MEAA criticises stalled press freedom in Australia

The local journalist union MEAA has released its annual report card on the state of press freedom in Australia. Kicking at the Cornerstone of Democracy is a comprehensive survey of media law and Australian regulation as well as taking a look at the situation in New Zealand and Asia Pacific.  According to MEAA secretary Chris Warren, the title of the report reflects what the MEAA sees as a failure of government to fulfil its promises. He says five years after the promises were made the project appears to have stalled.

In regulation, the report reflects the disappointment the MEAA expressed at the recent Finkelstein Report which it said would stifle media freedom. While the MEAA is in favour of reform of the Press Council, it disagrees governments should impose self-regulation on the news industry by statute. Warren said Justice Finkelstein’s judgement was clouded by News Corp’s various scandals. With one eye on its membership numbers, Warren’s take was “Finkelstein talks of a reference to the Productivity Commission in two years time – will this be too late? Journalists are losing their jobs now.”

Secrecy is another major concern of MEAA. The report says Australia has 500 secrecy provisions in 176 pieces of legislation across the country with 358 criminal offenses which attract a wide range of penalties up to 10 years in prison. This is despite the Australia Law Reform Commission releasing its report Secrecy Laws and Open Government  in Australia two years ago. That report called for 61 recommendations of reform, none of which have yet been acted on. The MEAA supports supported the ALRC's call for secrecy provisions in the Crimes Act to be replaced with a general secrecy offence limited to disclosures that clearly harmed the public interest.

Freedom of Information is another serious problem, one that anyone that has tried to access government data will find. The MEAA quotes an international FOI survey that puts Australia 39^th out of 85 countries. The Center for Law and Democracy  measured indicators such as right of access, scope, requesting procedures, exemptions, appeals, sanctions and promotional measures. Australia’s mediocre performance was put down to a lack of constitutional right of access to information as well as the numerous exemptions to FOI.

The MEAA said Shield Laws were getting bogged down in the issue of who was or wasn’t a journalist. The Commonwealth passed legislation in 2010 that protects anyone involved in the publication of news but the NSW legislation of 2011 narrowed it down to those in “the occupation of journalist in connection with the publication of information in a news medium”. Victoria and WA seem set to follow the NSW threshold.

Journalists are also under pressure from various “star chambers” to reveal their sources. These chambers are extra-judicial bodies in every state with power to investigate police and public service corruption. While the aims may be laudable, they have extraordinary coercive powers including the power to compel witnesses to produce evidence or other “things” (the definition at the discretion of the court) to help the investigation. Some can even deny witnesses their legal representation, a staple of all other courts. Journalists Linton Besser and Dylan Welch were served subpoenas to produce mobile phones and SIM cards after they wrote articles critical of the NSW Crime Commission. The Commission eventually backed down  from the request.

Other issues the MEAA looked at in their 2012 report include restrictive access to detention centres, the growing menace of spin and the “comment cycle” (which is replacing hard news), the growth in suppression orders, a review intocopyright exceptions  in the digital environment, the Convergence Review and concentrated media ownership and continued need for the public broadcasters ABC and SBS.  

Eritrea remains the black hole of news

The Horn of Africa nation Eritrea won a very dubious award this week: the world’s most censored nation. The list of the world’s 10 worst countries was put together by the Committee to Protect Journalists and Eritrea fought off the tough competition of North Korea, Syria, Iran, Equatorial Guinea, Uzbekistan, Burma, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Belarus to win this uncoveted award.  The CPJ research is based on 15 benchmarks, including blocking of websites; restrictions on electronic recording and dissemination; the absence of privately owned or independent media; and restrictions on journalist movements.

Eritrea has allowed no foreign journalists in since 2007 and domestic media are tightly controlled. Eritrea has been a dictatorship for 20 years since it achieved independence in  a bloody war with Ethiopia.  All domestic media are controlled by the government and the Orwellian "Ministry of Information" direct every detail of coverage. CPJ quoted an exiled journalist who said every time they had a story it was the Ministry who arranged interview subjects and gave instructions on the news angle to follow. Eight journalists from Eritrea are on CPJ's Journalist Assistance Program which supports exiled journalists who cannot be helped by advocacy alone.

Not surprisingly, the country’s president Isaias Afewerki who has ruled since independence in 1993, dominates coverage.  Equally unsurprising, the coverage is universally positive. As with all secretive countries, the media chose silence as a way of dealing with bad news. When Afewerki had a health scare recently it reported nothing for several weeks. Intense rumour-mongering filled the vacuum. Opposition websites and social media commented on the fact president had not appeared on television for nearly a month and many speculated on whether he had died.  (photo of Afewerki: Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP)

Finally on 29 April, Information Minister Ali Abdu told the BBC he saw Afewerki every day and the 66-year-old president was “in robust health.” A day later Afewerki went on television to dispel the rumours. "I do not have any kind of sickness," he said and accused those peddling such rumours of being "sick" and said they were indulging in psychological warfare to "disturb" the people.

The real psychological warfare is being conducted by the government suspicious of its own people. Government spies routinely report opinions in the street and even intimidate their opponents abroad.  All Internet service providers are required to connect to the web through government-operated EriTel. While Eritrea's journalists in exile run diaspora websites from London, Houston and Toronto, domestic Internet access is only affordable for the government elite. In 2011 the country had plans to implement mobile Internet capability but as the social media impact on the Arab Spring became widely known, Afewerki’s government abandoned the idea. 

The Eritrean Government has become increasingly paranoid as the country slowly becomes an international pariah. The UN Security Council imposed sanctions on Eritrea in 2009 for its support of Al Shabaab and other insurgents fighting neighbouring Somalia’s transitional government. The UN resolution also referenced a longstanding border dispute between Eritrea and Djibouti and demanded Eritrea cease “arming, training, and equipping armed groups that aim to destabilize the region or incite violence and civil strife in Djibouti.”

Eritrea’s friendlessness has allowed another longstanding enemy make incursions into its territory. In March, the Guardian reported Ethiopia had attacked Eritrea for the first time in a decade with few repercussions. Ethiopia's forces carried out a dawn raid in what it called a successful attack against military targets. Ethiopia claimed Eritrea used the military base to train an Ethiopian rebel group which has killed foreigners in Afar. 

The Guardian put the lack of international attention to the border incursion down to Afewerki's poor reputation, “a piece of work” as the British broadsheet called him. It quoted a Wikileak cable by US ambassador to Eritrea, Ronald McMullen, which said Afewerki was an unhinged dictator and his regime was very good at controlling all aspects of Eritrean society.

Media censorship is a key part of that control and the reason why the “award” for the most censored country is not as frivolous as it sounds.  As far back as 2005 Reporters Without Borders described Eritrea as a “black hole for news”.  Seven years later nothing has yet emerged from Afewerki’s vortex. And as the San Francisco Chronicle says, no one cares.

Wikipedia pulls Italian version in protest at wiretapping laws

Wikipedia has taking its Italian language version down in protest at new privacy laws currently before Italy’s parliament. The draft law would oblige websites to amend content within 48 hours if the subject deems it harmful or biased. In a communication released on Tuesday, Wikipedia said their Italian version may be no longer able to continue. “As things stand, the page you want still exists and is only hidden, but the risk is that soon we will be forced by Law to actually delete it,” Wikipedia said. “The very pillars on which Wikipedia has been built - neutrality, freedom, and verifiability of its contents - are likely to be heavily compromised by paragraph 29 of a law proposal, also known as "DDL intercettazioni.”

The Italian Parliament is currently debating DDL intercettazioni which requires all websites to publish a correction of any content that the applicant deems detrimental to his/her image within 48 hours of the request and without any comment. Wikipedia said the law does not require a third party evaluation of the claim and anyone offended by online content has the right for a correction to be shown, unaltered, on the page, regardless of the truth of the initial allegation. Wikipedia said this law would distort its principles and would bring to a paralysis of the "horizontal" method of access and editing, putting “an end to its existence as we have known until today”.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi introduced the draft bill in 2010 saying it was needed to protect the rights of private citizens. The bill restricts the right of police and prosecutors to plant bugs and record telephone conversations and also proposes fines for journalists publishing transcripts of recordings. Journalists across Italy went on strike in July 2010 in protest at the laws. Head of the Italian journalists union, Roberto Natale said the real objective was to prevent reporting of judicial cases with high political impact, “the ones that can generate, and have generated, embarrassment.”

