The Porn Shield

China kicked off the New Year with another crackdown of the Internet. A government-supported entity—the Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center, tasked with finding and fighting online content that violates the law—began by informing 19 popular Web sites, including Google and Baidu, China's two leading search engines, that they contain "vulgar content that violates social morality and damages the physical and mental health of youths." Only a few days later, they expanded their blacklist to 91 sites, including MSN and MySpace, demanding that they all take action to remove the offensive content. On the same day that they announced the crackdown, People's Daily, an official outlet, posted paparazzi photos of the Chinese celebrity Zhang Ziyi in a bikini at the beach. The Web site of Xinhua News Agency has also run a slide show called "China's Hottest Babes."

Aside from the obvious hypocrisy, charges of vulgarity often signal a coming persecution of political dissent. The current crackdown is no exception. Bullog.cn, an edgy Chinese blog-like platform that often irked the Chinese authorities by reporting on controversial events like protests against new chemical plants, was one openly political victim of the recent purges. Commenting on the current crackdown, Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on the Chinese Internet at the University of Hong Kong, wrote on her blog that "historically in China ... the technology used to censor porn has ended up being used more vigorously to censor political content than smut."

Beijing may now be trying to expand controls over the Internet in a year filled with unhappy anniversaries for the Chinese authorities. It's been 50 years since the Tibetan uprising, 20 years since the bloodshed of the Tiananmen Square, and 60 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China. A more immediate cause of the crackdown might be the launch of Chapter 08, an appeal for democratic freedom by numerous Chinese intellectuals just a few weeks ago, along with widespread and, so far, uncontrollable online discussions about the appeal. The thaw that the Chinese Internet experienced in anticipation of the Olympics, which saw the unblocking of even politically damaging sites like those of the Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, may now be nearing its end, with a wider censorship campaign in the offing.

Beijing's sudden toughness also comes at a time when the Internet is quickly becoming a very important tool in exposing government corruption. The Chinese Internet has become notorious for the so-called "Human Flesh Search Engines"—squads of Internet vigilantes who use the Web to identify and terrorize those leaders who they believe have overstepped their authority or good judgment. One such villain is Zhou Jiugeng, a real-estate official from Nanjing, who was spotted in an official photograph wearing a Vacheron Constantin watch, which retails for $15,000. Bloggers, smelling blood, did some digging and found that Zhou also drove a Cadillac to work and smoked Nanjing 95 Imperial cigarettes, which cost $20 a pack. Late in December, all this online attention, which included widespread calls for his resignation, triggered an official investigation into Zhou's affairs. Earlier in the month, Lin Jiaxiang, the Communist Party secretary of Shenzhen's marine affairs bureau, was fired after being caught on video assaulting a young girl at a restaurant. The Chinese Netizens tracked his identity and widely circulated a video of the assault online, demanding an investigation. In another episode, two Chinese officials left their receipts from a costly tour of North America on a subway in Shanghai, which wound up being published on the Internet, to the outrage of Chinese Netizens. The officials were promptly fired.

Eradicating Internet porn is often the easiest way for Beijing to demonstrate that the government is in control and enforces its own laws—and sometimes such a demonstration is all that's needed to inspire self-censorship on the part of bloggers. Several Chinese portals that found their names on the blacklist decided to apologize and comply with the orders rather than to fight them.

The government's methods of identifying dissent have gotten more sophisticated in the past year or so. Rather than having to rely on search queries to identify sensitive discussions, censors have begun to employ complex data-mining methods provided by budding "censorship entrepreneurs"—local companies that develop new ways to identify dissent online and take preventive measures such as demanding that the offensive content be removed. TRS Information Technology is one such firm; founded in 1993 and employing more than 200 people, it claims to be a leader in the fields of "information retrieval, content management and text mining". What this means in practice is that TRS provides various Chinese government agencies (mostly police authorities) with technology to monitor online discussions that may pose a threat to the regime. In a recent interview in the Financial Times, TRS's marketing director took special pride in having installed such systems at eight police stations in Shanghai, noting that now the work formerly done by 10 Internet police offers could be done by one.

China's innovative Internet-control practices have begun to inspire many of its neighbors to crack down on online discussions. The government of Vietnam now requires global Internet companies with blogging platforms to report to the authorities every six months and, upon request, disclose information about individual bloggers. Thailand's government has recently admitted to blocking 2,300 Web sites (up from 1200 four months ago), and plans to add at least 400 more. Virtually all of these sites have been banned for "lese majeste"—criticism of the Thai Royal family.

China isn't alone in exerting control over what happens on the Internet. Some western nations have also begun to tighten oversight. British authorities are considering demanding Internet-service providers to offer parents "child-safe" Web services and assigning film-style ratings to all Web sites, and Australia has proposed a mandatory Internet filter that would block at least 1,300 sites, most of them of violent or pornographic content. Wikileaks, a self-described Wikipedia for leaked documents, has recently released a list of nearly 4,000 sites (virtually all of them pornographic) that, it says, are secretly blocked by the Danish authorities on the advice of Danish police and the local chapter of Save the Children, without much judicial or public oversight.

Western controls, of course, are almost always imposed in the name of eradicating child pornography, excessive violence and advocacy of terrorism, rather than stifling dissent. But controls are controls. When West nations act to curb pornography, they inadvertently give Beijing and other totalitarians countries cover.

Morozov is a fellow at the Open Society Institute in New York. He is at work on a book about the Internet's role in authoritarian societies.