1. NY Times 2. TIME Magazine 3. Washington Post Trial Will Test China's Grip on the Internet THE NEW YORK TIMES November 16, 1998 By ERIK ECKHOLM BEIJING -- The trial of a 30-year-old computer executive, soon to begin in Shanghai, heralds a new electronic battleground for China's political dissidents and security forces determined to preserve Communist Party control. Lin Hai, the defendant, is charged with "inciting subversion of state power." Prosecutors say that from September 1997 until his arrest in March, Lin gave tens of thousands of Chinese e-mail addresses to "hostile foreign publications." In particular, they say, he provided addresses to an electronic newsletter called VIP Reference, which is compiled by Chinese democracy advocates in Washington and sent to hundreds of thousands of computer-users inside China. According to the indictment, Lin helped the newsletter "carry out propaganda and incitement by distributing essays inciting subversion of state power and overthrow of the socialist system." Lin appears to be the first legal casualty of a building struggle, as Internet users here and abroad make shreds of the government's efforts to censor political debate and filter foreign news. VIP Reference -- which sends out reports on dissident activities, essays and reprinted articles on human rights and other issues -- is the most prominent of several electronic forums that are breaching China's information defenses. "We're promoting freedom of speech on the Internet," said Feng Donghai, a software engineer at Columbia University who moved to the United States three years ago and helped start VIP Reference last fall. "They are putting Lin Hai on trial to set an example." The main VIP Reference, sent out every 10 days, mostly includes essays and debates on democratic topics. A subsidiary Daily News edition, sent daily, includes detailed accounts of dissident initiatives and arrests. The main newsletter is now sent to more than 250,000 addresses in China, said its publisher, Lian Shengde, who spoke from Washington. The Daily News edition goes to about 25,000, and the numbers are steadily climbing as sympathizers send in lists of Chinese addresses. The newsletter accepts addresses indiscriminately -- many are from commercially traded lists -- then mails to everyone. The theory is that when so many are automatic recipients, individuals cannot be accused of deliberately subscribing. "We're posing a new problem for the Communists," said Lian, a software engineer in his 30s who moved from China after the 1989 military crackdown on student-led demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. "I don't think there's any way they can stop us." Another, similar publication is Tunnel, a self-described "webzine" of commentary written in China and sent electronically to the United States from where it is wired back to thousands of accounts inside China. The sites, which require Chinese-script software, are at www.ifcss.org/ftp-pub/org/dck for VIP Reference and www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Bay/5598 for Tunnel. A third newsletter, Public Opinion, is edited and distributed electronically from inside China. It includes commentaries and reprints of items taken off the Internet and is produced by a group of young computer company workers who call themselves "political netters." Over the last year, these newsletters, plus assorted online discussion groups, have become important means of communication among political activists, said Xiao Qiang, executive director of Human Rights in China in New York. China now has some 1.2 million Internet accounts, many shared by several users, with the numbers zooming. The government has encouraged hookups in the interest of promoting national development, but is fighting a losing battle to control political uses. China uses an electronic "firewall" to block access to Web sites it deems objectionable, including those of human rights groups and some considered pornographic. But it cannot keep up with new sites, and clever users can sidestep the firewall. E-mail is virtually uncontrollable, although agents can identify a particular individual and read that person's mail. China's security agencies have formed special units to fight not only conventional computer crimes like illegal break-ins and fraud, but also the spread of dissident information. To evade government filters and electronic disruptions, VIP Reference is mailed from a different American address every day. Somehow, the authorities zeroed in on Lin. Last week, Lin's wife, Xu Hong, learned that his trial will begin on Nov. 26 but will be a closed proceeding so that she cannot attend. The lawyers she hired will be present but, Ms. Xu said by telephone, "I'm afraid the lawyers won't have much influence on the results." If convicted as charged, Lin may face a prison sentence of five years or more. He and his wife have a 20-month-old son. Ms. Xu, who says her husband is innocent, said that e-mail addresses are "public information, like telephone books, which can be exchanged or purchased." He has never been involved in politics, she said. ===================== ~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^^~^ Downloading Dissent TIME Magazine NOVEMBER 9, 1998 VOL. 152 NO. 18 China's old-school technocrats want to pull the plug on the country's computer-savvy "hacktivists" By JAIME A. FLORCRUZ Beijing When U.S. President Bill Clinton toured Shanghai last June, he stopped by an Internet cafe to mingle with young people surfing the Web. It was no random photo-op: Clinton was giving a thumbs-up to the liberating role of the Internet. Little did he realize that, not very far from the cafe, a local computer engineer was languishing in jail for tapping the power of the Net. Shanghai police in March arrested Lin Hai, 30, manager of a local software firm, and charged him with "inciting to overthrow the government." Now awaiting trial, Lin is the first Internet-related political prisoner in China. His offense: passing 30,000 Chinese