Reporters Without Borders strongly condemned the law at the time. They said the laws went beyond just the national domain. “It would send a disastrous signal to other countries and would encourage dictatorships to use it as a model for restricting the investigative capacity of their local press with even more dramatic consequences,” RSB said. They said telephone taps were often the main evidence in support of stories about corruption and organised crime. “The sole practical aim of this bill is to prevent any investigative reporting.”

Berlusconi has been the victim of several wiretaps. Most recently judges released wiretaps at the conclusion of an investigation into Gianpaolo Tarantini, who paid women to sleep with the prime minister at his home. The wiretaps revealed a man with a large sexual appetite but whether this is something for the public domain is debatable. Berlusconi didn’t think so. “My private life is not a crime, my lifestyle may or may not please, it is personal, reserved and irreproachable,” he said.

His law is not totally without justification. Italy is the champion of the western world for wiretaps. In 2005 Italian mobile operator TIM issued a fax to all Italian public prosecutors they have already over-stretched their capacity from 5000 to 7000 simultaneously intercepted mobile phones and had now reached their limit. In 2004, Italy orders 172 judicial intercepts per 100,000 inhabitants.

After being bogged down for a year, debate on the bill resumed on Wednesday. Centre-right politician Giulia Bongiorno was responsible for carrying the law though parliament disowned it after Berlusconi's PDL party succeeded in adding an amendment that would see journalists jailed for between six months and three years if they published "irrelevant" wiretaps. Bongiorno said she no longer recognised anything in the text of the bill and blamed the changes on Berlusconi's direct intervention. The UK Independent now says the parties have reached compromise to see the law applied only to registered online news services and not to amateur blogs. That compromise was not good enough for Wikipedia.

The politics of social media

“Corporations and politicians worldwide have latched onto social media to advertise their brand and get the message out. Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election was supercharged by Facebook and social networking, which became the ultimate tool for gauging public opinion and speaking to the masses. But working with social media can fast go horribly wrong. US Congressman Anthony Weiner’s recent fall from grace was brutal and should be a lesson to all who merge online networking with real-time power chasing. Social media holds power potential for those who play the game correctly. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, hire someone else to do it right. And always keep your pants on.”
Paul Barry, The Power Index

Hot on the heels of British plans to shut down social networks to stop rioting, comes news they have already been beaten to it by the US. Demonstrators in San Francisco had planned a protest to condemn the shooting death of Charles Hill. Bay Area Rapid Transit police officers killed Hill on 3 July after they responded to complaints about a drunk man at a station. A week later protesters shut down three BART stations and planned a second protest last week. This time BART interrupted wireless service for three hours at some stations, to “ensure the safety of everyone on the platform." Initially they claimed they asked providers to stop service, but later admitted they did it themselves as it is allowed to do under its contracts with the providers - Sprint, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile.

The move prompted hacking group Anonymous to hit back. They have planned Operation BART which they said was “meant to teach BART a lesson about the dangers of censoring people...and is supposed to be an educational experience for the operators.” Yesterday, they defaced BART affiliated websites and released user info for the website mybart.org but said they “are just warming up.”

Anonymous compared the San Francisco moves to government censorship in the Arab Spring. “In Egypt and Tunisia, we saw people struggling to make their voices heard,” Anonymous said. “We have seen companies such as Telecomix delve into the nastiness of political corruption in an attempt to free those censored individuals from their prisons of silence.”

Whatever the truth of that comparison, the Arab regimes remain suspicious of social networks. This week, an Egyptian has been charged with using Facebook to incite violence. The Egyptian Military Prosecution has arrested activist and blogger Asmaa Mahfouz, 26 for defaming the junta and calling for armed rebellion. The court said Mahfouz used Facebook to call for the assassinations of Supreme Council of Armed Forces members and judges. “If justice is not achieved and the justice system fails us, no-one should feel upset or surprised if armed gangs emerge to carry out assassinations,” Mahfouz wrote. “As long as there is no law and there is no justice, anything can happen, and nobody should be upset.”

Mahfouz and others may be helped by the Telecomix site mentioned in the Anonymous post about BART. Telecomix is an international organisation “dedicated to informing the public about internet freedom issues”. Telecomix member Peter Fein said it was guerrilla informational warfare. "We're kind of like an inverse Anonymous," Fein said. "We operate in a very similar way to Anonymous not just IRC (Internet Relay Chat) but also the non-hierarchical structure. Except they break things and we build them.” In Egypt when authorities cut off the internet and telephones, Telecomix filled a a need for internal communication. “Not for people to be able to talk on Facebook or Twitter to the world, but amongst themselves ... so there were a number of tools, mesh technology and so on — that we tried to help people figure out,” Fein said.

The experiences learned in North Africa may need to be re-applied to the Western world. British Prime Minister’s knee-jerk “kill switch” proposal for social networks may sound idiotic and undemocratic but that does not mean it will not be tried if he thinks there are votes in it. All there is to go on is Cameron’s statement to MPs: "We are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality."

The short answer is, no it would not. People will plot violence regardless of the availability of social networks. But as the current Australian Government has shown with its internet censorship plans, draconian moves to limit free speech are justified using tropes such as “not acceptable to civilised society” and protecting “young children”. China too has successfully mastered internet censorship with its Golden Shield (though 30 second Internet response times are starting to throttle innovation) with equally vague excuses about protecting citizens from dangers. As Electronic Frontiers Foundation says of the Australian proposals, successful technology isn't necessarily successful policy. “We're still yet to hear a sensible explanation of what this policy is for, who it will help and why it is worth spending so much taxpayer money on,” said EFF.

Yet it is hardly surprising politicians are so wary of the technology. Many of the social media most widely used today are still in their infancy and their uses and potential effects remain difficult to understand. As the Paul Barry quote illuminates, there is a coming of age of online political engagement, According to researchers Jim Macnamara and Gail Kenning (E-electioneering 2010: Trends in Social Media Use in Australian Political Communication) three-quarters of Australia’s federal politicians had a Facebook presence of some kind in 2010 and local studies have shown that 57 per cent of citizens would like opportunities to comment on policies online and 36 per cent are interested in communication with their MPs online. But old habits die hard. Macnamara and Kenning found most politicians used social media primarily for one-way transmission of political messages, rather than citizen engagement or listening to the electorate. Maybe that will change as the technology matures, but equally likely it will be shackled to keep out of powerbrokers' pants.

Fiji turns the screws on the media

Opponents of Fiji’s media censorship want to set up a pirate radio station in international waters to broadcast news and music currently banned by the Frank Bainimarama dictatorship. Usaia Waqatairewa, the Sydney-based president of the Fiji Democracy and Freedom Movement, told the ABC today they wanted to put an antenna on an American or Australian registered ship located outside Fiji's legal jurisdiction. Waqatairewa says Internet access was rare in Fiji and people needed another means of getting news the Bainimarama government isn't letting them hear. “What we're planning to do is to if we could in some way set up a freedom radio that does not have the control of the regime in Fiji and be able to broadcast out the real news, instead of their propaganda and what they have censored themselves,” he said. (photo by Jachin Sheehy)

The announcement comes just days after the Fijian dictator, who has ruled since 2006, claimed the country would probably not be “ready” for elections in 2014. It also comes less than a month after strict new laws further inhibited Fiji’s media from honestly reporting on what is happening there. On 29 June the military backed regime introduced its new "Media Industry Development Decree 2010" which brought in a new set of strict rules governing Fiji’s media. The laws strengthen already tough laws governing the media, military intimidation of reporters, censors in newsrooms and the deportation of foreign-born newspaper executives.

