All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Speaking of China, I wanted to bring your attention to a Frontline documentary that discusses the economic, political and social reality of today's China. You can watch the whole thing here, and I would highly recommend doing so, as well as clicking around the above linked Web site.

For our purposes here at Public Eye, I want to focus on the program's discussion of the way in which the Chinese state controls information, and the willingness of some American companies to submit to their demands. Take Google, for example, which has built into the Chinese version of its search engine software which censors results. Consider the iconic image of "Tank Man," the man who stood in front of a row of tanks during the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. The image became an inspiration to people around the world, a symbol of the individual standing up for himself in the face of overwhelming oppression.

If you type "Tiananmen Square" into the Google and do an image search, you get image after image of Tank Man. But do the same in the Chinese version of Google, and Tank Man is nowhere to be seen – instead you get pictures of the square, shots of smiling tourists, and maps. (One result showing the massacre did seem to get through, though Chinese users attempting to click through to these images are unable to do so.) One of the saddest scenes in the Frontline report involved an interviewer showing the image of Tank Man to a group of Beijing university students, who had no idea what it was. One thought it might be a parade. It is estimated that almost no one in China under 20 years old has ever seen the image.

Read full post…

In America, where Google is fighting the Justice Department's efforts to secure the company's records of its users search habits, it might look like Internet companies consider keeping private information about users a significant priority. But while the Internet may be global, that corporate philosophy is decidedly not.

Yahoo is now being accused of providing Chinese authorities with information that led to the arrest of writer Li Zhi. His efforts to join the China Democracy Party, Reuters reports, have landed him an eight year prison sentence for "inciting subversion." In September, Yahoo was hammered for allegedly helping Chinese authorities identify Chinese journalist Shi Tao, who was accused of "illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities" and sentenced to ten years in prison. He reportedly sent an email summarizing an internal Communist Party directive to a foreign source using a Yahoo email account. The company provided the Chinese government with his account holder information.

Now the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders are calling on Yahoo to disclose what information it has turned over to the Chinese government. They want to know how many Chinese citizens have gone to jail on the basis of information provided by Yahoo. "Now we know Yahoo works regularly and efficiently with the Chinese police," Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.

Yahoo argues that it has no choice but to comply with Chinese authorities, and that it's ultimately for the greater good. "The choice is not whether to comply with law enforcement demands for information. The choice is whether to remain in the country. We believe that the Internet is a positive force in China," said Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako, who added that Yahoo was "distressed" by the details of the Shi Tao case.

Erick Schonfeld is skeptical of that logic. "…where are the proof points of "positive force" that counterbalance what's been done to Shi Tao or Li Zhi?," he writes. "Each jailed dissident convicted based on information Yahoo (or Google or Microsoft or any American company) gave to the Chinese government belies the notion of the Internet ultimately being good for China." He adds: "It's one thing to comply with the law in foreign countries. It is another to become a surveillance arm in those countries or to be complicit in censoring their citizens."

Read full post…