Google, Censorship,
and the Hostage Dilemma
David Veksler
December 9, 2002
On September 8, 2002, the Chinese
government blocked Google, one of the Internet’s biggest search engines.
The government of China
regularly blocks websites that it considers “dangerous” to its regime, but
Google.com is a search engine – it only indexes the Internet without bias or
preference to the content of a particular website. So why would Google be banned in China,
especially considering that it is a crucial research tool without adequate
Chinese substitutes? I believe that the answer lies in a game theory
scenario known as the hostage dilemma. Because Google had the potential
to greatly improve coordination between pro-democracy supporters, it may pose a
threat to the Chinese regime. While the exact intentions of China
in blocking Google are not clear, the incident holds a lesson for anyone trying
to support or suppress democratic movements in authoritarian regimes.
It has been
widely recognized that preventing communication and coordination is key to
suppressing dissent in an authoritarian regime. Governments have a much
easier time subjugating their citizens when there are no organizations through
which one may express dissent. Louis XVI failed to learn this lesson when he
called together the Estates General to raise money and ended up being beheaded when the delegates teamed up against
him. Gorbachev may have forgotten it as well, as his policy of glasnost
not only exposed the Soviet Union to the west, but allowed the democratic
movement to organize the a government, leading to the collapse of the
USSR. In China
and Cuba,
dissidents are severely punished and isolated from their peers,
for any statements that paint the state in a bad light. It is
clear that authoritarian regimes not only have an interest in suppressing
opposition, but preventing coordination among dissidents as well.
Traditionally,
opposition groups have used conventional means of communications to coordinate
their efforts, but in an oppressive (and especially urban) society, this poses
many problems. In person communication requires
planning, which may be intercepted by the government. Telephone calls,
mail, and print publications can be recorded or seized
and the organizers arrested. While local interpersonal communication is
hard to trace, any organization on a national level is nearly impossible to
organize in an authoritarian regime because of the hazards to the
organizers. Many of these regimes are almost
universally opposed by their citizens, but because a coordinated revolt
is very difficult to organize, oppressive regimes may persist for many years.
However,
governments cannot keep an eye on every citizen, and therefore they must find a
way to set up incentives so that no citizen would want to engage in
“counter-revolutionary” activities, even if the risk of getting
caught is small. Many methods have been devised to do this over they
years. The most obvious is to impose severe punishments for even minor
infractions, so that the high cost of protest makes opposition too risky for
most. Another common method is to refuse to distinguish political
dissidents from common criminals, thereby denying dissidents the possibility of
martyrdom. Penetrating social structure is yet another method – for
example, breaking of weakening familial bonds by raising children away from
parents and encouraging them to turn in any critics of government, even family
members. A similar strategy is to replace old social organizations with
new party-oriented ones, and set up leadership arrangements so that the most
loyal party members are always in charge. For example, in China,
the State runs labor organizations, youth leagues, and otherwise maintains a
monopoly on all organizations, so that no non-governmental
framework exists to organize dissent. Perhaps this is why China so
opposed to Falun Gong – it represents an entity
outside of its control, unlike the government authorized and controlled
Catholic and Buddhist churches/temples.
The growth of
the Internet poses a significant threat to authoritarian an
government’s ability to monitor its citizens. The Internet allows
communication to be instant, relatively anonymous, globally accessible, and
perhaps most damaging of all, it allows citizens to learn about living
standards and political philosophies of free nations. For this reason,
most authoritarian regimes have restricted Internet access to varying degrees.
In Cuba, where
only a tiny minority of the population can even afford a computer, domestic
Internet access is still banned. Citizens may
only access email for a steep fee in government Post Offices, and nowhere are
they allowed to print or save any documents to disc.
As one of the Cuban dissidents explains: “The high
[email-access] prices, which disguise high taxes, are a subtle form of
censorship, and they finance everything from new investment to the maintenance
of the repressive apparatus.”5
Several nations
with wealthier populations allow limited Internet access but block any website
that is critical of the government. The only nations (out of those that
allow Internet access at all) to have successful website blocking programs at
the ISP level are China and Saudi Arabia.2 However, the
Internet has over 36 million websites6, and it is impossible to
block all the objectionable ones. It is estimated
that over 30,000 people in China
work on filtering out websites1 and the cost of manual filters and
Cisco-developed filtering technology makes the cost of finding every single
objectionable site prohibitive. To complicate the problem, supporters of
democracy often set up mirrors (exact duplicates) of banned sites abroad, and a
number of governmental and non-governmental organizations are working to set up
automated methods for creating alternative access routes to blocked
sites. This is where Google comes in. Its automated spider crawls the web from link to link and indexes all the sites
it finds in a giant database. Google also creates copies,
or a cache the sites it finds, so that it can be access when it’s down (or
blocked.) Furthermore, Google constantly and automatically updates its
indexes, so that each day brings fresh search results from new sites. Because
China does not
have the resources to index every single site, it apparently decided to block
the entire search engine. As a recent Newsweek article put it, “When the
Chinese government decided that the Web offered its citizenry an overly
intimate view of the world outside its borders, what better way to pull down
the shades than to block Google?” By blocking the entire search engine, it
tried to make it significantly harder for dissenters to communicate and locate
unblocked (and cached) versions of undesirable sites.