One of those executives was Russell Hunter who was the former managing-director of the Fiji Sun before he was deported in 2007. Hunter called the laws draconian and an erosion of freedom and basic human rights. The laws give the media authority the right to demand the name of confidential sources if the story relates to government corruption. Journalists could be fined $50,000 and jailed for two years for work deemed against the “public interest or order”. The most well-known provision is the 10 percent limit on foreign ownership as it directly affects the News Ltd owned Fiji Times, which is the country’s oldest and largest newspaper.

The Fijian Government has now given News Ltd three months to sell the paper or be forcibly shut down. It also casts huge doubts over the viability of foreign investment in the country at the very time it is most needed. News Limited boss John Hartigan said the laws eroded the "basic tenets of democracy" in Fiji. "This illegal government has retrospectively withdrawn permission for foreign media investment in Fiji, which is not only grossly unfair but will inevitably be enormously damaging to Fiji's reputation as an attractive investment opportunity," he said.

In response, the Fijian media regulator said the country’s media needs to be a part of the regime not an opponent. Former Canberra-based academic Satendra Nandan, chair of the Media Industry Development Authority, said action needed to be taken against newspapers such as The Fiji Times, which had acted against the Bainimarama government. Nandan told The Australian the Times’ coverage of the scrapping of the judiciary and constitution last year was “abusive and scurrilous”. "The Fiji Times took a strong stand against the current government and the abrogation of the constitution and they didn't consider the national interest,” Nandan said.

The New Zealand Herald says the media laws are part of an ongoing removal of Fijians' rights including quashing the constitution, removing dissent and empty promises on a new election. With 60 percent of Fiji’s tourist income coming from New Zealand and Australia, the Herald rightly suggest the time is now right to reconsider holiday plans in Fiji. “Tourists might like to say that Fijian businesses and jobs should not be penalised for the sins of the regime,” the paper said. “But they are undermining their own country's diplomatic efforts."

IP not Idiot Proof: Britain passes bad Digital Economy Bill

The hilarity of yesterday’s news was provided by Boing Boing’ Cory Doctorow who revealed that the Minister for Digital Britain did not know what an IP address is. In a letter purporting to be from the Minister (Neither Boing Boing nor the Financial Times were certain it was genuine and Timms did not respond to a direct enquiry on the matter by Woolly Days) to a fellow Labour MP, an IP address is called an “Intellectual Property” address rather than a “Internet Protocol” address. Such a mistake is forgivable for lay people, but not only is Timms the relevant minister who should know better, but he has also has been responsible for a piece of legislation called the Digital Economy Bill that many see has seriously set back the cause of a free and open Internet. In this context the error takes on a whole new meaning.

The Digital Economy Bill was one of the last acts of the current British Government which they pushed through late on Wednesday night. It may have many long-lasting and unintended consequences. The bill is an extraordinarily wide-ranging piece of legislation that affects communications regulator Ofcom, Channel Four, Commercial TV, spectrum regulation, broadband, digital radio, video games, intellectual property (not Internet Protocol!) and internet domain registrations. MPs had just a few hours to digest its lengthy contents. All of it needs scrutiny but it is its recommendation on illegal downloads that has generated the most controversy.

As Gigaom says the bill tackles copyright infringement by forcing ISPs to cut off persistent file-sharers. In their rush to pass the legislation, it is looking leaky and undercooked and is likely to have many negative implications for digital freedoms. Among the concerns are it could have the unintended consequence of forcing libraries and cafes to stop offering free Wi-Fi and worryingly it could also give the government the power to block sites like Wikileaks, on the excuse it hosts copyright-infringing material. By tackling those who download copyrighted content illegally, the bill also moves to suspend or slow down some web users' connections.

The bill won cross-party support but one of the few active voices in parliament against it was Labour MP Tom Watson. Watson is one of the few MPs who understands what the digital economy actually means, and in his speech against it he described it as a mass (or mess) of “unintended consequences”. As Mike Butcher wrote in the Telegraph those consequences include potentially huge legal bills for Internet start-ups, and everyday parents who have little idea how their download limit is being used up by “teenage children, neighbours, or even someone parked outside their house.”

Another dissenter in parliament, Tory MP William Cash, made the point the impact and implications of the Bill's many clauses are sophisticated and not immediately obvious, and supporting it should not be a given. "The Bill should not be rushed through," he said. "It is not the Dangerous Dogs Bill; it is a very different type of Bill."

But TechCrunch Europe have seen it all before. They emotively used a Churchill pre-war speech as a metaphor for what is happening now “The stations of uncensored expression are closing down,” said Churchill about Nazi dominated Europe in 1938 and TechCrunch argued these stations were shutting down again today. Just as in the proposed Australian legislation the onus will be on ISPs to police the new laws. TechCrunch says ISPs will have to send letters to their subscribers who have been linked to copyright infringements and, after these warnings, suspend their accounts. Copyright holders will be able to apply for a court order to gain access to the names and addresses of serious infringers and take legal action.

Similar to the battle here in Australia over the Government’s proposed Internet censorship plans, the British digital economy bill has lined up the tech savvy and civil libertarians on one side and mainstream politicians on the other. As in Australia, neither side has covered themselves in glory in an issue that does not fully resonate with the majority of the electorate. Politicians, with too many other issues to deal with, allow themselves to be swayed by party whips, vested interests and industry lobby groups. The tech savvy’s mobilisation of platforms such as Twitter starts by being a good focus of anger but ends up being a frustrated and vitriolic echo chamber of like-minded views. Politicians know these views fail to cut through to suburbia and the issues affecting marginal electorates. Those fighting the #nocleanfeed war in Australia should closely examine the way the Digital Economy Bill played out. An antipodean repeat is on the cards.

Iceland aims to become the Caymans of journalism

A group of Icelandic MPs have launched an exiting new collaboration to turn the country into a haven of investigative journalism. The MPs are collaborating with Wikileaks to amend laws to grant protection for journalists, sources and whistleblowers. The plan would also provide data storage facilities as well as combating “libel tourism”, the practice of bringing defamation charges wherever the law is most attractive for the plaintiff. The intention is to provide a comprehensive Freedom of Information Act, whistleblower and source protections, limited prior restraint, protection for ISPs and protection from the insidious act of “libel tourism”.

The proposal submitted to the Althing (Icelandic Parliament) yesterday asks the government to find ways to strengthen freedoms of expression and information freedom in Iceland, as well as providing strong protections for sources and whistleblowers. The proposal requests changes to law, and an examination of the legal environments of other countries to get a “best of breed” law in freedoms of expression and information. It also recommends the establishment of an international prize to be called The Icelandic Freedom of Expression Award.

The aim is to turn the island nation of 350,000 people into the world's first "offshore publishing centre." According to Mother Jones, the proposals could turn Iceland into the Cayman Islands of journalism. It says the proposal is based on the business model of offshore financial centres like Switzerland, which attracts investors with an enticing combination of low taxes and strict bank secrecy laws. Iceland could be the equivalent for investigative journalists if, as expected, it passes what would be the strongest source protection and freedom of speech laws in the world.

The proposal is the brainchild of the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative which addresses the key issues for freedom of expression in the digital age. The IMMI say Iceland is “at a unique crossroads”. The IMMI is feeding of the sense of change in the electorate as a result of the economic meltdown in the banking sector, in order to prevent it from taking place again. It also quotes Reporters Sans Frontiers who say Iceland dropped from first in the world for freedom of expression in 2007) to 9th last year. “It is time,” say IMMI’s founders, “this trend was rectified”.

The IMMI was drafted with help from Julian Assange and Daniel Schmitt, two of the founders of Wikileaks. WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange has been in Iceland for the past two months, consulting parliamentarians on the project. Assange says Wikileaks has fought off more than 100 legal attacks over the past three years by spreading assets assets, encrypting everything, and moving telecommunications and people around the world. He says the Iceland will adopt the strongest press and source protection laws from around the world.

