What are we complaining about?

                                                                                         

 I was surprised to hear in my lecture this week that on Stephen Conroy’s website (the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy) there is a tag cloud that helps the viewer easily access popular content on his website, or topics that are linked to his portfolio. An example of some of the tags include, Internet, mobile services, National broadband network etc. Unless you have been living under a rock for the past couple of months you would’ve heard about  Conroy’s plan to roll out mandatory ISP filtering in Australia, and all the debate that has surrounded the topic. You would think that on Conroy’s website considering the popularity of this topic in Australian media, that there would be a tag for ISP filtering. There isn’t, Using JavaScript they have deliberately made sure that this tag never appears in the tag cloud. So Conroy’s website is essentially being censored.

This got me thinking about censorship in China. I knew that China had quite and extensive censoring of the internet but I didn’t know much detail about the issue. I watched  Hungry Beast on Wednesday night and they had a segment on “the great firewall of china”  which gives the viewer a great insight into the Chinese censorhip.

China has the most advanced censorship program in the world. It employs 30 000 internet police to essentially eradicate online opinion. The Chinese government uses ip blocking (which controls what is uploaded), and keyword filtering (which controls what is downloaded)  to censor the internet. Every ip address is monitored in China. If there is something coming from that ip address that the government doesn’t like, all the content that is uploaded is blocked from that website. The government scans what people type into their address bar. If there is a certain keyword or website that the government doesn’t approve of then it is blocked, and a message comes up and informs you that you can not access this website. This is a pretty standard way of censoring the internet. What make Chinese censorchip different is that there is a culture that has been instilled in China of self censorship. Web hosting companies are held responsible for its content. They hire staff to find content that might be censored and remove it before it does get censored, so they are not responsible. Even massive companies such as google filter their search results that are shown in China so Google doesn’t get blocked.

All this effort that the Chinese Government puts into controlling what is seen on the internet isn’t impossible bypass. People still manage get around the firewall. A really good example of people protesting against the censorship is the song of the grass mud horse. In China it is said that the grass mud horse is a legendary creature. Bei feng who is a journalist and blogger  summarized the grass mud horse in his blog, he wrote: 

“Recently there is a popular online term called “Grass Mud Horse”, it pops up all at a sudden and crosses the red light. Even intellectual like Cui Weiping has written article on “Grass Mud Horse”, and now we have “Grass Mud Horse” toy on the internet. It is difficult to trace what is the origin of “Grass Mud Horse”, all we know is that around early Jan 2009, a post titled as “10 legendary creatures in Baidu” has caught our attention, together with two spoofing video “Grass Mud Horse at Ma Le Desert” and “Song of Grass Mud Horse”. It is said that the appearance of the term is related with the “anti-Smut” campaign. The article said that “Grass Mud Horse” is a creature living in “Ma Le Desert” (translator note: phonetically equivalent to “mother’s cxxt”), the creature launches a battle with “river crab” (translator note: harmony / meaning censorship policy) in order to keep their stock grass (translator note: also phonetically equivalent to “fxxk”). Netizen 1.5 pointed out that “Grass Mud Horse” emerged as a “ridiculous” popular term, is actually a collective conscious of netizens for sending out the signal: the ruling elites has fallen into the trap of Tacitus in the eye of netizens. The ruling elites have the power to see without seeing, but for the netizens, they believe that “river crabs will disappear from the Ma La Desert”. source: http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/03/02/china-more-on-grass-mud-horse/

 

The lyrics of the grass mud horse song are: 

                                                      There is a herd of Grass Mud Horses*
In the wild and beautiful Ma Le Desert**
They are lively and intelligent
they are fun-loving and nimble
They live freely in the Ma Le Desert
They are courageous, tenacious, and overcome the difficult environment

Oh lying down Grass Mud Horse
Oh running wild Grass Mud Horse
They defeated river crabs*** in order to protect their grass land
River crabs forever disappeared from Ma Le Desert

Despite all of the Chinese Governments control, people are still rebelling which is great to see. The grass mud horse is a great symbol of protest against Chinese censorship.

 It will be interesting to see if ISP filtering comes into  effect in Australia what the Australian public will do. The Defence department has already setup a cyber security operations centre to combat against internet warfare. Recently a group calling themselves Anonymous waged “operation titstorm” which is a protest against Australian censorship. It was targeted at the Australian Government. Anonymous were able to bring down the parliament house website by emailing them a whole lot of porn. If these kind of attacks are already happening, what will happen if the Australian internet is censored?