WASHINGTON -- While the Great Wall no longer deters would-be invaders from entering China, experts meeting in Washington on Monday said the Chinese government continues to maintain a nearly rock-solid cyberwall.
At a panel discussion held by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, experts warned that China has recently improved its censorship technology -- much of which is provided by U.S. companies. The panel also claimed that China now employs some 30,000 "Internet police" to monitor its citizens, and that is has increased arrests of dissidents and journalists posting illegal content on the Internet.
Congress created the China commission in October 2000 to monitor human rights in the Communist country.
"I was the first victim of Chinese censorship on the Internet," said Lin Hai, a Shanghai computer scientist who spent 18 months in a Chinese prison for distributing forbidden e-mail addresses to an online dissident magazine.
Hai, who now lives in the United States, said China last year arrested 10 people for distributing forbidden information on the Internet. He has since developed software to help Chinese citizens get around the most recent government effort: blocking access to free Web-based e-mail accounts such as Hotmail and Yahoo.
Panelists said the Chinese censors have become adept at spotting new circumvention measures -- and quickly thwarting them.
"China has developed the largest and most sophisticated IP-blocking and content-filtering system in the world," said Bill Xia, president of Asheville, North Carolina-based Dynamic Internet Technology. The company's DynaWeb product, launched in March, attempts to skirt Chinese Internet censorship.
In no small part, the panelists came to Washington to ask for more funding to take on the Chinese government. Companies that make anti-censorship software can't continue developing products without government funding, they said.
The Global Internet Freedom Act (H.R. 5524) introduced in the House of Representatives on Oct. 2 would provide $50 million a year in 2003 and 2004 to help private companies develop new ways to circumvent censorship by foreign governments.
"The bottom line is that there is an arms race between censorship and anti-censorship measures," said Aviel Rubin, co-founder of Publius, a Web-publishing system that evades some censorship technology and provides anonymity for publishers. "It's not clear who the winner is. We need new research."
Several panelists warned that the U.S. government is the only agency powerful enough to stop Chinese censorship -- and that if it doesn't act soon, China could cement its grip for good.
"The Chinese government is already on its third generation of firewall technology, and we haven't even started version one of our counter-strategy yet," said Paul Baranowski, chief architect for the Peekabooty project, which develops circumvention software.
"If we do not do something soon, they may be able to close off the country completely and obtain absolute monitoring and control of their Net before we can do anything about it," he said.
Baranowski also urged the U.S. government to support open-source solutions to encourage innovation from the largest universe of programmers.
Meanwhile, Hai said the U.S. government should also look within its own borders when considering the problem of Chinese censorship. For example, Yahoo recently agreed to certain Chinese government censorship requests, and U.S. manufacturers of Internet routers have also cooperated with Chinese officials to stay within their censorship parameters.
"The American companies are helping China to build censorship firewalls," Hai said.
But Rubin cautioned against arbitrarily restricting U.S. companies from selling certain software or equipment to China.
"Such export restrictions have fallen on their faces before," he said, noting that China could always buy similar equipment from non-U.S. companies. "I'd worry that we'd be hurting our businesses without stopping censorship."
