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Kansas and John Cornyn of Texas have
introduced an Iran DemocracyAct to provide
$50 million for a foundation which would
support the private California TV stations and
help Radio Farda.
In the words of one prominent Washington
observer of Iranian affairs: “LosAngeles based
TV and radio stations have a role in provoking
people into action. However, their role should
not be overestimated. They lack credibility
with Iranians to a large extent. Moreover, a
good number of analysts in Iran feel that by
continual agitation, the expatriate media draw
people into the streets who are unprepared
and unorganized. A severe repression by the
(Iranian) government may set back the
movement, and stifle reformists’ aspirations,
for a long while.”
China
For five months after the first appearance of
SARS in China’s southern province of
Guangdong late last year, official state media
made scant mention of, or intentionally
understated, the extent of the disease’s spread.
Finally, in lateApril, the government revealed
the seriousness of the epidemic and
punctuated this by announcing the ouster of
its health minister and the mayor of Beijing.
The People’s Republic of China long has been
blocking the broadcasts or Internet sites of
the BBC World Service, VOA, and the U.S.-
funded Radio Free Asia in all indigenous
languages reaching that country. Ken Berman,
manager of the Internet Anti-Censorship
Programof the U.S. International Broadcasting
Board of Governors, quotes scholars as
estimating the number of Internet users in
China as ranging from 39 to 62 million.
“What the numbers tell us unequivocally,”
Berman told a recent hearing on Capitol Hill,
“is that China has the most Internet users after
the United States, and considering their huge
growth rate of new users… it is clear that they
will be largest Internet audience in the world in
the not-too-distant future.” For that reason,
Western international broadcasters are focusing
anew on breaching the Great Internet Firewall
of China. They’ve registered some successes.
“Before April 20, when the Chinese
government finally announced the true scope
of the SARS epidemic,” writesAnthony Kuhn
of the University of
Southern California
A n n e n b e r g
publication
On Line
Journalism Review
,
“only those Chinese
with access to
overseas media via
the Internet or
satellite TVwere able to peer behind the curtain
of official denial to see the virus’ spread across
the nation.”
China is the world’s 800-pound gorilla, in
terms of both audience size and Internet
interdiction technology. Xiao Qiang,
executive director of Human Rights in China,
an international non-governmental
organization, told
On Line Journalism Review
that the People’s Republic “can dedicate
unlimited resources to development and
deployment of censorship and surveillance
technology. It is impossible for a relatively
small number of technically savvy users, Xiao
said, “to defeat state censorship through
grassroots efforts without external help.”
Some Internet blocking technology, ironically,
is thought to be supplied to Beijing by U.S.
firms.
The BBG’s Ken Berman, testifying at the
Capitol Hill hearing of the U.S.-China
Economic and Security Review Commission,
explained some of the measures being taken to
counter the jamming of VOA and Radio Free
Asia websites. “What we have essentially
instituted,” he said, “is a two-prong ‘push-
pull’ program that consists of separate but
related efforts:
—The ‘push’ component consists of pushing
email news to those users in China who would
find the news interesting or a complement to
China’s official, approved news stories. (The
emails get through because they circumvent
the central Internet Service Providers
thoroughly filtered by Chinese authorities.)
—The ‘pull’ component consists of
circumventing an elaborate matrix of Chinese
filtering and content filtering techniques to
permit users to access the VOA and RFA
websites and pull Internet content into the
browsers of their computers.
A Framework for Global Internet
Freedom
In addition to China and Iran, nations
which have from time to time used
Internet filtering techniques to block
external news and information include
Burma, Cuba, Kazakstan, Laos, North
Korea, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
Legislation now making its way through
the U. S. Congress would strengthen
efforts “to develop and deploy
technologies to defeat Internet jamming
and censorship.” The bill, which has
bipartisan sponsorship in both the
Senate and House of Representatives,
is called the Global Internet Freedom
Act. It would authorize the
appropriation of as much as $10 million
a year to a newly-established federal
Office of Global Internet Freedom.
According to
On Line Journalism
Review
, it also would seek to prevent
the persecution of web users.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion
and expression; this right includes freedom to
hold opinions without interference and to seek,
receive and impart information and ideas
through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 19, Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Anthony Kuhn
