With a report from Joanne Lee-Young in Hong Kong
Saturday, October 5, 2002á C Page A14
BEIJING -- The illicit e-mail seemed tantalizingly close, glowing quietly in a Hotmail inbox in
Beijing. But a click on it produces nothing except an ominous beep and an error message. And then
the entire inbox seizes up, freezing helplessly until the computer is rebooted.
The long arm of the Chinese law has just reached inside another computer, wreaking electronic havoc
on a hapless user.
The shutdown is triggered when a high-tech "packet sniffer" detects an illicit word in a
message. Perhaps it is a word about a banned religious [group] or a separatist region, or perhaps a
phrase about China's Internet police tactics. There is never any official explanation of the illegal
words.
The computer is swiftly shut down, and China's Web surveillance team has scored another victory.
Until recently, Internet boosters were convinced that their technological marvels would unlock the
doors to greater freedom and democracy in police states such as China. But in the past few weeks,
with a dramatic escalation in blocking and filtering Web sites and e-mail, Chinese authorities are
demonstrating that their so-called Great Firewall can thwart almost any unauthorized ambitions among
the country's 50 million Internet users. China's controls have proven much more powerful than anyone
expected.
First came a crackdown on Internet café's this summer, after a fatal fire at a Beijing
establishment. About 14,000 were closed across the country. Several thousand were not permitted to
reopen, and the rest were forced to install devices to block unauthorized sites.
In August came a set of regulations requiring Web-site operators to censor their political content.
Then, early last month, the popular Google and AltaVista search engines were abruptly shut down in
China, an unprecedented step. They were eventually permitted to function again, but this time with a
key change: Google's cache function, which had allowed Chinese users to see some banned Web pages,
was permanently disabled.
Shortly afterward, China introduced sophisticated new software that seemed capable of
"sniffing" for illicit keywords and freezing any e-mail or Web sites that contained the
words. Until this year, Web-based e-mail sites such as Hotmail and Yahoo appeared to be evading the
filtering software. But now the electronic police are prying inside those havens too. Any e-mail or
Web site downloaded through Chinese servers is vulnerable to filtering or blocking. And even when a
Web site is left accessible, China has now developed technology to block specific pages within the
site.
"They are definitely getting slicker about it," said a California consultant on Internet
security who asked not to be named. He said the Chinese technology now seems advanced enough to
examine every request for a Web page.
Internet-based dissidents have been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the Chinese government for
years. More than 30,000 state employees have reportedly been assigned to watch the Internet,
blocking sites and monitoring e-mail messages and chat rooms. In the past two years, at least 25
Chinese citizens have been arrested for using the Internet to spread "subversive"
messages.
Internet experts in Western countries were convinced that Chinese surfers could bypass the
censorship with "proxy servers" that the government couldn't detect. Instead, the
authorities have become faster and faster at finding the proxies, using "proxy hunter"
technology and other tools. Now the proxies are almost useless.
Paradoxically, the Chinese government has recognized that the Internet is crucial to China's
industrial future.
It has spent billions of dollars on the latest information technology, unleashing an army of young
engineers to create new products.
Much of this energy, however, is devoted to exploiting these products for political goals:
controlling the Internet, blocking sites and launching high-tech hacker attacks on Beijing's
enemies, especially the Web sites of the Falun Gong [...] and the Tibetan pro-independence movement.
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