‘Beijing 6′ Brian gives Shout Out to SFT on PBS Idea Lab

Brian Conley, creator of the well-known videoblog, Alive in Baghdad, and one of the ‘Beijing 6‘ citizen journalist detained this summer in Beijing for capturing images and videos of pro-Tibet actions during the Olympics, was interviewed for PBS Idea Lab about his incredibly important new project Alive in Tehran.

During his interview, Brian gave the following shout out to SFT and our efforts to break through China’s Great Firewall. Read and listen to the fill interview.

Ryan: So while you weren’t on the ground in Gaza, you had connections who were, and were able to get information out, too.

Brian: Exactly, and then we used Twitter to pull in questions from people and enable people to sort of interact with our guy on the ground there. So then when Iran started happening it seemed like a natural fit to try and use the same tools for the folks there, to enable them to basically communicate out. The primary thing that we’re trying, that we’re pushing right now, is basically a phone number that people can call, get to a voicemail box and record whatever they would like to say, and right now I have a public voice mailbox available via an Alive in Tehran Facebook [group].

Also, people can message me via twitter.com/baghdadbrian and then for people who are more private or who have family, they just want to share one voicemail box…we can set up a specific number for any individual. Beyond that, we’re looking at other tools. I’ve learned a little bit about how Students for a Free Tibet have gotten video out of Tibet. So there’s one tool I’m sort of sharing with people privately. Then there on Alive in Tehran we have a list of tools Iranians can use to communicate securely. So basically, right now it’s a lot of organizing and working it.

BBtv (Beijing): interview with pro-Tibet videobloggers in hiding.

Last week, eight American citizens were detained in Beijing for participating in pro-Tibetan sovereignty protests near the site of the 2008 Olympics, with Students for a Free Tibet. Two videobloggers who documented those protest and guerrilla art installations evaded detention, and spoke to Boing Boing TV on Friday Beijing time about why they were there, what they witnessed, and why it mattered.

Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson of Ryanishungry.com spoke to us over Skype from a hostel in Beijing. One of the actions they documented in photo and video was the hanging of an “LED throwies” light banner, shown below, which read “FREE TIBET.” We agreed to hold this Boing Boing tv episode until after we received word that they’d safely left the country. They have returned home, so I am posting the piece today.

View the original post at http://www.boingboing.net/2008/08/25/bbtv-beijing-intervi.html

China Blocks iTunes for Tibet Album?

This is a screenshot of iTunes accessed from inside China:

As you can see, you can’t get onto iTunes from within China. The problem was identified in this thread on the Apple Support forum and it didn’t take long for iTunes inside China to put things together. User merrillks writes:

I live in Western China and use an american account and have the same problem. My guess is that China has blocked iTunes. How they do this I don’t know, but it’s the same way that they can block Youtube. My guess is that they probably blocked it due to the “Songs for Tibet” CD that came out on iTunes two days before the olympics. I think part of the money goes to Tibet and since they have very strong views on Tibet I’m sure that played a part in them shutting down iTunes.

User Sinoman adds:

In my 12-year China experience, I’ve seen a plethora of all sorts of “blockages” from the Chinese government, and if that’s what this is, it’s likely a “content” issue. I wasn’t aware of the aforementioned selection supporting Tibet, but that’s exactly the kind of thing that would spur a blockage of the site, since they can’t very well block a single song.

Another user points out that the same day iTunes was shut down, there were media reports that 40 Olympic athletes have downloaded “Songs for Tibet,” a musical compilation benefiting Tibetan independence, from inside Beijing. The album had been made available for free for Olympic athletes to download from iTunes. “Songs for Tibet” opened #4 on the Billboard charts and has been a huge hit on iTunes and other online sales sites worldwide.

A report on china.org.cn, which is the authorized government portal site to China, managed by the Information Office of the State Council, was critical of the iTunes download and spoke to angry Chinese netizen response:

According to Chinanews.com, the angry netizens are rallying together to denounce Apple in offering “Songs for Tibet” for purchase. They have also expressed a wish to ban the album’s singers and producers, most notably Sting, John Mayer and Dave Matthews, from entering China.

Many people have made remarks on online forums to express their anger, even those who have been fans of the artists in the past.

So it seems the table was set for an action on iTunes. Has it happened? It’s unclear but even bloggers who aren’t pro-Tibet think so and are outraged by it.

We don’t know for certain that iTunes has been banned because of “Songs for Tibet” or the popularity for this album amongst Olympic athletes. Both Apple and the Chinese government are silent so far. But it seems like a real possibility that China has shut down access to iTunes merely because it was selling an album supportive of the Tibetan people and their struggle for independence. Obviously if that turns out to be the case, it will be just another instance where the Chinese authorities show their true colors during the Olympics. They have not opened up. They have not become more progressive. They have not changed as a result of the Games. Rather, they’re the same repressive government that has only taken their illiberal tactics to new, more brazen levels with the whole world watching.

