block of YouTube beginning on March 4, coinciding with the one-year anniversary
of the crackdown on protests in Tibetan regions (during which YouTube was also
reported blocked in March 2008) as well as the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising of 1959. Blogspot became inaccessible around May 9, 186 and on June 2, two days
before the 20th anniversary of the June 4 military crackdown, Flickr, Twitter, live.com,
and Hotmail were blocked in rapid succession. 187
In May 2009, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in China sent a
notification to computer manufacturers of its intention to require all new PCs sold in
China after July 1 to have filtering software preinstalled. 188 The notice, jointly issued
by the MIIT, the Civilization Office of the Central Communist Party Committee, and
the Ministry of Finance, according to the PRC Government Procurement Law, mandates the procurement of all rights and services related to a designated software called
‘‘Green Dam Youth Escort’’ to be made available for free public use. Green Dam is a
product of the Jinhui Computer System Engineering Company, which reportedly
received RMB 40 million from the government for a year-long contract. 189
The purported intent of the Green Dam software is to filter harmful online text and
image content in order to prevent this information from affecting youth and promote
a healthy and harmonious Internet environment. 190 However, researchers at the
OpenNet Initiative and the Stop Badware Project conducting an initial technical assessment of the software found that Green Dam’s filtering not only is ineffective at blocking pornographic content as a whole, but also includes unpredictable and disruptive
blocking of political and religious content normally associated with the Great Firewall
of China. 191
As a computing tool, Green Dam is far more powerful than the centralized filtering
system China currently implements, as it actively monitors individual computer behavior to the extent that its ‘‘language processing’’ tool can institute extremely intrusive ‘‘kill’’ action on sites if the content algorithm detects ‘‘inappropriate’’ sensitive
political or religious speech. 192 These actions include the sudden termination of Web
browser tabs, whole browsers, and a wide range of programs including word processing
and e-mail. The program installs components deep into the kernel of the computer
operating system in order to enable this application layer monitoring. Researchers
also found that the killing of sites upon inappropriate keywords or URLs like http://
falundafa.org extends to killing single letters that autocomplete in location boxes and
autocomplete lists in browsers. For example, if a user enters ‘‘epochtimes.com’’ into the
location, the user will see the page briefly, see the warning box briefly, and then have
the whole browser terminated. But after the user restarts the browser, epochtimes.com
will be in the browser history and therefore in the autocomplete list, so that the
user may only have to type ‘‘e’’ into the location box to trigger the appearance of
epochtimes.com in the autocomplete list and cause Green Dam to terminate the whole
browser. 193
472
China
of the crackdown on protests in Tibetan regions (during which YouTube was also
reported blocked in March 2008) as well as the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising of 1959. Blogspot became inaccessible around May 9, 186 and on June 2, two days
before the 20th anniversary of the June 4 military crackdown, Flickr, Twitter, live.com,
and Hotmail were blocked in rapid succession. 187
In May 2009, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in China sent a
notification to computer manufacturers of its intention to require all new PCs sold in
China after July 1 to have filtering software preinstalled. 188 The notice, jointly issued
by the MIIT, the Civilization Office of the Central Communist Party Committee, and
the Ministry of Finance, according to the PRC Government Procurement Law, mandates the procurement of all rights and services related to a designated software called
‘‘Green Dam Youth Escort’’ to be made available for free public use. Green Dam is a
product of the Jinhui Computer System Engineering Company, which reportedly
received RMB 40 million from the government for a year-long contract. 189
The purported intent of the Green Dam software is to filter harmful online text and
image content in order to prevent this information from affecting youth and promote
a healthy and harmonious Internet environment. 190 However, researchers at the
OpenNet Initiative and the Stop Badware Project conducting an initial technical assessment of the software found that Green Dam’s filtering not only is ineffective at blocking pornographic content as a whole, but also includes unpredictable and disruptive
blocking of political and religious content normally associated with the Great Firewall
of China. 191
As a computing tool, Green Dam is far more powerful than the centralized filtering
system China currently implements, as it actively monitors individual computer behavior to the extent that its ‘‘language processing’’ tool can institute extremely intrusive ‘‘kill’’ action on sites if the content algorithm detects ‘‘inappropriate’’ sensitive
political or religious speech. 192 These actions include the sudden termination of Web
browser tabs, whole browsers, and a wide range of programs including word processing
and e-mail. The program installs components deep into the kernel of the computer
operating system in order to enable this application layer monitoring. Researchers
also found that the killing of sites upon inappropriate keywords or URLs like http://
falundafa.org extends to killing single letters that autocomplete in location boxes and
autocomplete lists in browsers. For example, if a user enters ‘‘epochtimes.com’’ into the
location, the user will see the page briefly, see the warning box briefly, and then have
the whole browser terminated. But after the user restarts the browser, epochtimes.com
will be in the browser history and therefore in the autocomplete list, so that the
user may only have to type ‘‘e’’ into the location box to trigger the appearance of
epochtimes.com in the autocomplete list and cause Green Dam to terminate the whole
browser. 193
472
China