Assange said the move was driven by Icelandic people who have just suffered the largest economic meltdown of any country per capita in the GFC. He said Icelanders believe fundamental change was needed in order to prevent such events from taking place again including better bank regulation and better media oversight of dirty deals between banks and politicians. He quotes the “libel tourism” of Iceland’s largest bank Kaupthing which brought a successful suit against a Danish tabloid, Ekstra Bladet, in London where the costs of fighting libel is prohibitive. Iceland’s second largest bank Landsbanki also sued a Danish media outlet over its Russian mafia connections. http://icelandtalks.net/?p=471

Icelandic writer and blogger Alda Sigmundsdottir says the aim of the proposed legislation is not to allow people to publish freely any old rubbish and get away with it. “The point is not to make Iceland a haven for tabloids, paedophiles or similar low-level activities,” she said. Sigmundsdottir said the idea was to create a framework wherein investigative journalism and free speech can flourish. “Anything that is illegal will still be illegal,” she said. “The amendments will not change that.

However the Citizen Media Law Project says that while the laws are well-intentioned, they probably won’t achieve much because of the principle that publication happens at the point of download, not the point of upload. It quotes the famous (or more correctly infamous) case of Dow Jones v Gutnick where Melbourne tycoon Joe Gutnick sued Barron's Online for publishing a supposedly defamatory article about him. Gutnick applied the writ in Victoria where only a handful of people read the article but the Australian High Court ruled this was where Gutnick’s reputation was and ruled against Barron’s.

For better or worse, says the CMLP, the poorly thought-out Australian ruling has set the precedent in similar cases around the world since. So while Iceland’s protections will suit Wikileaks they will not be useful for multi-national media companies. Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain believes it was unclear how broadly the laws could be applied should they pass. "Unless the executives behind a particular media company are themselves prepared to move to Iceland, I'm not sure how substantial the protections can be," he said. "A state can still demand that someone on its territory answer questions or turn over information on pain of fines or imprisonment."

Fatma Riahi on frontline of Tunisia's war on bloggers and journalists

Blogger Fatma Arabicca has resumed blogging two months after authorities arrested her but the blog remains censored. Fatma joins another high profile Tunisian blogger journalist Sofiene Chourabi on the censorship list in recent times. Fatma’s original blog was deleted in November just before she attracted the unwelcome notice of authorities but a new version (in Arabic) has been posting since 17 January.

Arabicca is the nom de blog of college theatre professor, Fatma Riahi. On 2 November, the 34-year-old Riahi was summoned to appear before a Tunis criminal court where she was questioned about her online activities. The authorities wanted to know whether Riahi was hiding behind the pen-name of Blog de Z, a Tunisian cartoonist blogger whose political satire enraged the government. They released her and summoned her again the next day. Three security officers escorted her to her house in Monastir 160 km from Tunis, to confiscate her PC and conduct a search for evidence. A day later, they escorted her again to Monastir to get her passwords and access her facebook account.

Riahi was detained for a week and denied permission to speak to her lawyer for longing than a few minutes. She was charged with criminal libel that potentially carries a prison term to up to three years in prison. A Free Arabicca campaign blog was been launched by fellow Tunisian bloggers in support for Fatma (though it hasn’t posted since mid November), and there is also a Facebook support page.

While it is not clear what Riahi’s perceived offence was, it didn’t need to be much to rile the sensitive Tunisian government. President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali's government is one of the most repressive in the world as regards Internet usage. Social networking sites such as YouTube and Facebook are often blocked because of content criticising the president's policies and the government also filters emails of human rights activists. The 2008 Reporters Without Borders freedom of the press index ranked Tunisia 143rd out of 173 countries. When the Journaliste Tunisien blog posted the index a day after it was issued, it was blocked by authorities.

Just last week the Committee to Protect Journalists reported an appeals court in Nabeul refused to release Tunisian journalist Zuhair Makhlouf despite his completion of a three-month prison term imposed in October. Makhlouf is a contributor to news Web site Assabil Online and the opposition weekly Al-Mawkif. He was sentenced in October on the charge of “harming and disturbing others through the public communication network.” The sentence ended on January 18 but Tunisian penal code provisions say a prisoner cannot be released before all appeals have been considered. The court designated February 3 as the date for Makhlouf’s initial appeals hearing.

The decision came days before an appeal hearing for Taoufik Ben Brik, a journalist sentenced to six months in prison. Last year Reporters Without Borders (RSF) criticised the detention of Ben Brik and a violent attack on another journalist. In October 2009 Ben Brik was detained on a trumped-up charge of harassing a woman on the street. Reporters Without Borders said the arrest was an effort to muzzle him for his fierce criticism of President Ben Ali. Around the same time, independent journalist Slim Boukhdhir was attacked by a group of men just hours after he gave a critical interview to the BBC. RSF said the behaviour was “befitting of a mafia regime."

The regime is showing no signs of changing its hostile attitude to journalists. Ben Ali has ruled Tunisia since taking over in a bloodless coup in 1987. In 2009 Ben Ali was re-elected for a fifth term with 89 percent of the vote in a rigged election. Although he promised to promote media diversity in 2004, the regime retains a tight control of news and information. According to the RSF, journalists and human rights activists are the target of bureaucratic harassment, police violence and constant surveillance by the intelligence services. The Internet is strictly controlled and foreign journalists are not allowed anywhere without the presence of government officials. But despite a total lack of regard for democratic institutions, RSF says Ben Ali is treated very leniently by international organisation all because he is “an ally of the west in its fight against terrorism.” No one seems to care about the terrorism he inflicts on his own subjects.

Google has more to lose than China

On 12 January, the official Google blog posted a seemingly innocuous entry called “a new approach to China”. In it Google claimed that serious cyber-attacks in December resulted in the theft of their intellectual property. The post stated the attack was aimed at accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. It also said the accounts of dozens of American, Chinese and European Gmail users who advocate human rights in China “appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties”. Then they dropped the bombshell. As a result of these attacks, Google decided to stop censoring results on Google.cn. “We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China,” concluded post author David Drummond, Google Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer.

There is little doubt that Google made a business decision and dressed it up with noble values. The news was even kept secret from Google’s 700 Chinese staff until it was made publicly available. Techcrunch’s Sarah Lacy offered three reasons why Google made their decision. Lacy claims Google were not doing great business in China (with 30 percent of the market) and could never outdo local leader Baidu (with 63 percent). Secondly Google had already made their decision and the announcement was a “scorched earth” move aimed at buying Google goodwill in the west. Thirdly it is only going to get harder for western firms as cashed-up Chinese tech companies begin infiltrating the US market.

The official Chinese news agency Xinhua has been strangely diffident in its response. Normally it reacts bullishly to any perceived criticism of the Communist regime but an article on 13 January merely suggested China was seeking more information on Google’s stance. They quoted an anonymous high ranking official merely said "It is still hard to say whether Google will quit China or not. Nobody knows.” They also quoted Guo Ke, professor of mass communication at Shanghai International Studies University, who said it was "almost impossible" for Google to quit China and also impossible for the Chinese government to give up its management right over the Internet. "I think Google is just playing cat and mouse, and trying to use netizens' anger or disappointment as leverage,” Guo told Xinhua.

The official Chinese Government response is that companies must follow the law of the land. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said China welcomed foreign Internet companies but that those offering online services must do so “in accordance with the law.” According to the New York Times, another high-ranking official has called for even tighter Internet restrictions. Wang Chen, the information director for the State Council urged Internet companies to increase scrutiny of news or information that might threaten national stability and emphasized the importance of “guiding” online public opinion.

Subsequently Google has hinted it will negotiate with the Communist regime. It may be that Google needs China more than China needs Google. China has by far the world’s largest internet population with estimated 338 million Internet users - 46 million of those were added in the last 12 months alone. The entire network is policed by the Great Firewall of China and the government stepped up efforts to censor the Web during the Beijing Olympics and the Communist regime’s 60th anniversary last year. During the purge, the Chinese government made particular efforts to shut down social media sites such as blogs, online video sites, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.

