GreatFire Q&A with Jimmy Wales on China Censorship

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On May 19, 2015 both the encrypted and unencrypted Chinese-language versions of Wikipedia were blocked in China, ending what has been a complicated censorship situation for the world's most important online resource.

We have been critical of Wikipedia’s approach to censorship in the Middle Kingdom. In a recent piece for the Huffington Post, I lamented the loss of Wikipedia in China. The encyclopedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, who is also a staunch and public anti-censorship champion, reached out to us on Twitter. Jimmy agreed to publish our unedited exchange on the difficult nature of dealing with censorship in China.

 

Q: What is Wikipedia doing to combat censorship in China and elsewhere?

A: Wikipedia opposes censorship worldwide.  We have a very firm policy, never breached, to never cooperate with government censorship in any region of the world.  It is my view that access to knowledge - particularly factual encyclopedic knowledge of the kind put forth by Wikipedia - is a fundamental human right, a corollary to the right of freedom of speech.

I have personally worked to lobby governments around the world to change their policies.  And the Wikipedia community has at times successfully gone on strike, turning Wikipedia black for a day in various languages, in order to protest against censorship.

 

Q: In 2012, you threatened to make Wikipedia HTTPS by default in the UK in an effort to derail the Snooper's Charter. The Communications Bill would have allowed the UK authorities to track their citizens web and phone use. You suggested that this kind of activity was something you would expect in “Iran or China”. Why did you not threaten China in the same way?

A:  We didn’t just threaten - we did it.  Wikipedia is now HTTPS everywhere.  We have been 100% consistent in our principled approach to the opposition of spying on people using technology.  We have known for a long time that there was a problem with clear text transmission of Wikipedia, but like many people, we didn’t realize how bad the situation had gotten until Ed Snowden’s revelations about the actions of the NSA.

Moving to HTTPS everywhere was a technical challenge for a number of reasons.  We did it in stages, and we have always understood that it would likely lead to the complete block of Wikipedia in some countries.

 

Q: We believe that you would never voluntarily practice censorship. However, allowing the Chinese authorities to censor individual content is very similar to the strategy of some media organizations, i.e. they build a full version site and also a "clean" site which results in the full version getting blocked while the clean version remains accessible.

Whether this approach can be seen as technically self-censorship is up for debate, but the end result is that Chinese get a version that complies with the Chinese censorship standards. Was this the thinking behind the China strategy?

A:  We do not allow the Chinese authorities to censor individual content.  So this is a silly thing for you to say.

That is not up for debate - it's an entirely silly notion.  Someone who steadfastly refuses to comply with censorship and moves forward aggressively to combat censorship in every venue can hardly be said to be "self-censoring" when China is the one doing the censoring.

The thing you should understand is that such debate tactics are sad. Rather than championing and supporting people working hard - both publicly and behind the scenes - to champion freedom of information, such silly arguments merely make people inclined to just not listen to you.

One aspect of this whole thing that is different for us from just about any other website is that we are very strongly community-driven.  So when we think about what are the exact best tactics for us to advance freedom of speech in China, we think about and respect the views of our community members inside China. Ultimately we might be forced to overrule them, but they are passionate about the issue of free and open access to Wikipedia and for us to authoritatively bumble around based on pressure from activists *rather than* engage in a slow and thoughtful consultation with community members about the best way forward would be a mistake.

 

Q: So community members in China were against moving to an all-encrypted version of Wikipedia before because they feared that the site would get blocked? What is the reaction of the community now that the site is blocked?

A: In any community discussion, there will be voices on various sides of an issue.  The community has been very supportive of our move to HTTPS, even though the resulting current situation is that Wikipedia is likely to remain blocked for a long time.

 

Q: What do you think is the future of internet censorship in China? Do you think we will ever seen a loosening of restrictions or will things only continue to get worse?

A: It greatly depends on the world reaction to what is happening in China. If the western world stops turning a blind eye on censorship in China and invoke pressure on the Chinese authorities to allow more freedoms, things will change positively. This is one of the things I am thriving to achieve through the Jimmy Wales Foundation. We all must take responsibility and raise our voice for change.

