by Kitty Hurst
Daily Lobo
Internet censorship in China was believed to be caused by a firewall that blocks all information the government doesn't want its citizens to see.
But a UNM assistant professor and a team of researchers disproved the assumption there is a "Great Firewall" of Internet censorship bordering China.
"People need to understand Internet censorship is not just a firewall trying to block off any dissenting ideas," said Jed Crandall, who teaches computer science. "There's a lot more going on."
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Crandall worked on a study of the firewall with three researchers from UC-Davis and an independent researcher.
The Tiananmen Square incident of 1989 and outlawed Falun Gong movement are known to be censored subjects.
About 28 percent of the tested Internet paths into China showed no signs of censoring for more than two weeks, the study found.
The remaining paths filtered sporadically, allowing up to a quarter of usually blocked words through during busy Internet periods, according to the study.
The researchers found the government's censorship works like a panopticon, Crandall said.
A panopticon is a type of monitoring, designed for prisons, where one central observer watches a large number of people, he said.
People behave as if they are being watched all the time, when they are only being watched part of the time, said Niame Adele, a sociology instructor who teaches a class about social control.
"(Sociology) has shown that people would rather conform than resist," Adele said. "When this type of social control motivates fear, people can be targeted because they have no privacy."
The researchers studied censorship of keyword searches because it can be done from outside China, Crandall said.
The government filters keywords in chats, blogs and e-mails, he said.
Keyword censorship may not block every illicit word, but it stops enough to keep people away, Crandall said.
"Chinese still engage in self-censorship," he said. "They know what concepts they're supposed to avoid, but this just reminds them of those concepts."
Crandall said the researchers were surprised by some of the blocked words they discovered, such as "conversion rate" and "multidimensional."
Some words were blocked because the characters in them resemble other censored words, he said.
Nordrhein Westfalen, an art collection in Germany, is blocked because it resembles the characters of Falun Gong, Crandall said.
"They want to target one Web site or news source," he said. "But they end up blocking a whole lot of other things, like Italian poets and mathematical discussions."
The Chinese government increased censorship after a number of large protests were organized through chat rooms and instant messaging,
Crandall said.
Laws, regulations and an Internet police task force maintain China's censorship, he said.
Crandall said the study is applicable to Internet regulation around the world, not just China.
"Internet censorship is done in a lot of countries," he said. "If we're going to make intelligent decisions about Internet censorship in the future, we all need to understand exactly how Internet censorship works."