However, many Chinese users have sophisticated knowledge of the Internet and are able to circumvent the censorship. Locals call it “fanqiang”, or “scaling the wall.” Users connect to an overseas computer via a proxy server which costs $2 a month to share with about two dozen others. Chinese citizens engaged in such practices say the government rarely cracks down on them individually, preferring instead to go after prominent dissidents who publish information about forbidden topics online. Meanwhile non-profit companies have set up censorship-evading tools for users to download in a cat-and-mouse game with authorities.

But as The Hindu puts it, many Chinese online users will be let down by Google’s losing battle with the authorities over censorship issues. They quote Chinese Internet expert Kaiser Kuo, who believes the ordinary Chinese Internet user is being ignored. “But they are also questioning whether the moral point Google is trying to make is worth the price they have to pay,” he said. “The government no longer worries about access to outside information through Web 1.0 sites, but has closed down social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube that allow for the rapid dissemination of information.” The absence of Google will simply tighten the Government’s grip on power in this most closed of kingdoms.

Berners-Lee condemns Net censorship in BBC’s “Digital Revolution”

World wide web founder Tim Berners-Lee has told an exciting and ambitious new BBC “open source” documentary series that governments and companies should limit the amount they snoop on web users. Berners-Lee admitted the web should be policed for unacceptable use but said censorship would have "all kinds of pernicious effects". He said the medium should not be set up with constraints and praised the Internet’s ability to route around censorship. “But it is by no means an easy road,” he warned.

Berners-Lee was speaking in a recent launch for a four one-hour series due to air next year that has a working title of Digital Revolution. According to the BBC, Digital Revolution is an “open source documentary". It is due for transmission on BBC Two in 2010 and will take stock of 20 years of change brought about by the World Wide Web. The makers say it would have been foolish to make a documentary about the web without engaging the web itself.So they are requesting the participation of the public in every aspect of the production process and will be blogging their progress.

Although it is likely that everything about Digital Revolution (including the name) will be subject to crowdsourcing change in the months to come, it is safe to say Berners-Lee’s words will remain. Tim Berners-Lee is one of the true greats of the digital revolution. When Intel held a poll in early 2008 to find out who was the most influential person in technology in the last 150 years, it was Tim Berners-Lee who came up trumps beating Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin into joint second place.

It is no surprise that the last two decades dominated. The pace of technology has increased several times over in that time due in no small part to Berners-Lee, Page and Brin. But while the stunning invention of the world wide web gave people a revolutionary intuitive interface with which to tame the increasing powerful Internet, Berners-Lee was following in the great British problem-solving tradition of Babbage and Turing.

While working at the CERN particle physics lab in Geneva in the 1980s, Berners-Lee was frustrated by fact his company’s computers couldn’t easily talk to each other. What he went looking for was an easy way for scientists to share data over the Internet. Drawing from the work of Vannevar Bush on hypertext, Bill Atkinson’s Hypercard for Apple and the vision of Robert Fano’s “Proceedings of the IEEE”, he had created by 1990 the technology that became the web. These were a set of protocols for displaying documents linked across the Internet.

Berners-Lee was immediately aware of the potential power of his inventions. But when he told CERN, management were unimpressed. His supervisor called it “vague but exciting”. No one could see the potential of hypertext. Berners-Lee began to fear that a rival protocol might win out. The University of Minnesota’s Gopher was clunky but gaining in popularity. It may have edged out the web but made one crucial mistake. When the University of Minnesota suggested it might charge to use Gopher, Berners-Lee saw it as an act of treason. He persuaded CERN to release the rights of the web for free into the public domain. Anyone could take the protocols and build anything they wanted on top of them. Berners-Lee’s brilliance was to design the web without a centralised place to register a new server or get approval of its contents.

(photo by hyoga) Berners-Lee has many other claims to fame. He wrote software to dish out instructions from computers to clients that would eventually become known as “browsers”. He was also central to the development of the remarkable Hypertext Markup Language (html) whose simple instructions, graphic interface and linking capacity made publishing web pages easier, more powerful and more attractive. In 1992 he became one of the early pioneers of surfing (and a grandfather of blogging) when he began postings items and lists about new websites that attracted his attention and gave reasons why they interested him.

But as Dan Gillmor reminds us, there was something else important he purposely did not do. He didn’t patent his invention. Instead he gave the world an open and scalable platform to build in further innovation. Berners-Lee was keen to promote a sense of shared ownership. “Use links, don’t talk about them”, he wrote. Later he noted in his book Weaving the Web that inventing the web involved a growing realisation that there was power in arranging ideas in an unconstrained web-like way.

He knew that central points of control would rapidly become a bottleneck which could choke the web. It was critical the web remain "out-of-control". Berners-Lee’s philosophy was based on the creative anarchy and universality of the Internet as a whole. As long as everyone accepted the rules of sending packets around, packets could be sent anywhere. And so from 1993 onwards, the network of networks exploded.

But perhaps it is only now that Berners-Lee’s vision is being truly being realised. He wanted a read-write web but what developed out of the crowd of the 1990s was read only. The rise of social networking, blogs, wikis, and videos is finally changing the Internet into a many-to-many (and few-to-few) communication tool. But Berners-Lee still wants more. He says the web should be as free and unconstrained as paper. When you buy paper, he said "it does not come with the fundamental constraint on it that you can only write truth.” His conclusion: the internet should not be controlled, censored or intercepted by government or companies. His statements will not be welcomed by governments and companies but it is clear that Berners-Lee’s own digital revolution still has a long way to go.

Meddling in internal affairs: Rebiya Kadeer, China and the MIFF

On the afternoon of 5 July internal affairs in the far north west of China turned violent and ugly. Thousands of angry citizens had taken to the streets of Urumqi, Xinjiang to protest the killing of two Uyghur workers in Guangdong. Suddenly there was a flashpoint and matters turned violent. Fights led to gunfire. Eventually 184 people died, and another 1,600 were injured. Both Han and Uyghur alike suffered amid claim and counter-claim whose fault it was. It was the worst ethnic riot in China in decades.

China was anxious to blame the separatist movement for the riot. “The violence was masterminded by the separatist World Uyghur Congress led by Rebiya Kadeer”, exclaimed the official state mouthpiece Xinhua. Though their nominated culprit was inconveniently located in North America at the time, the regime seemed happier to scapegoat her rather than scrutinise the role played by the thousands of soldiers it had sent in to the city.

China also scolded Muslim Turkey for expressing its anger over events affecting their ethnic Turkic brothers and sisters in Xinjiang. They were denounced, alongside all other foreign critics, in the time-honoured fashion of “meddling in internal affairs”.

Perhaps China now considers Melbourne as an internal affair. Last week it demanded the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) censor a film about Kadeer. On Friday, Chinese consular officials telephoned Festival director Richard Moore and asked him to justify its inclusion of a film about the “criminal” Rebiya Kadeer in the festival. China urged Moore to withdraw the documentary "Ten Conditions of Love" by Melbourne film-maker Jeff Daniels about the exiled Uyghur.

Moore was nonplussed. “I didn't have any reason to justify the inclusion of the film in the festival,” the MIFF director told the consulate. Nor did he need one. The film will be rightly shown - its cinematic merit is justified on the subject matter alone. Melbourne will get the opportunity to see the documentary in a fortnight. Kadeer will be here herself to talk about it.

She currently lives in Washington State where the vastness of the Pacific separates her from China. Xinjiang is further away still. Rebiya Kadeer was a successful businesswoman and an activist for a people that were being swamped in their homeland by Han Chinese. In the 1990s she founded and directed a large trading company in north-western China. She was not only a champion for the rights of Uyghurs but became one of the most prominent women’s rights advocate in all of China. These activities came to an abrupt halt in August 1999. She was arrested and charged with harming national security. In a charge that sounds as disturbingly vague as that of Stern Hu affair, Kadeer was thought to be “providing secret information to foreigners”. Thumbing their nose at America, Chinese authorities waited until she was about to meet a group of US congressional staff on an official visit to China before making the arrest.

She was found guilty and got eight years. It was reduced to seven in 2004.

In 2005 she was released as part of a deal with the US on the grounds of “medical treatment”. Kadeer has now recovered. But the medical treatment that Kadeer really wants is the healing of her oppressed people.