 

Q: If you sat down with China’s cyber czar (Lu Wei, the head of the Cyberspace Administration of China) what would you say to him?

A: The same thing I have said to his predecessor’s and to similar authorities in other countries around the world: you are on the wrong side of history.

Actually, in China, because the usual excuse for censorship is that it promotes a harmonious society, I tend to lead with a discussion about how the censorship program leads to disharmony.  I want to push them to rethink their principles from scratch.

 

Q: If Lu Wei told you that he would not unblock Wikipedia unless you censor content or disable encryption by default, how would you respond?

A: We will never compromise. I'm more patient than they are.

 

Q: What would be your advice to a foreign internet firm dependent on user-generated content that is looking to enter the China market?

A: I am afraid that I wouldn’t have any specific advice, other than to warn them that it will be difficult.

 

Q: Which foreign firms are “doing it right” in China, in your opinion?

A: It’s not really appropriate for me to comment in detail.  In some cases I know privately what some companies are doing to help users defeat censorship, but if I talk about that, it will cause those efforts to fail.

But I also think that free speech activists should back off from tactics that involve naming and shaming people who are trying to do the right thing.  There are different strategies that may work at different times and for different companies.  Sometimes when companies say that the Chinese are better off by having access to their service, even if it is filtered, they are just being weak on human rights - but sometimes that argument can make sense.

If a company is in a complex situation of compromise and offers the defense that they are working to improve matters in China, then it is appropriate to ask them: how are you trying to improve matters?  Have you hired lobbyists to try to argue for changing the law, etc.?

 

Q: If you could turn back time, what would you change about Wikipedia’s approach to China, if anything?

A: I think our approach has been better than anyone’s.  I could say that I wish we had done X or Y differently - things haven’t always gone perfectly, and Wikipedia has been blocked for long stretches more than once - but it isn’t clear that if we went back and tried a different approach that it would have worked better.  History doesn’t work that way!

I am most proud that we have always been 100% uncompromising, and better than any other major website on these issues.

 

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星期一, 11月 25, 2024

China’s New Effort to Achieve Cyber Sovereignty

How Real-Name Registration policies create an “ideological firewall” that chills dissent by eliminating user anonymity and selectively restricting transnational access to Chinese social media apps.

星期四, 8月 10, 2023

1.4 million people used FreeBrowser to circumvent the Great Firewall of Turkmenistan

Since 2021, the authorities in Turkmenistan have taken exceptional measures to crack down on the use of circumvention tools. Citizens have been forced to swear on the Koran that they will not use a VPN. Circumvention tool websites have been systematically blocked. Arbitrary searches of mobile devices have also taken place and have even targeted school children and teachers.

The government has also blocked servers hosting VPNs which led to “near complete” internet shutdowns on several occasions in 2022. Current reports indicate that 66 hosting providers, 19 social networks and messaging platforms, and 10 leading content delivery networks (CDNs), are blocked in the country. The government presumably is unconcerned about the negative economic impact that such shutdowns can cause.

星期五, 3月 18, 2022

Well-intentioned decisions have just made it easier for Putin to control the Russian Internet

This article is in large part inspired by a recent article from Meduza (in Russian).

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Russian users have had problems accessing government websites and online banking clients. Browsers began to mark these sites as unsafe and drop the connection. The reason is the revocation of digital security certificates by foreign certificate authorities (either as a direct consequence of sanctions or as an independent, good will move); without them, browsers do not trust sites and “protect” their users from them.

However, these actions, caused - or at least triggered by - a desire to punish Russia for their gruesome actions in Ukraine, will have long-lasting consequences for Russian netizens.

Digital certificates are needed to confirm that the site the user wants to visit is not fraudulent. The certificates contain encryption keys to establish a secure connection between the site and the user. It is very easy to understand whether a page on the Internet is protected by a certificate. One need just look at the address bar of the browser. If the address begins with the https:// prefix, and there is a lock symbol next to the address, the page is protected. By clicking on this lock, you can see the status of the connection, the name of the Certification Authority (CA) that issued the certificate, and its validity period.