However China’s
blocking of Google was not entirely successful. Many websites have
licensing deals with Google, and blocking them would require blocking most
major search engines and many other sites. Hours after Google was
blocked, part of Yahoo and AltaVistsa were blocked because media sites immediately reported ways
to get around the block. Since then, the ban on most Google-enabled sites
has been lifted in lieu of new technology that filters out particular search
results (“cache”, the term for Google saved archive of a site is one of them)
or simply disconnects the user from the Internet.
In addition to
blocking websites on the ISP side, China
has attempted to control access from the user’s side as well. Earlier
this year, citing “fire hazards” and “students who died of fatigue in cafes,”
China shut down thousands of cafes, imposed mandatory filters, a voluntary
“Public Pledge on Self-Discipline” and time and age restrictions on café use. Furhermore, a ban on a particular nation’s media outlets
seems to travel along with the Dalai Lama.8 With such policies, China
hopes to make access to “dangerous” ideas more difficult. It is widely
acknowledged that China
can never block every single dissident site, but my raising the amount of effort
needed to communicate with fellow dissidents at home and abroad, it thinks it
can prevent the medium from being used for reasons
“harmful to social stability.” 9
The fact that China
does not ban Internet access completely is an indicator that that the
government does not have a free hand to impose dis-incentives
against undesirable activity. While blocking Internet access completely
would be a more effective way to prevent coordination, this may also be too
costly as solution because of the vital role the Internet plays in integrating
China into the world market and China’s desire to enter various international
trade organizations. Furthermore, China
removed most of the blocks on Google less than a week after they began,
probably a response to the combination of negative media coverage and
complaints from its own researchers. Overly harsh punishments also have
the risk of creating martyrs and arousing public resentment. Thus, authoritarian
regimes must maintain a balance between suppressing and punishing expression of
undesirable ideas and keeping the resources and attention on their activities
to a minimum.
What kind of
strategies could dissidents use to overcome government efforts at
censorship? The Internet, with its anonymous and encrypted means of
communication, provides unique opportunities to circumvent official
restrictions. The ability to locate websites on foreign
servers is another great advantage to dissidents– it’s hard to operate a
printing press or a even server (because IP addresses can be tracked down to
their origin) in secret from one’s own government, but moving operations abroad
doesn’t raise the cost of communication while preventing raids and confiscation
of equipment for the dissidents. (This isn’t
always true: China
has been the origin of a number of hacking incidents in various universities
and government agencies, including several library servers at Texas A&M
earlier this year.) Furthermore, the support of governmental and
non-governmental projects in democratic countries can be a big help to
dissidents, by creating new technologies such as Peekabooty,
and Triangle Boy, which may also go a long way towards this goal. These
technologies create encrypted networks that have no central point of origin and
facilitate anonymous access to shared documents and/or regular
websites. The Global
Internet Freedom Act, a proposed bill in Congress to create an
Office of Global Internet Freedom with a 50 million dollar budget may also be
of great help to raising the costs to China
of censoring democratic movements. Pressure from major media networks has
also been successful in opening access to blocked sites, as widespread
condemnation of China’s blocking of western news outlets has led it to reopen
access to some of the sites.
Whether
immediate efforts to prevent coordination among dissidents are successful, China’s
attempts at censorship are bound to fail in the long run.
Because the Internet’s value as a commercial and research tool are bound to
grow, and are closely intertwined with alternative uses, the costs of
preventing access to any particular material is bound to become prohibitively
expensive, especially with the rapid and exponential growth of Internet users
in China. Meanwhile, the best strategy democratic nations can follow is
to make China’s
censorship policy as costly as possible by sponsoring the development of
circumvention technologies.
References
1
“Replacement of Google with Alternative Search Systems in China”
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/google-replacements/
2. Felipe Rodriquez. (30 November 2002 ) ‘Freedom of the Media and the
Internet’. Paper for the OSCE workshop
http://www.xs4all.nl/%7Efelipe/OSCE_paper.pdf
3. Martha Beatriz
Roque Cabello. Every
Cuban Has a Built-In Policeman
http://www.cubafacts.com/Commentary/roque1.htm
4. John DeSio.
(January 2, 2002) First
pro-democracy Web site in Cuba
is launched. Digital Freedom Network
http://dfn.org/focus/cuba/roque-website.htm
5. Manuel David Orrio.
(October 8, 2001)
Independent Cuban journalist gets access to e-mail. Cooperativa
de Periodistas Independientes
(CPI)
http://dfn.org/focus/cuba/expensive.htm
6. Internet starts to shrink. (January, 2002) BBC Sci/Tech News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1738496.stm
7. Bobson
Wong. (July 23, 2002)
Chinese Internet clampdown continues after cybercafe
fire. Digital Freedom Network
http://www.dfn.org/news/china/cafe-reopen.htm
8. Bobson
Wong (April 25, 2002)
Temporary Chinese ban on Australian news site ends. Digital Freedom
Network
http://www.dfn.org/news/china/abc-ban.htm
9. Zhao Ying, “information and
security issues,” Jingji Guanli,
no.5, may 5. 1998pp as printed in Rand Report ‘You’ve
got dissent!’ pp48 chapter two, government counter strategies
10. Steven Levy. (Dec. 16, 2002) The World According
to Google
http://www.msnbc.com/news/844175.asp?0dm=T11PT
11. Paul Wilkinson. (October 2, 2002) Bipartisan,
Bicameral Bill Stops Internet Jamming
http://policy.house.gov/html/news_release.cfm?id=111