Great new export: Internet censorship tools
The January/February issue of Foreign Policy has a short report that
Beijing recently sent engineers trained in phone tapping to Zimbabwe. It also arranged to send computer equipment designed for filtering-- or spying-- on the Internet. In 2004, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's state-owned telecom, TelOne, made Internet service providers sign contracts allowing it to monitor and censor illegal material. The Chinese hardware could make this job much easier.
The one faint silver lining in this story is that the number of Internet users in Zimbabwe hasn't exactly exploded in the last few years, given the state of the economy. But according to Reporters Without Borders, the 2004 measure was aimed squarely at political dissidents: as an RWB spokesman told Foreign Affairs, the government "has realized that the opposition has turned to the Internet.... That's why [these shipments of Chinese hardware] are worrying."
I've wondered if censorship tools developed by the Chinese could be attractive to other authoritarian regimes that want to tap into the Internet-- but want to avoid all those pesky political side effects. If you're a dictator or president for life, why choose the completely open, dangerously destabilizing Western version of the Internet, when you could go with an Internet that lets you control the content your citizens see and observe what they do? With China's announcement of its creation of new top-level domains, we may be seeing the foundations of an alternative Internet, one that doesn't treat censorship as a flaw, but a feature.
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