The Christian Science Monitor interviewed Kadeer last week. She told them the riot wasn’t her fault. The Uyghurs were provoked by the police, she said. She also thought that plain clothed agents launched the riot as a false flag operation to give China the excuse to justify a larger crackdown. Maybe or maybe not - but it is no less plausible than saying she launched it.

Kadeer knows the old Chinese Communist state was bad. But the current model is worse: the Party has shred the last vestige of political philosophy in a naked grab to maintain power. It now relies on nationalism for fuel. China aggressively promotes its vision of Greater China and uses western mediatisation methods to enforce the vision on the homeland.

The most important skill China learned from the West was how to control your image. This is a primary consideration of politicians the world over. Former British civil servant Christopher Foster told in 2006 how media pressures had changed New Labour’s Cabinet meetings. The meetings were shorter and were no longer about decision making but instead reviewing the media impact of decisions already made.

The Chinese have also made a decision. Xinjiang is an internal province. But to the World Uyghur Congress the area is East Turkistan. With an articulate spokesperson like Kadeer on the loose, China knew it would be difficult to sell its message. Kadeer was careful never to attack the regime (she left that to her husband Sidik Rouzi). Instead her tactic was to get under their skin realising the Chinese were not leaving East Turkestan any time soon.

“I am extremely grateful for both Han and Uyghurs that protected each other in the riots,” she told CSM last week. “That should be the true relationship we should have with each other. But this Chinese government has created such a tragic situation, that it is not happening, generally, as it could.”

She is right. As state security, the Chinese Government were ultimately responsible for the deaths in Urumqi. This outcome is something they may repent in leisure. They may not be able to control ethnic tensions they have created even with their media sophistication.

The MIFF deserve praise for not buckling to the pressure. Kadeer is an important voice that speaks for more than just Uyghur values.

“Under Mao, during the Cultural Revolution, Uyghurs were badly treated.” Rebiya said. “But [at least] we could speak our language.”

Steamed Buns: China and the media

“China shines. It radiates possibility. If it were a colour it would be the new black. My problem is that I remember the old darkness”.

Writing in the Griffith Review, former Age journalist Peter Ellingsen captured some of the conflicting essence of China in those short opening sentences to his Tiananmen Square evocation. Ellingsen was an eye witness to the old darkness and his account of the 1989 Beijing massacre is heart-wrenching. Yet despite that nagging memory it is shiny, modern China that now excites him with possibility.

Ellingsen’s article is unusually tentative in one respect. Most foreign media representations of China focus on its struggles with democracy. The problem with this representation is that it ignores a fundamental reality. China seeks détente with Western technology but resolutely refuses to adopt Western ideas about statecraft. The Chinese Communist Party has defied predictions of its demise, with a great deal of help from compliant western capital. The party has survived by applying strict censorship but also by judicious adaptation to the times. But they still face a difficult problem from within. The billion-strong audience is capable of a communications revolution and it is unwise to assume there is undifferentiated opinion. Chinese journalists are on the frontline of that communications revolution. This post investigates how the government controls information and how journalists have adapted to these controls. Of particular relevance are a new breed of Chinese bloggers who have opened up a new online front in the battle between the nation’s growing affluence and government censorship requirements. China’s politicians, producers, and consumers combine to create complicated, and often contradictory media patterns that will continue to make the field a fruitful subject of inquiry.

Enormous legal, political and technological changes have shaped Chinese media over the last 40 years. The government rules by controlling the information flow. They have been helped by the profit imperative of western technological companies. China subverts the idea that the Internet will bring about democratic change. Its growing clout in world affairs means their position will only harden. But hope exists. Despite sophisticated shields and compliant media, subversive messages are getting to the people formerly known as the audience. The less well regulated activities of bloggers and social networkers are subverting China's Communist norms. Since the 1980s reforms of Deng Xiaoping, China has danced subtly with democracy while always keep the steady party hand at the tiller. The Internet provides the greatest challenge yet to that centralised power.

The People’s Republic of China has always been deeply uncomfortable with an independent fourth estate. The Communist Party has maintained a monopoly on state power for 60 years and sees the media as a strategic sector of control. It has no immediate intention of relinquishing that control. A couple of weeks ago China blocked access to Twitter, Flickr, and Hotmail in the latest attempt to stop online discussion of the Tiananmen crackdown. Despite the opening of the Chinese economy that began during the Deng era, the country’s information space is restricted by regulations inherited from pre-reform years. At the national level, the main broadcasting stations and newspapers are controlled by the state while provincial and municipal authorities oversee regional and local newspapers and television stations. The effect is to ensure that state propaganda messages dominate the press and the airwaves.

A sense of the complexities of Chinese journalism emerges in the annual reviews of the journalist lobby bodies. Freedom House sees China as middle of the road. It calls the country “partially free” with tight official control and a crackdown on dissent balancing increasing the apparent benefits of media commercialisation. Reporters Sans Frontières is less impressed and ranks the country 167 out of 173 in its press freedom index. It says Chinese authorities continue to arrest journalists as a result of bad publicity from reports on corruption and nepotism. But the very fact that so many journalists are so frequently jailed and attacked shows a willingness on the part of many of its practitioners to defy the machinery of state to get out dissenting messages.

In theory, the dissidents are supported by the constitution. China, unlike Australia, has a bill of rights. Usually more honoured in the breach, its very existence shows a willingness to accept new ideas. Article 35 of China’s 1982 Constitution guarantees freedom of expression, press, assembly, association, demonstration, and protest. But these very admirable democratic rights have mostly been trumped in practice by other more vaguely worded articles which prescribe the media’s right to infringe upon other interests of the state. The media must keep state secrets, respect social ethics, and safeguard “the security, honour and interests of the motherland”. In practice, they are governed by the Communist “party principle” which comprises of three elements: the media must accept the party’s ideology as its own; the media must spread the party’s programs, policies and directives; and the media must accept party leadership, organising principles and press policies. The fourth estate is a branch of the state. Those facets of journalism that serve wider purposes such as freedom of the press, objectivity, truthfulness and news values are all subordinate to the “party principle”.

The only watchdog allowed is the Communist Party itself. It controls the media through the Central Propaganda Department. This Orwellian creation is charged with dealing with politically sensitive news. But the media pay the price for this interference: its credibility suffers. As jailed journalist Dai Qing said in 2002, “In the Chinese media, only the weather reports can be believed”.

Despite the scepticism, Chinese journalists do engage with the news. As the interviews with journalists in the book "China Ink" demonstrate, Chinese reporters have a willingness to address public issues in ways similar to their western counterparts. They subvert Communist norms in subtle ways that are a testament to their journalistic craft. The view of Hu Zhibin is typical:
“If we have to play the role of government mouthpiece, we do it perfunctorily and at the same time we provide information. For instance, if the government announces new grain and oil price adjustments, we’ll put the old and new prices side by side so the people can see them clearly. If the government wants us to report on the achievements of the tenth five-year plan, we’ll try to point out some of the more interesting aspects, such as…how much the water shall be improved, achievements related to the interests of the people”.

Zhibin and the others were able to practice the 5 Ws and H of journalism because of the 1980s reforms. Deng and his cadres were single-minded in their quest for face-paced development and integration with international norms. Chinese media got more in tune with the “interests of the people” and began to break free of Communist shackles. Journalists began wreiting about economic inefficiencies and political corruption hoping that a freer media would promote economic reforms. However the trend did not survive the government crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in 1989. According to American journalist Harrison E. Salisbury who was in Beijing at the time, the media were complicit in the crackdown:
“It is a propaganda blitz, and it is backed up by the biggest lie they could think of – Tiananmen did not happen. No one, no one, was shot in the Square. They have even put down the memory hole their original announcement of the twenty-three students killed there. Now all they talk about are the brave PLA soldiers”.

