Living Behind the Great Firewall

The photo is a typical screen I get when trying to access Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or any Western social media website in China

It seems cheap sneakers, iPads and iPhones, and a Christmas wish list of consumer goods won’t be China’s only exports arriving on America’s shores. Censorship and government meddling in a free and open Internet might be turning up, too.

In November, Congress began holding hearings on SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act), a bill that will crack down on online intellectual property theft. Targeting “rogue websites” that host copyright infringing content – music, movies, books, software and the digital likes – the House bill, and its Senate counterpart, the PROTECT IP Act, authorizes the Department of Justice to maintain a blacklist of block-worthy sites, most of which exist on servers outside America’s jurisdiction.

Despite the facade of pure and noble intents – combating the theft of U.S. property – the House bill provides broad and ambiguous definitions that will not only block online pirate havens but also cause innocent websites to get caught in SOPA’s nets. It will also make it easier for the government and entertainment industry to pressure Internet Service Providers (ISPs), like PenTelaData, to monitor individual user traffic.

Blacklisted Web domains. Government oversight. Widespread blocking. These are words and phrases typically reserved for the likes of despotic regimes — Cuba or Iran for example — where pervasive censorship is the norm.

As Time magazine puts it, SOPA will allow the government to eliminate alleged pirate sites by essentially “disappearing them,” or making them invisible or inaccessible on your web browser. “Disappearing,” unless you’re referring to a magic act, is another one of those word that should never be associated with the actions of democracies.

The Chinese government certainly isn’t shy about its censorship. Since China began opening up in the late 1970s under Deng Xiaoping, the government has been engaged in a constant balancing act between openness and control, says Rebecca MacKinnon in her essay “Flatter World and Thicker Walls”. Deng likened the reform to opening a window for fresh air only to have a few “flies” (read, new ideas that run counter to the Party line) blow in.

To swat those flies in the modern age of the Internet, China has between 30,000 and 50,000 people involved with the Ministry of Public Security’s Golden Shield Project, commonly called the “Great Firewall of China,” according to Amnesty International. The project employs a variety of techniques to monitor the flow of traffic and control what sites are accessible to China’s close to 500 million Internet users.

From firsthand experience, dealing with the Great Firewall of China is certainly annoying but easily tolerable. If I want to chat with friends on Facebook, or check out a new YouTube video, or read blogs, or tweet, or retweet, or have full access to Gmail, or even view my hometown newspaper the Times News’ webpage (apparently its coverage is too sensitive and controversial for Chinese readers and has subsequently been blocked here), I just have to log into a subscription-based proxy service that allows me to circumvent China’s firewalls. I used that proxy to publish this post.

As inconvenient as access denial to certain websites gets, for the most part I’m indifferent towards the Chinese government’s Internet censoring and monitoring protocols, because that’s what I’ve come to expect of China. My expectations for America are higher.

Granted, SOPA doesn’t go to the same censorship extremes as China. It doesn’t even come close. The Chinese government is out to quash political comments on sensitive China-centric issues. SOPA is meant to protect American intellectual property from foreign online pirates. But the similarities are still there.

Aside from assigning blacklisting authority to the government, SOPA will require website operators to prove their sites aren’t being used for copyright infringement, the same “guilty until proven innocent” guidelines the Chinese government imposes on domestic social networking sites. The House bill also puts an unprecedented burden on ISPs to comb over all user traffic to find violators or face punishment themselves. Censoring could quickly turn into over-censoring as ISPs looking to avoid litigation block sites that aren’t hosting copyrighted material but share keywords or have user posted links with sites that do.

The necessity for stronger laws to clamp down on web-based piracy is definitely there, especially with Hollywood studios, record companies and publishing houses claiming $135 billion in annual loses from online theft. American intellectual property deserves protection, but perhaps not the way Congress is proposing, and certainly not if it emulates the kind of draconian tactics employed by China’s Internet censors.