NY Times on NYC Projection Action

Jim Dwyer of the New York Times has a fantastic article about the New York City digital projection action on the Chinese Consulate. Dwyer covers how the action was done, what made it effective, and the ensuing battle with the IOC and YouTube to keep video of the action online.

The pictures were four and five flickering stories high. And for about 25 minutes on the night before the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Games, that video, produced by Students for a Free Tibet, looped against the wall of the consulate. The modern Olympics have always been a theater for sport, commerce and politics, tightly controlled by the International Olympic Committee and the host country. This year, there are stages everywhere….

For pure spectacle, it was hard to top the anti-Chinese video that was streamed onto the consulate wall. Giant projections have been used in other protests — in Los Angeles, for instance, critics of the Catholic hierarchy’s handling of sex-abuse allegations streamed pictures onto the cardinal’s residence. The tactic is a linear descendant of the rock and slingshot, with images catapulted into stinging view by a 5,000-lumen projector.

The article goes on to show how SFT pushed back on the removal of the YouTube video of the protest and how we were able to get the video back online.

A few hours later, Mr. Gulotta said, a friend sent him an e-mail message asking if he had taken down the video. He went to YouTube and saw that it had been removed by a “third party” — the International Olympic Committee — on the grounds that the use of the Olympic rings was a copyright infringement.

Mr. Gulotta struck back, filing an appeal to YouTube, arguing that the brief appearance of the rings amounted to “fair use” under copyright standards.

“The I.O.C. was safeguarding China’s image,” Mr. Gulotta said.

Representatives for the Olympic committee did not respond to a request for comment on Friday, but they had previously said that their request to YouTube was made automatically by a software robot that searches for unauthorized uses of the Olympic logo. (Normally, the use of the rings is limited to commercial sponsors who have paid for the right.)

In any event, the video was restored to YouTube this week. “That part of the operation got more attention than the action itself,” Ms. Nirankari said.

So far, no one has tried to prohibit such projections. Ingenious as the tactic is, it does involve hijacking someone’s property, if fleetingly. Mr. Gulotta agreed that the projections had to be used “responsibly,” but he said the Chinese government had it coming. “If any individual had done anything to the level of what the Chinese government has done in Tibet,” he said, “they would actually be inviting this onto themselves.”

This is great coverage and the sort of article that really shows how creative and innovative SFT has become in an effort to bring global attention to China’s brutal, illegal occupation of Tibet while the Olympics are going on. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention and you can be sure that SFT will keep finding new ways to bring Tibet into the international spotlight until Tibet is free.

Videoblogger Deported From China for Filming Tiananmen Square Protest

Many bloggers were very impressed with Lhadon’s efforts in Beijing last year, and wanted to support our work. They came to Beijing to support the Tibet issue, but also to support Chinese bloggers and free speech.

Now American videoblogger noneck has been deported from China for posting videos of SFT protests in Beijing. Here is one of the videos that the Chinese government found so offensive as to deport him for:

While he wasn’t “embedded” with SFT, he was always in the loop if a protest in progress, and since most of our protests were in central areas, it was easy for him to get there quick.

Our relationship with him and other bloggers is essentially the same as our relationship with professional journalists, and in fact, we consider citizen journalists such as noneck, to be just as legitimate and well suited as allies in our “this just happened” online media strategy

noneck is a supporter of SFT, but also a personal friend of Nathan Dorjee, SFT’s Digital Operations Director.

You can watch more of noneck’s video blog coverage on Qik and read his Twitter feed for his great microblogging during his time in China.

BlogSchmog has a great write-up of noneck’s deportation and what he’s been doing while in Beijing.

High Tech Action @ NYC Chinese Consulate

File this digital projection action onto the Chinese consulate in New York City as one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen…

Click here to view video of the action.

Chinese Hackers Hit US Congressmen

Two U.S. Congressmen have accused China of hacking their computers.

U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican, said his office computers had been compromised in August 2006 and that he was told by the FBI and other officials the source of the attack was inside China.

Rep. Christopher Smith, who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said his computer had also been attacked from China….

Wolf said the computers that were targeted contained sensitive information about human rights in China, while Smith, a New Jersey Republican, said he had “every reason to believe” the Chinese government was to blame.

Hmm. Why would China (or Chinese hackers working on behalf of their government) want to target American Congressmen like Chris Smith? Readers of Tibet Will Be Free will probably remember that New Jersey Congressman Chris Smith was a lead advocate for human rights and a free internet when Google launched their tailor-made censor site, Google.cn. At the time, Rep. Smith said, “These are not victimless crimes…We need to stand with the oppressed, not the oppressors.”

