Blogger-Handbuch gibt Einblicke in Netz-Zensur in China

Das gerade erschienene Handbuch für Blogger und Internet-Dissidenten von Reporter ohne Grenzen beschäftigt sich auch intensiv mit dem Thema China und Internet-Zensur:

China was one of the first repressive regimes to realise it couldn’t do without the Internet and so it had to be brought under control. It’s one of the few countries that’ve managed to block all material that criticises the regime while expanding Internet facilities. What’s the big secret? A clever mix of investment, technology and diplomacy. Beijing has spent tens of millions of dollars on the most sophisticated Internet filtering and surveillance equipment. The system is based on a constantly-updated blacklist of websites. Access to “subversive” ones – a very broad notion that includes pornography, political criticism and sites that are pro-Tibet or favour Taiwanese independence – is then blocked at the level of the country’s Internet “backbones” (major connection nodes). But censorship doesn’t stop there and the regime can automatically bar access to sites in which “dubious” keywords, or combinations such as “tianamen” + “massacre,” are spotted. The regime can also censor online discussion forums almost instantly. State-of-the-art software and a cyber-police thought to number tens of thousands have enabled it to gut online forums (very active in recent years) of virtually all political dissent. A call for free elections, for example, has a maximum online life of about half an hour. The ministry of industry and information has also zeroed in on blogs and done a deal with Chinabased blog platforms to censor users. So a post about the Dalai Lama will appear online full of automatically-inserted blank spaces in place of “illegal” words.

Möglich macht die "große Firewall" laut dem Kompendium auch die willige Zusammenarbeit von US-Firmen wie Cisco, Yahoo oder Google mit den Behörden. Der Band enthält zudem einen Beitrag von Yan Sham-Shackleton, die in Erinnerung an die Toten des Tianamen-Massakers von Hongkong aus bloggt: Blogging allows me to keep my promises to the dead. Dazu passend auch: Peking hat die Daumenschrauben für Webpublikationen schon wieder angezogen.