e-mail addresses on to Da Can Kao (Big Reference), an overseas dissident webzine, which then "spammed" the addresses with forbidden information. Shanghai authorities claim the tide of e-mail paralyzed the city's computer network. Since China four years ago plugged into the yingtewang, as the Internet is known, communist apparatchiks have gingerly widened access to the Net, even as they built firewalls to block sites considered subversive (CNN, TIME) or degenerate (Playboy, Penthouse Live). Today, 1.2 million Chinese have access to the Net, a number that is projected to grow to 5 million by 2000. Typically, the Net-surfers are young, highly educated, influential and affluent. Just the sort of person who might be inclined to question authority or become involved in dissident activities, which China has long sought to curb. Indeed, it has been the government's continuing crackdown on subversive tendencies that has spawned a new band of "hacktivists"--activists who are shifting to the relatively unpatrolled world of cyberspace to campaign on behalf of democracy. Says Eddie Leung, editor of the Hong Kong Voice of Democracy website, (www.democracy.org.hk), which monitors freedom in China and the former British colony: "There is a significant trend toward using the Internet as a means of bypassing government censorship on the mainland." Last week, only two days after a state-run organization launched a human rights Web page (www.humanrights-china.org) to promote the official line, a U.S.-based group calling itself Legions of the Underground cracked the site's security and replaced the page with a new one labeled "Boycott China!" The hackers also added links to two sites--Amnesty International and Human Rights in China--usually blocked by state firewalls. Pro-democracy activists, as well as Taiwan and Tibet independence advocates, have set up mailing lists and websites on servers outside the mainland. A Chinese-language webzine called Tunnel (www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/5598), which bills itself as "the underground magazine of mainland China," claims it has received nearly 200,000 visitors since June 1997. Tunnel is said to be surreptitiously edited in China and sent by e-mail to an address in the U.S., where it is posted on the Internet and bounced back to Chinese readers. Its creators supposedly have a system that guarantees anonymous messaging from the mainland, where e-mail users are required to register with the police. Da Can Kao (www.ifcss.org), the webzine to which Lin Hai sent e-mail addresses, is a compendium of banned reports and commentaries compiled by exiled activists. Like Tunnel, the site invites those "who care about human rights in China" to send its editors messages, which it promises cannot be traced. The Hong Kong Blondes, an enigmatic group of Chinese hackers, claim to have more than 40 people working both within and outside of the country to infiltrate mainland police and security networks in order to warn political targets of imminent arrests. In a recent online interview the group's mainland-born leader, a man who uses the name Blondie Wong, warns that other hackers plan to target computer systems and websites of U.S. companies doing business with China. Says Oxblood Ruffin, the online pseudonym of a Toronto hacker who serves as the Blondes' spokesman: "The Internet cannot be censored." He helps operate a separate organization, the Cult of the Dead Cow, which he says is "committed to assisting whoever wants to latch on to the democratic experience." Such threats only reinforce Beijing's worst fears about cyberspace. The government is grooming a team of "Internet police" to patrol its networks and is upgrading technology to filter sites. New laws require severe punishment--including a five-year jail term--for using the Internet to "harm state interests," "spread rumors," or "publicly insult others." Lin Hai committed none of those offenses, insists his wife Xu Hong. His exchange of e-mail addresses with Da Can Kao, she argues, was merely a normal business deal. Says Xu: "E-mail addresses are public information, just like telephone books, which can be exchanged or purchased at will by companies or individuals." If spamming the local network were a crime, she avers, the police should go after Da Can Kao, not Lin Hai: "If someone committed murder with a knife, why arrest the knife manufacturer instead of the murderer?" Lin's legal tangle underscores the need for China to define online crime more precisely, lest legitimate businesses be stifled. As the information highway expands, the country will have to prepare itself for life in a borderless, transparent world. With reporting by Lori Reese/Hong Kong http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/asia/magazine/1998/981109/china_internet1.html ========================== Internet Police on The Prowl In China Free Flow of Ideas Worries Leaders By Michael Laris Special to The Washington Post Saturday, October 24, 1998; Page A12 BEIJING—As head of the Shanghai Police Department's Computer Security Supervision office, Qing Guang is in charge of ferreting out "harmful information" on the Internet. He has to look only as far as his own in box. Qing is an unwitting subscriber to Chinese VIP Reference, an electronic pro-democracy magazine run by Chinese students and scholars from a small office near Washington's Dupont Circle. Every 10 days, editors e-mail their magazine -- with its essays on "thought liberation," bulletins on democracy activism, and reader-inspired reports on corruption -- to more than 100,000 Internet users in China. Qing is one of them. And that makes the tough-talking Shanghai cop crazy. "For me, this kind of information is useless. When you put it in my mailbox, it's a type of spiritual pollution. All the users don't want to receive these kinds of things," Qing said in a rare interview. "If there was something you didn't need, and I sent it to you by force, could you accept that? Would you be disgusted or not?" The Internet is slowly