CYBERNOTES
Story Not Available in China
Advocates of Internet freedom won
a substantial victory on Aug. 13, when
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology scrapped its long
delayed and heavily contested Green
Dam Youth Escort program (www.
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con
tent/article/2009/08/16/AR2009081
601697.html).
This program, introduced as mandatory pornography filter software on
all new computers sold in China,
blocks political content as well as
pornography. It could enable Beijing
to install a censor on every new computer in the nation.
Although the major U.S. computer
vendors in China did not challenge
Green Dam, a host of other technology
companies and lobbies openly opposed
the project and pushed the Obama administration to decry it (www.mercu
rynews.com/breakingnews/ci_1258
0793?nclick_check= 1).
The discontinuation of China’s
mandate that Green Dam be included
on all new computers was lauded as a
sign of the success of the global outcry
and corporate conscience in altering
Chinese policy. American pressure
may not be behind the decision to reduce the project scope, however.
Rather, practical concerns and failures may have precluded its nationwide release. The filter, for instance,
Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the
world cannot now stand by and
wait for America to solve
the world’s problems alone.
We have sought — in word and
deed — a new era of engagement with the world. Now is the
time for all of us to take our share
of responsibility for a global
response to global challenges.
— President Barack Obama,
U.N. General Assembly,
Sept. 23, www.whitehouse.gov
was only operational on Internet Explorer, not on Firefox or Google
Chrome. Moreover, flaws in the software would have exposed personal
data to Internet spammers, potentially
turning the entire Chinese computer
system into the world’s largest junk
mailer ( www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/
06/ AR2009070603305.html?nav=r
ss_opinions).
Despite such flaws, Green Dam
will nonetheless be installed in all Internet cafés and on university computers in China.
Green Dam is just one brick in Beijing’s wider Internet censorship program, popularly known as the Great
Firewall of China. Comprised of filter
programs and rooms of party employees trolling the Internet for sensitive
content, the censorship operation is a
massive entity and difficult to follow.
But certain sites are dedicated to tracking stories about it ( www.newser.
com/tag/24612/1/great-firewall-of-
china.html?utm_source=ssp&utm_
medium=cpc&utm_campaign=tag).
To learn more about the Great Firewall and see which sites have been
blocked, go to http://greatfirewallof
china.org. To learn what is being done
to evade censorship within China, visit
www.internetfreedom.org.
For a transcript of the Sept. 10
hearing on China’s media and information controls sponsored by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review
Commission, go to www.uscc.gov.
Do-It-Yourself Project
Goes Wrong for State
A long-awaited Government Accountability Office report analyzing the
2005-2006 restructuring of the Nonproliferation, Arms Control, and Verification and Compliance Bureaus of
the State Department was released on
July 15 ( www.wtop2.com/index.php
?nid= 15&sid=1721196).
The restructuring aimed to consolidate the three bureaus into two in an
effort to eliminate overlap, thin top-heavy management, and better address
arms and nuclear issues in the post-9/11