Smith also proposed legislation to stop Google and other American tech companies from helping totalitarian governments like China crack down on the internet.

The subcommittee’s chairman, Representative Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey, plans to introduce legislation by week’s end that would restrict an Internet company’s ability to censor or filter basic political or religious terms — even if that puts the company at odds with local laws in the countries where it now operates. Although some advocates have argued that the companies may actually be violating existing trade laws, most experts concede that does not appear to be the case.

Mr. Smith’s legislation, called the Global Online Freedom Act, however, would render much of what the Internet companies are currently doing in China illegal.

Among the act’s provisions is the establishment of an Office of Global Internet Freedom, which would establish standards for Internet companies operating abroad. In addition to prohibiting companies from filtering out certain political or religious terms, it would require them to disclose to users any sort of filtering they undertake.

It strikes me as awfully convenient that Smith would just happen to be hacked by attackers from inside China. The Chinese government has never liked the outspoken position some American politicians have taken on behalf of the people of Tibet and China. Smith is one of them and this is what he gets in return: not respect deserving of an American elected official, but hack jobs by Chinese internet goons.

You stay classy, China.

High-profile Tibetan Writer & Blogger Woeser Under Attack

Woeser, the well-known Tibetan writer/blogger and political dissident, is under intense cyber-attack.

On the evening of May 27th (Beijing time), Woeser discovered that her Skype account and email address were both apparently accessed and her Skype ID hijacked. Contacts of Woeser in China and Tibet have reported that people are impersonating her and contacting them. Woeser said in a statement that “this places me and my contacts in an extremely dangerous situation.” Shortly thereafter, her website was also hacked.

[UPDATE May 29th: Woeser has managed to get her blog back up online. Currently, all the archives are gone and readers can only see posts starting yesterday. Hopefully, she'll soon be able to get everything back up that was there when the site was hacked.]

While it is currently impossible to connect the attacks directly to Chinese officials, a recent profile in The Washington Post notes that Woeser’s books are banned in China and over the past two years, three different blogs she maintained on Chinese servers have been shut down. She was reportedly told by a friend at an internet company that the blogs were shut down on government orders. She has also reported being warned by Chinese police to stop writing about Tibet.

The attack on her website was claimed by the Honker Union of China (it sounds way more badass in Mandarin), a well-known network of nationalistic Chinese hackers. According to Wikipedia, the name Honker (Chinese: 紅客; pinyin: hóngkè) means “Red Guest”, as compared to the usual Chinese transliteration of the term “hacker” (黑客, hēikè, literally “Black Guest”).

The hackers removed the content of Woeser’s website and replaced it with a gif animation of the Chinese flag with the headline “LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA! “DOWN WITH TIBET INDEPENDENCE!” Below the animation is a photo of Woeser with the words “Please remember this Tibetan separatist Woeser’s ugly face. Whoever sees this ugly face, please beat her hard like one beats a dog.” Further text was added and has apparently been changed several times in the hours since the site was hacked. The website is currently hosted on a server in the United States.

More recently, her husband, Chinese writer and intellectual Wang Lixiong, reported that she was placed under house arrest this past March 10th – the 49th anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan uprising in Lhasa. Protests commemorating the 1959 uprising triggered another Tibetan uprising of national proportions, with widespread demonstrations taking place throughout Tibet and continuing to this day. It seems that the confinement has been eased but that she remains under constant surveillance.

Woeser, 41, goes by one name in the Tibetan tradition. She was born in Lhasa and lives in Beijing with her husband. She writes in Chinese and has been a lone voice among Tibetans reporting on recent Tibetan protests across the country and the ensuing crackdown, including details about the situation in Tibetan areas in the wake of the May 12th earthquake.

Below is the English translation of an urgent statement she sent out in an attempt to warn her contacts.

[Subject:] Woeser warning her correspondents on Skype!

Dear friends, in order to spy on me and others on my Skype contact list, someone has for a while on Skype claimed that he or she is an overseas Tibetan, an officer from the Tibetan government-in-exile, or having secrets to pass on etc. It looks that he or she has stolen the list of my Skype contacts. Yet, after I posted a warning to inform my contacts of such a development, someone hijacked my account around 10 pm on May 27th. My password has been changed and I can no longer log in. As far as I can tell, the hijacker has begun to make contact with people in my account. This places me and my contacts in an extremely dangerous situation. Therefore, I am sending the strongest warning. Please stop any communication with “Degewa” on Skype, delete or lock out this user’s name from your Skype account, warn anyone you know who might try to contact me through Skype, tell them to cease contact with “Degewa.”

From now on, if you receive any Skype message from “me” in any other users’ name, please speak first (Tibetan friends, please speak in Tibetan) to verify “my identity.” If the other side of the contact refuses to talk, it means you are not in touch with me.

