US to tackle Web censorship

The Observer, London
July 17, 2006

The news that members of the US Congress are to introduce the measures comes as a campaign for freedom of speech on the Internet, run by Amnesty International, prepares to launch this week in the US. More than 24,000 people have already signed the Irrepressible.info online petition.

Representative Chris Smith has drafted the Global Online Freedom Act in a bid to stop major Internet companies cooperating with regimes which restrict free expression and use personal information to track down and punish democracy activists.

"China has forced US companies operating in China, specifically Yahoo, to hand over personally identifiable user information used to convict and imprison democratic activists on trumped-up charges," said Smith, a Republican.

Smith believes that the Internet has become "a cyber sledgehammer of repression for the government of China" and that the abuse is repeated around the world.

"Unfortunately, authoritarian regimes including Belarus, Cuba, Ethiopia, Iran, Laos, North Korea, Tunisia and Vietnam as well as China all block, restrict and monitor the free flow of information on the Internet," Smith said.

"Web sites that provide uncensored news and information, such as the Web sites of the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, are routinely blocked in such countries," he said.

If passed by Congress and the Senate, the bill would prohibit US companies from revealing the identity of a user to officials of an Internet-restricting country except for legitimate law enforcement.

Smith has cited the example of information from Yahoo being used to convict Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist sentenced to 10 years hard labor for sending an e-mail about the anniversary of the democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.

The bill would also make it illegal for US businesses to host an e-mail server or search engine within an Internet-restricting country, censor US government Web sites or alter products to yield different results when terms such as "human rights" are searched.

It cleared its first major hurdle in Congress when it was passed unanimously by a cross-party foreign policy panel that oversees human rights.

During a hearing earlier this year, executives from Cisco Systems, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo were told by Republican Representative Tom Lantos: "Your abhorrent activities in China are a disgrace. I cannot understand how your corporate executives sleep at night."

There are fears that the Silicon Valley giants will lobby against the bill. But Mila Rosenthal, director of the business and human rights programme at Amnesty International USA, said: "We think the companies should be welcoming this. They say `There's nothing we can do -- if we're in China, we have to do what the Chinese government tells us to do.' This act would give them the legal strength to say, `We can't hand over information which will see someone thrown in jail for 10 years because it's out of our hands.'"

Rosenthal is expecting a huge response to the launch of Irrepressible.info in the US, where thousands of bloggers have expressed their anger at attempts to curb the free Web.

"This feels like a time to draw a line in the sand and say these are absolute values and international human rights that are worth standing up for," she said.

Meanwhile, China intends to launch a fresh crackdown on Internet blogs and search engines. according to Cai Wu, director of the information office of China's Cabinet.

"As more and more illegal and unhealthy information spreads through the blog and search engine, we will take effective measures to put the BBS [bulletin board system], blog and search engine under control," Cai said recently.

Earlier this month the European Parliament adopted a resolution condemning government-imposed restrictions on Internet content which conflict with freedom of expression.