There are several dozen commercial and non-commercial organizations in the world that have digital root certificates, but 3/4 of all certificates are issued by only five of the largest companies. Four of them are registered in the USA and one is registered in Belgium.

星期一, 8月 03, 2020

GreatFire 应用生成器 发布

GreatFire (https://en.greatfire.org/) 是一家专注于中国的审查监督组织,我们自豪地宣布一个新的反审查工具,该工具将使任何被屏蔽的媒体、博客、人权组织或民间社会组织反制审查,将其内容得以传播到中国和其他互联网审查国家的数百万读者和支持者的手机上。

GreatFire 已经构建了一个名为“GreatFire 应用生成器”的网页程序,任何组织可以使用它来为中国和其他国家的用户解锁他们的内容。任何人可以访问 (https://appmaker.greatfire.org/),该网站将编译一个带有自己logo的应用,并将包含他们以前被封锁的内容。该应用还将包含一个特殊的、绕过审查的网络浏览器,以便用户可以访问未经审查的网络。这些应用将使用包括机器学习在内的多种策略来规避中国当局先进的审查策略。这个项目在其他有类似中国的审查限制的国家也同样有效。对于组织和最终用户而言,这些应用将免费、快速且非常易于使用。

这个项目的灵感来自于GreatFire自己的应用 自由浏览(https://freebrowser.org/en)的第一手经验,并希望帮助那些可能没有内部专业知识来规避中国审查制度的小型非政府组织。GreatFire的反审查工具在中国发挥了作用,而其他工具却没有。自由浏览可以引导中国的互联网用户从应用的首页进入被僧所内容的导航(http://manyvoices.news/)。

   

人权基金会 (HRF) 已经使用 GreatFire 应用生成器 创建了一个应用程序HRF 在全球范围内促进和保护人权。该组织的使命是确保自由在世界范围内得到维护和促进。 HRF 的网站 在中国被封锁, 但现在中国任何人都可以 下载 HRF Android 应用程序 并访问该网站的信息。

“现在是中国政府防火墙倒塌的时候了,”人权基金会战略顾问王珍妮说。 “与我们在 GreatFire 的朋友一起,我们致力于击败中国的审查制度——在每一部手机。”

GreatFire 应用生成器 的起源可以追溯到 2014 年,当时开放技术基金 (OTF) 支持 GreatFire 的“依附的自由”实验。该项目直接导致了 2015 年中国政府的大规模网络攻击,后来被称为“大炮”。 OTF 还为 GreatFire 开发 AppleCensorship.com,该网站正在跟踪苹果对包括香港在内的全球应用商店的审查情况。

自由浏览 是“大炮”攻击的直接结果,五年后,我们很高兴能够向任何可能遭受中国当局审查的组织提供我们的方法。 

星期五, 7月 24, 2020

Apple, anticompetition, and censorship

On July 20, 2020, GreatFire wrote to all 13 members of the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law of the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary, requesting a thorough examination into Apple’s practice of censorship of its App Store, and an investigation into how the company collaborates with the Chinese authorities to maintain its unique position as one of the few foreign tech companies operating profitably in the Chinese digital market.  

This letter was sent a week before Apple CEO TIm Cook will be called for questioning in front of the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. The CEOs of Amazon, Google and Facebook will also be questioned on July 27, as part of the Committee’s ongoing investigation into competition in the digital marketplace.

This hearing offers an opportunity to detail to the Subcommittee how Apple uses its closed operating ecosystem to not only abuse its market position but also to deprive certain users, most notably those in China, of their right to download and use apps related to privacy, secure communication, and censorship circumvention.

We hope that U.S. House representatives agree with our view that Apple should not be allowed to do elsewhere what would be considered as unacceptable in the U.S. Chinese citizens are not second class citizens. Private companies such as Apple compromise themselves and their self-proclaimed values of freedom and privacy when they collaborate with the Chinese government and its censors.

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