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Researching the nature of Chinese Internet censorship

By Sue Vorenberg
Saturday, September 15, 2007

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This story will not be read on China's Internet.

It won't make it through the censorship process because of the following terms: massacre, Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, multidimensional, red terror, conversion rate.

And even if it does make it through the country's computer censors, it's unlikely anyone would read it — because most people, when they realize certain concepts are banned, will avoid them, said Jed Crandall, an assistant professor in the University of New Mexico computer science department.

"People have talked about the `Great Firewall of China,' but it's not a true firewall," Crandall said. "It blocks sites periodically based on certain words, and if you do enough blocking that way, people tend to engage in self-censorship."

Crandall and several researchers from the University of California-Davis recently finished a study investigating the nature of Chinese Internet censorship.

They'll present their findings at the Conference on Computer and Communications Security in October.

One of the more interesting findings — besides the filtering of some strange words — was that the filtering process itself is very imprecise, said Daniel Zinn, a UC-Davis graduate student who worked on the project.

"It shows that it really is enough to only filter words once in a while," Zinn said.

It's a process that Americans might be more familiar with than they realize, he said.

"If you think of it, it's sort of like driving in this country," Zinn said. "It's easy to surpass the speed limit, and you can do that once in a while. But you don't know if the cops are around or not, so you tend to be very careful about it."

Some Internet service providers in China also filter more keywords than others. Chinanet, which is the main provider, filters a much larger percentage of keywords than other providers, Crandall said.

In some cases, providers may be filtering thousands of keywords and blocking any sites that use them. But that can have unintended consequences, Crandall said.

"There's a city in West Germany that has been blocked because in Chinese the characters are similar to the word multi-dimensional," Crandall said. "In this case, multi-dimensional seems to correspond to a news site they don't like."

Because of that bit of censorship, people in China can't look up the German town or any scientific papers that include the word multi-dimensional, he said.

China has also blocked the name of a French town, probably because an Asian film festival is held there, Crandall said.

Perhaps the strangest blocked term is conversion rate, because it seems so innocuous, Crandall and Zinn said.

"It might be conversion rate to a particular religion or whatever," Zinn said. "There are certainly some surprising words."

Still, the researchers all were reluctant to say whether they thought Internet censorship was good or bad.

Some countries block child pornography and Nazi propaganda, which Zinn said is a good thing in his opinion .

"We're more interested in figuring out the nature of censorship, rather than whether it's a bad or good thing," Zinn said.

In the near future, the group hopes to build an `Internet censorship weather center' Web site where the public can check out which words are being censored in China at different times, Crandall said.

And that site — at least in the United States — won't be censored, he said.

"We do plan on making the list public," Crandall said.