're also testing many hundreds of thousands of sites, yielding an increasingly rigorous sense of what's blocked where; we're planning to publish our full results online, for review by anyone interested.

Research aside, some have watched the situation devolve and have resolved to do more than write about it. Taking matters into their own hands, public-spirited programmers calling themselves Peak-a-booty are designing software to circumvent filtering systems established by China and others. Though not yet complete, their software already reflects an arms race: Whenever Peak-a-booty releases a new circumvention method, China will surely strive to render it ineffective.

China's recent implementation of keyword-based filtering shows all too clearly the country's apparent commitment to Internet filtering. China will not easily give up the filtering arms race, recent developments suggest, and facilitation of the free flow of information will yet require renewed efforts on all fronts -- reporting, analysis, circumvention, and lobbying. Meanwhile, after two weeks of absence, Google is back in China -- for those users who avoid topics deemed off-limits. But the interested public ought not rest until keyword restrictions are lifted -- or, at the very least, until Chinese officials admit to the tampering.

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Benjamin Edelman is a student at the Harvard Law School and a researcher at its Berkman Center for Internet & Society.