‘Big Brother’ fears as China prepares to filter pcs for “unhealthy” content

Reporters Without Borders voiced concern today over China’s plan to force computer manufacturers to install software on personal computers to filter information seen by the Communist Party as “unhealthy”. The ‘Green Dam’ software, which must be installed from 1st July onwards will filter pornographic content, the industry and information and technology ministry has decided. “It is a scenario worthy of Big Brother that is unfolding in China,” the worldwide press freedom organisation said. “First comes the arrests of dissident bloggers and now the time for surveillance built into computers themselves.” “This Chinese-style filtering will go well beyond pornographic content that it is supposed to deal with and represents a threat to free expression. Until now, Internet-users have been able to access blocked websites using software for getting round censorship. Green Dam is designed to stop that. “We urge companies that sell computers on the Chinese market not to comply with the instruction, which will make them accomplices to censorship”, the organisation said. The industry and information technology ministry said today that companies in the computer market were in May given six weeks to install the new software, paid for by the government (Read the notification in English and Chinese). According to the Wall Street Journal, it would link PCs with a regularly updated database of banned sites and block access to those addresses. The Chinese government said that Green Dam was intended to protect young people from “harmful” content online. The software has since March already been downloaded three million times, is reportedly used in 2,279 schools and has been installed in some 518,000 computers. The companies Lenovo, Inspur and Hedy have apparently already installed the software in 52 million computers. “The appearance of such a strict directive shows the need to protect foreign companies operating in China, who are forced to comply with local laws. This is why we support the need for a law like the Global Online Freedom Act, that makes it possible to stand up to the Chinese government in this kind of situation”, said Reporters Without Borders. A wave of online censorship linked to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on 4 June is still being felt within China. Scores of websites such as Twitter, YouTube, Bing, Flickr, Opera, Live, Wordpress and Blogger were left inaccessible in the country. Twitter, FlickR, Hotmail, Wikipedia and Radio Free Asia were accessible again from 8th June. “How long is the government going to continue using censorship against the Web 2.0? The authorities are showing the extent to which they are calmly seeking to control the flow of information reaching Internet-users” it concluded. Read the notification in Chinese More on that issue - New York Times - Wall Street Journal - Human Rights in China