coming of age in China, prompting a showdown between Communist Party officials who seek to maintain their media monopoly, and upstart Internet publishers relying on powerful technology and their uncensored news coverage to appeal to China's best and brightest. The number of Chinese Internet users has jumped 75 percent this year to 1.2 million, and it is expected to reach 10 million in five years. Eighty-five percent of users are under age 35, and they represent an influential elite of students, intellectuals and officials. VIP Reference reaches at least 10 percent of Chinese users and perhaps a greater percentage if reader surveys about how often it is forwarded are accurate. The Chinese government is ambivalent toward the Internet. Telecommunications officials have been investing millions of dollars to increase Internet access, and national policy supports its swift growth, but propaganda and security officials oppose its unfettered expansion. As Chinese at home and abroad have become more effective at spreading their ideas online, police and state security agents have launched a campaign to train "Internet police" and pursue those responsible for "hostile magazines." "The water that carries the boat can also tip it over. The Internet is also like this," the People's Daily, the most authoritative voice of China's Communist Party, wrote on Oct. 12. "Going online is inevitable, but tremendous economic benefit requires an assurance of safety." China's leaders are not alone in their concern. New York-based Human Rights Watch is looking into reports that governments in Malaysia, Turkey and Bahrain have persecuted their citizens for distributing political information online. "It is precisely because of the Internet's potential for increasing the civil and political participation of the disenfranchised that regulators are seeking to control it," said Jagdish Parikh, online researcher for Human Rights Watch. But China's government, which relied heavily on underground propaganda to build support for taking power in 1949, is especially sensitive about keeping its own censorship structures in place. Authorities boast that China was the first country to require Internet users to register with the government, and police are institutionalizing the monitoring of the country's networks. In Shanghai, for instance, Officer Qing has trained more than 200 employees from government work units to be the eyes and ears of the police on local networks. In three-day seminars, Qing describes the dangers of "black guests," the Chinese term for hackers, and explains Internet security. He also explains China's stringent Internet regulations, which went into effect last January. "No one is allowed to release harmful information on the Internet," Qing said. "You cannot send out harmful information which attacks our nation's territorial integrity, attacks our nation's independence, or attacks our socialist system." Qing would not say how many Internet cases are being prosecuted in China, nor how many police are surfing China's networks. But in interviews, Chinese Internet users who have had run-ins with security forces say the pressure is growing. Lin Hai, a computer entrepreneur in Shanghai, was arrested in March for allegedly providing his database of 30,000 e-mail addresses to VIP Reference. Although Lin had not been active in politics, and had openly sold and exchanged e-mail addresses as part of his online headhunting business, he has been charged with "inciting the overthrow of national power." Xu Hong, Lin's wife, said trading e-mail addresses is considered as sinister as trafficking in postage stamps, and she believes authorities are using her husband to send a message. "It's 'killing a chicken to scare the monkeys,' " she said, using an old Chinese expression. Feng Donghai, a co-founder of VIP Reference who works as a telecommunications researcher at Columbia University, said his parents and friends in China have been visited by state security agents four times in the past several months to investigate him. "I also received a lot of reader messages that they were visited by national security police because they received our magazine," Feng said. But, like Officer Qing, many have an alibi. "When police question our readers, they can claim they never subscribed," Feng said. The magazine has editors and contributors around the United States and in China, and is part news source and part network. Democracy campaigners in China have used it as a forum for discussing reform, and to locate the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of fellow travelers. VIP sends copies of its magazine not only to police officers but also to Chinese lawmakers and government officials, as well as thousands of citizens. VIP also e-mails a smaller-circulation daily update on dissident activities. Readers e-mail the magazine 500 times each day. About 30 of those are requests to be removed from the mailing list, but many others write to talk politics. The Chinese government has set up e-mail filters to block distribution, but editors send the magazine from different addresses each time and have an elaborate system within China to ensure the messages reach their destination. Feng said he gets several dozen e-mail threats a day and has also been hit by e-mail "bombings," which fill up his in box with large files. Several of VIP's other key editors are trying to keep their identities secret to escape similar trouble and to avoid being blacklisted. The chief editor of "Public Opinion," an electronic journal edited in China that focuses on government abuses of power, said he went into hiding after police investigated his company. "I was scared. Many people like me, who say things they shouldn't, have been struck," said the editor, who gave his name as Li Yongming in an e-mail interview from an undisclosed location in southern China. But Li has continued working on the magazine. "I will not let others cover my mouth," he said. © Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company