After Tiananmen and the collapse of Communism in Europe, stability became a paramount concern. The Chinese Communists tightened its grip on power as the party prepared for the transition from Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin. Jiang’s rule was paternalistic coupled with a central-supervised application of market economics. The state closed down avenues of opposition while beefing up state-controlled media. In 1996, the People’s Daily (the organ of the Communist Party central committee) was China’s top selling newspaper. The paper’s target readership was decision-makers, government officials, executives, experts and scholars but its circulation was flagging. It was selling 800,000 copies daily but most were dutifully bought by work units of the party state rather than by citizens wanting real news. Concerned party bosses did not solve the problem by allowing lively stories and objective analysis. Instead they issued a directive to work units across China urging extra subscriptions and circulation lifted quickly to 1.6 million. But because the solution was artificial, it sagged back to the previous number within months. As Ross Terrill said, it was a “piece of make-believe, unconnected with the appeal of the People’s Daily, or lack of it, to the Chinese people, serving only the self-image of the Chinese state”.

Despite these state vanity projects, the market reforms of the 1980s did leave a lasting imprint on the newspapers. When the government loosened control on the media, it encouraged them to create their own revenues. Advertising rose from an insignificant component to rivalling circulation as newspapers’ most important source of income. There is now more emphasis on business information especially in the non-state controlled mass-appeal market. There is also increasing commercialisation in tabloids and weekend editions that results in a vibrancy and diversity that Beijing is struggling to control. Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Society Institute, says the spirit of professionalism imbues many journalists to take the initiative in developing stories on environmental issues, labour difficulties, health problems, land disputes, abuses of power and corruption.

The state does not actively encourage such initiative. The Freedom House “Freedom of the Press 2008” global survey of media independence found that Chinese media control and internet restrictions were tightened in 2007 and the number of jailed journalists and bloggers increased. In November 2007, China introduced an emergency response law which allowed media licences to be revoked if they reported “false information” about emergencies, natural disasters or the government response to them without prior authorisation. Other pre-emptive restrictions stopped discussions of diverse topics such as flaws in the legal system, human rights defenders, a Hunan province bridge collapse, and negotiations with Taiwan over the Olympic torch route. Journalists who try to get around these restrictions have suffered harassment, sackings, abuse and detention. At least 29 journalists and 51 cyber-dissidents were in prison at end of 2007, more than any other country in the world.

Foreign journalists also face many restrictions in China. According to Beijing-based New York Times reporter Joseph Kahn, they can expect to be bugged, followed, and have their texts and e-mails monitored. He described “huge obstacles” to reporting, including the risks his Chinese accomplices face:
“We’re closely monitored, our phone is tapped, we’re subject to detention whenever we leave one of the major cities if we’re not travelling with permission and probably the biggest barrier to us is that the Chinese who work with us are subject to Chinese rules which are very different from the rules that apply to foreigners”.
Kahn was pessimistic about the possibility of any impending change to Chinese policies. At the time, preparations for the Beijing Olympics were in full swing. Kahn said authorities used the Olympics as an excuse to deny reforms in the name of stability. He added “it’s been going on for some time” and other excuses such as the 2010 Shanghai World Expo have been, and will continue to be, used to justify further crackdowns.

Many of these crackdowns involve the state oversight of the media consumption of its citizens. China has put in place the “Golden Shield” electronic surveillance system with the help of western technology companies using methods developed to counteract terrorism. The shield is a “massive, ubiquitous architecture of surveillance” which will integrate a gigantic online database with an all-encompassing surveillance network including speech and face recognition, closed-circuit television, smart cards, credit cards and Internet monitoring technology. Legal channels also support the system of censorship. In order to overcome technological difficulties monitoring audiovisual content with automated filtering technology, the State Administration for Film, Radio and Television issued a regulation in 2007 requiring 600,000 websites with such content to apply for permits. Huge numbers of government employees filter Internet content in web portals and internet cafes and punishment for breaking the rules is severe. A 2002 Harvard Law School study found a range of sites were filtered. They included sites that provided information on dissidents and democracy, public health and HIV, religion, Tibet, Taiwan, and worldwide higher learning institutions as well as news sites such as the BBC, CNN, Time, PBS, the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Washington Post and Reuters. Censorship is also becoming more subtle. Pages that contain proscribed terms cease loading while Internet access is limited without explanation for minutes or sometimes hours. Users are often not aware they are being censored.

Foreign technology companies have been complicit in this sophisticated throttling of free speech. The Golden Shield could not have progressed without the help of US-based Lucent and Cisco, European wireless giants Nokia and Ericsson and Canada’s Nortel Networks. In 2004 many of the top international technology companies operating in China including Yahoo, Intel, Nokia and Ericsson formed the Beijing Association of Online Media which quickly morphed from a trade grouping into what Bandurski called “an active agent of the Chinese government’s initiative to stifle discussion of political issues”. Two years earlier Yahoo had signed a document called the Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet industry in which it promised to inspect and monitor information on domestic and foreign websites and refuse access to those sites that “disseminate harmful information”. Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said Yahoo had switched “from being an information gateway to an information gatekeeper”. For international companies, it was clear that profits were more important than the health of Chinese democracy.

Few people were especially worried about these technological constraints given China’s astonishing rapid growth and prosperity in the last two decades. Fons Tuinstra relates how when he first studied in China in 1994, the Internet was unknown, it cost $15 to send a fax, and his most important communication tool was a bicycle. At the time, the Chinese bureaucracy was heavily divided about the merits of the Internet. The security apparatus opposed it as it would make their task of keeping a lid on societal tensions much harder. But its concerns were overridden by economic development departments who saw the need to invest heavily in Internet rollout. Authorities also realised that too much censorship would cripple the useful function of using the Internet for government business. The Chinese government closely monitored the Internet not just to control content but also to listen to the increasingly powerful voice of online citizens. As Tuinstra put it:
“Like other media channels, the Internet is more often seen as an extension of the government than a meeting place for opposition so audiences deal with this inherent reality rather than expanding energy opposing it”.

China is now dealing with the paradox of using information technologies to drive growth in the integrated global economy, while at the same time maintaining the authoritarian power of the Communist single-party state. As a result, China walks an ambiguous road between promoting widespread access to the Internet while keeping comprehensive oversight using strategies such as content filtering, monitoring, deterrence, and self-censorship. Journalists must avoid stories about the military, ethnic conflict, religion (particularly the outlawed spiritual movement Falun Gong), and the internal workings of the party and Government. Yet economic reform has impacted the emerging professional culture of media organisations and working journalists, who improvise new reporting strategies to overcome official control and attract market success. And the Communist Party itself is evolving as much as the media that serves it. The 74 million member party has consolidated its iron grip precisely by transforming itself and its relationship with the public. It regularly uses opinion polling and sophisticated spin techniques in an effort to show greater responsiveness to public opinion while heading off alternative opinion at the pass.

While the Party moves with the times, there is less certainty as to what it now stands for. According to Zhou He, the death of Communist ideology is at the heart of most contradictions in China. He says that although China still claims itself to be in “the primitive stage of socialism”, it has tacitly turned itself into a bureaucratic capitalist society. David Harvey described China’s reform era political economy as “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics”. Communism is no longer an ideology of values and ideas faithfully followed by adherents, but is instead “a ritualised rhetoric [which survives] because of the long convention and the justification it provides to the Communist Party”. Two different media worlds collide in this contradiction: the official ritualised public discourse of the media and a private discourse being explored by blogs. While the mainstream media is staid under the party’s watchful eye, the less well-regulated blogging platform allows for a range of newly emerging ideologies that run a full gamut from liberalism, conservatism, new-leftism, nationalism, cynicism, materialism, and consumerism. This plethora of opinions offers the best hope for a more democratic China.

Blogging was slow to take off in China due to the popularity of bulletin boards and chat rooms in the early 2000s. It took the sexual exploits of Lee Li under the pseudonym of Mu Zi Mei to bring blogging into the mainstream. Her blog about the minutiae of her sex life made her famous and brought the technology to public attention. Li tapped into the zeitgeist at a time when Sex and the City episodes were among the most popular DVDs in China. The popularisation of Li’s blog made blogging the hottest keyword in Chinese search engines. After attracting praise and condemnation in equal measure, the government finally stepped in. After she was strongly criticised by the state-run Beijing Evening News, her book was banned and she shut down the website.

