The Digital Curtain

We’re halfway through first semester and I think it’s reasonably safe to say that the vast majority of Harvard undergraduates haven’t noticed a somewhat subtle change in their ability to access the Internet that was put in place before the school year began: just about every computer on the wireless and residential networks on campus is now behind a firewall.

This particular firewall is, more or less, innocuous. It blocks incoming traffic, so it only will stop you from things like trying to run a web server out of your dorm room. The reason for its implementation is in fact to protect us, from malicious viruses that take over our computers and use them to attack other machines on the Harvard network or the internet at large.

Were we not students at Harvard, however, but rather students at one of the top universities in China, our experience with firewalls would be a substantially different one.

China, along with a growing number of other countries (generally with authoritarian governments—places like Myanmar and Singapore), has a firewall of a different sort—a national barrier aimed at preventing those on the inside from accessing information about certain ideas viewed as “dangerous,” dissenting, or sensitive.

The “OpenNet Intiative,” a project based out of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has studied Internet filtering in these countries, and what they’ve found is at once not terribly surprising and, to those tuned to American notions of free speech and expression, quite alarming. The internet is, it turns out, a scary place for certain norms of Chinese governance.

Many of the sites made inaccessible by what has been coined “The Great Firewall” are those discussing specific high-tension questions of Chinese politics: sites detailing the lot of the controversial Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, sites about the Tiananmen Square protests, and some others about Taiwanese independence. Also blocked, however, are sources of general international news—the BBC web site, for example, can only be intermittently reached from within Chinese borders.

Of course, firewalls aren’t perfect, but the Chinese government has mechanisms in place for catching would-be circumventors as well: they log even traffic they don’t block, and have been installing surveillance cameras at internet cafes to track down those who are trying to access objectionable content. What happens to those who get caught in this way is something of an unanswered question, but the preponderance of the evidence suggests some scary things—long jail times, perhaps without trial, and so on.

What are we to do, if anything, to express our feelings on this matter? It’s a difficult question: a foreign government has taken a position that is at some level fundamentally at odds with a feature we see as essential for legitimate governance, in this case free discourse, and we’re left to decide how if at all we’re able to get involved.

One thing we might consider is the role of major US corporations in helping China to deploy the restrictions. It’s hard to expect deep ethical consideration by entities that exists largely to provide returns for their shareholders, but there’s substantial evidence at least in the case of Cisco (a company that makes firewall and routing hardware, including the wireless access points in the dorms here at Harvard, and also manufactures the Linksys brand of consumer networking devices) that they’re being complicit in unsavory ways. A brochure which Cisco handed out at a 2002 trade conference in China advertises particular products as ideal for such uses as “police routine community surveillance” and “preventative control and increse [sic] social stability.”

Should we be okay with this sort of marketing? One wonders whether regulating, taxing, or otherwise using the force of government to impede Cisco’s participation in these schemes would have any impact on the ultimate outcome—Cisco might just move its operations to a different country, or China might find another vendor. Then we’d be hurting our own industrial growth without obtaining any measurable benefit for the important problem at hand.

We can, however, make this cooperation expensive to companies in other ways: we can give them bad PR, for example, by writing blog posts and newspaper columns about what they’re up to—even economists, who might dismiss regulation for unfairly forcing the costs of US social norms upon a particular company, would probably think this inoffensive, if likely ineffective.

We can also call upon watchdog organizations like OpenNet, or the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) or Human Rights Watch to research internet censorship and ultimately to take strong positions on it and call for its end.

Still, China’s prominent political position makes intervention a tricky matter. Some of these organizations have thus put effort into researching technological methods by which people in China can get around the firewalls safely. Whether to publicize these mechanisms is always a difficult decision – within a few days, usually the holes they exploit are closed off and we’re back to the drawing board – but if more robust solutions of this sort can be found we might be able to sidestep the politics altogether.

Harvard is an institution that idolizes free speech, in a country that holds these values sacrosanct. It behooves us to cast a wide net in searching out violations of these principles. Our own firewall should perhaps offend our sensibilities as students, but the restricted intellectual freedom of Chinese citizens ought to offend our sensibilities as people, and we should actively seek to restore these rights to them.



Matthew A. Gline ’06 is a physics concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.