Li’s exposure showed the Chinese blogosphere could allow different political views and ideas to flourish that were previously unavailable. Because China’s traditional press is tightly controlled, bloggers often break news and provide provocative commentary. Many are written by mainstream journalists who cannot speak out at newspapers. Blogs played a prominent role in spreading news and information about the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Bloggers have also taken to using euphemisms to get around keyword filtering to pass around banned material and have also used tactics such as changing pseudonyms and IP addresses or hiding behind proxy servers to sidestep government control. Despite the Golden Shield, the Internet still enjoys greater freedom than other Chinese media platforms. Luwei (Rose) Luqiu, the executive news editor of Hong Kong-based Phoenix Satellite Television, sidelines her broadcasting work with a blog called Rose Garden which focuses on analysing news and current affairs and gets two million regular readers across China. She covers the international tours of Chinese leaders such as Hu Jintao and says what interests her readers is the human aspect of government; something she says is forbidden in China’s news media. Although the blog’s portal server is in mainland China and therefore must obey Beijing regulations about restrictions on conducting interviews and avoiding sensitive key words, Luqiu is able to link to her broadcast stories, and write about politics, the Cultural Revolution, and democracy.

Luqiu, Mu Zimei and others have shown how apparently apolitical media practices influence the way people think about politics, culture and society. The ease of publishing a blog makes it an attractive and potentially dangerous weapon. According to Asian studies scholar Haiqing Yu, 2005 was “the year of Chinese blogging”. Two of the largest Chinese Internet Service Providers, sina.com and sohu.com, sponsored competitions to stimulate blog usage while a series of “blogger events” such as the group production of satirical on-line mash-up movies (“Steamed Buns”) and videos (“A Hard Day’s Night”) reflected the general trend of cultural transformation. While the movies and videos showed playful spirit – with “Steamed Buns” becoming a synonym for spoof – the authors in each case denied any political purpose or innuendo. Nevertheless, references to contemporary Chinese politics abound in these works and the pieces were characterised by mockery, paradox, sarcasm, and deliberate misuse and misinterpretation of mainstream ideology. The blog Massage Milk uses the apparently innocuous motto “dai san ge biao” which literally means “wearing three watches”. However, it is also a pun on “three represents”, which was a slogan of former leader Jiang Zemin which was compulsory learning for all Chinese students. Meanwhile Dog Daily purports to gather news about dogs but the references are to humans. This proliferation of consumer choice is destroying the claim of the 2 percent ruling elite of a “hegemonic mandate” over the cultural consumption of the other 98 percent 2002. The consumption of blogs has become a process of subtle resistance.

There are now signs that the elite understands the power of blogging and has started to crack down on some of its more open samizdat dissidents. Last month, the Committee to Project Journalists included China on a list of the ten worst places to blog. They said that despite having more than 300 million people online, Chinese authorities maintain the world’s most comprehensive online censorship program which relies on service providers to filter searches, block critical web sites, delete objectionable content, and monitor e-mail traffic. The crackdowns have forced international watchdogs to re-assess the fundamental meaning of what it was to be a journalist. In 1999, Ann Cooper, the then-executive director of CPJ, noted how her organisation had to decide whether to take up the cases of six Chinese bloggers arrested for “anti-government” or “subversive” messages. While none of the bloggers were professional journalists, CPJ reasoned they were “acting journalistically” by disseminating news, information and opinion and took up the case. Since then the CPJ has defended similar writers in Cuba, Malaysia, Iran and elsewhere. According to Cooper, these early Chinese bloggers have played a trailblazing role in forcing CPJ and American journalists as a whole to re-consider what it is to be a reporter and move the debate along from “who is a journalist?” to “what is journalism?” This is a question that Chinese authorities are also struggling to grapple with as it deals with a tidal wave of new media and new views.

These examples of “shiny China” sit uneasily next to the state-sponsored “old darkness”. Ellingsen’s contradictions have become the hallmark of modern Chinese media. While the state-dominated press and broadcasters serve the “party principle”, Chinese journalists continue to write critically about important issues. And while the media have been hamstrung by a laundry list of restrictions, commercial imperatives are slowly forcing change. Similarly, the state is using sophisticated technology to enforce digital rule on the Internet with the help of foreign companies yet new actors such as bloggers have launched a subtle resistance that is forcing a re-definition of what journalism is and what it is capable of doing in China. While it remains far from clear that the nation will embrace any lasting democracy, the Chinese media is diverse enough to accommodate a wide range of critical voices. The government may find the democratisation of media harder to handle than democracy itself.

China backflips on Green Dam net nanny

Iran is not the only 20th century totalitarian regime struggling to overcome 21st century technology. Yesterday the Chinese government was forced into an embarrassing backflip when it overturned its directive that all computers sold in China after 1 July should include the Green Dam Youth Escort Web filtering software. Government mouthpiece China Daily now reported that the Green Dam software is not compulsory on all computers. It says users will still need to have the software on an installation disk but it is up to individuals to install the software. This effectively means it will be ignored. China Daily now says it all was merely "a misunderstanding.”

If it was a misunderstanding, it was one that has backfired spectacularly on the government. Green Dam is net nanny software. Chinese authorities had claimed it was necessary to protect people from pornography but the software also blocks politically sensitive terms and can be updated remotely to filter out other “undesired” items. But the software has some undesired features of its own. It is spyware which uses unencrypted data which can be easily hacked. It is also not robust with known versions not working for Firefox or Safari and is also not compatible with Macs or Linux machines. Like the controversial proposed Australian “clean feed” it is also resource hungry and may impact performance. Worst of all, it may be pirated software.

This ham-fisted drama provoked exactly what the government didn't want: a very public controversy about censorship. Chinese journalist Michael Anti says the intrusive filtering treated all consumers like children. "China is a kindergarten, that is the basic logic behind this," says Michael Anti, a Chinese journalist and popular microblogger. "It's stupid. It's so stupid." Meanwhile, Hong Kong-based Internet scholar Rebecca McKinnon said the debacle has turned into the laughing stock of China.

On her blog, McKinnon got hold of a document from an anonymous source ordering Green Dam’s installation on all PCs. The software’s black list contains about 2,700 words related to pornography and about 6,500 “politically sensitive” words. According to McKinnon’s document locally made and imported PCs are required to pre-install the latest version of "Green Dam Youth Escort" by 1 July. PC Manufacturers and Green Dam’s developers Jinhui Computer System Engineering are then required to provide monthly reports to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) about sales figures and the number of copies installed.

But there are serious questions about the legitimacy of the software, beyond the censorship ramifications. According to The Register, the software was pirated from an American software maker Solid Oak and also uses open-source code without displaying the proper license. US software maker Solid Oak is seeking injunctions against Jinhui and its US suppliers claiming that Green Dam code uses libraries tagged with the name of its CyberSitter application and makes calls back to Solid Oak servers.

The British online IT magazine also warns the software poses a massive security risk as a single point of failure. If it were possible to hack into the code, says The Register, Green Dam could be used to create a huge malicious software robot. It could also be used to create targeted attacks on government computers. It is probably this latter threat that the government wants fixed up before it proceeds with making it compulsory.

Green Dam is aimed at supporting the server-side and ISP-level filters, the so-called Great Firewall of China and the Golden Shield. It came about as paranoid Communist officials realised that even with all their sophisticated surveillance technology, users could still by-pass government censorship. Bryan Zhang, founder of Jinhui, said Green Dam operates similarly to net nanny software to let parents block access to Web content inappropriate for children. Some computers sold in China already come with parental-control software, but it isn't government-mandated. But Jinhui is unlikely to take its current issues lying down. Zhang stands to make a lot of money when each of China 250,000 million Internet users are forced to install paid upgrades of Green Dam in a year’s time. The high level of user ridicule will need to be sustained over the coming months to compete with serious money and political paranoia if it is to ensure the Chinese internet is not completely damned.