Also, I suggest you and other friends to avoid this kind of trap by talking, rather than writing, via Skype.

Woeser
Early morning in Beijing
May 28th 2008

Woeser is probably considered a nuisance by the Chinese government for the simple reason that she engages in courageous truth-telling. Her ‘Tibet Updates’ have chronicled the protests and ensuing crackdown throughout Tibet over the last couple months. Her May 9-15 Tibet Update reported the alarming news that the regional government in the epicenter zone issued an urgent document on the day the earthquake struck entitled “Combining work on anti-separatism and safeguarding stability with disaster relief work.” She wrote that Chinese officials also sent letters encouraging local authorities in earthquake-affected Tibetan areas to “be responsible for both anti-separatism and the disaster relief work.”

Elevating her from a nuisance to a threat in the eyes of Chinese officials is the fact that in addition to telling untellable truths, she writes her essays and poetry in a voice that conveys a specific contemporary Tibetan combination of despair, pride, and resistance. Which is to say that her voice alone bears many untellable truths about Tibet, and the spirit of her generation. That her voice inspires younger generations of Tibetans is in itself another untellable truth.

As enemies of truth, it is obvious and expected that the current hard-line Chinese leadership should try to stop a compulsive truth-teller. But they can’t.

Repressing Woeser only amplifies her truth, and many others, about Tibet.

[excerpt from Woeser's poem, "Secrets of Tibet"]

Once in a while, the masked demon reveals its true face,
frightening even the ancient deities.
Yet, the challenges have emboldened the ordinary birth;
who turn prayers in the deep nights into cries under the sun,
who convert whines behind the high walls into songs spread wide.

They are arrested! Punishments increased! Life sentences!
Executions postponed! Shot dead!

I usually keep quiet because I barely know anything.
Having been born and raised under the bugles of the PLA,
I am a suitable inheritor of Communism.

Egg under the red flag, suddenly cracked and broken.
Nearing middle age, belated anger is about to blurt from my throat.
I cannot stop my tears for the suffering Tibetans younger than me.

China’s Security State

Naomi Klein, author of the great book The Shock Doctrine, has an in-depth look at the Chinese security state in Rolling Stone. In the article, Klein looks at how China’s infamous Golden Shield surveillance system has been deployed and implemented as a tool in crackdowns in Tibet.

This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country’s notorious system of online controls known as the “Great Firewall.” Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder’s personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces….

When the Tibetan capital of Lhasa was set alight in March, the world caught a glimpse of the rage that lies just under the surface in many parts of China. And though the Lhasa riots stood out for their ethnic focus and their intensity, protests across China are often shockingly militant. In July 2006, workers at a factory near Shenzhen expressed their displeasure over paltry pay by overturning cars, smashing computers and opening fire hydrants. In March of last year, when bus fares went up in the rural town of Zhushan, 20,000 people took to the streets and five police vehicles were torched. Indeed, China has seen levels of political unrest in recent years unknown since 1989, the year student protests were crushed with tanks in Tiananmen Square. In 2005, by the government’s own measure, there were at least 87,000 “mass incidents” — governmentspeak for large-scale protests or riots.

This increased unrest — a process aided by access to cellphones and the Internet — represents more than a security problem for the leaders in Beijing. It threatens their whole model of command-and-control capitalism. China’s rapid economic growth has relied on the ability of its rulers to raze villages and move mountains to make way for the latest factory towns and shopping malls. If the people living on those mountains use blogs and text messaging to launch a mountain-people’s-rights uprising with each new project, and if they link up with similar uprisings in other parts of the country, China’s dizzying expansion could grind to a halt….

The answer is Golden Shield. When Tibet erupted in protests recently, the surveillance system was thrown into its first live test, with every supposedly liberating tool of the Information Age — cellphones, satellite television, the Internet — transformed into a method of repression and control. As soon as the protests gathered steam, China reinforced its Great Firewall, blocking its citizens from accessing dozens of foreign news outlets. In some parts of Tibet, Internet access was shut down altogether. Many people trying to phone friends and family found that their calls were blocked, and cellphones in Lhasa were blitzed with text messages from the police: “Severely battle any creation or any spreading of rumors that would upset or frighten people or cause social disorder or illegal criminal behavior that could damage social stability.”

During the first week of protests, foreign journalists who tried to get into Tibet were systematically turned back. But that didn’t mean that there were no cameras inside the besieged areas. Since early last year, activists in Lhasa have been reporting on the proliferation of black-domed cameras that look like streetlights — just like the ones I saw coming off the assembly line in Shenzhen. Tibetan monks complain that cameras — activated by motion sensors — have invaded their monasteries and prayer rooms.

During the Lhasa riots, police on the scene augmented the footage from the CCTVs with their own video cameras, choosing to film — rather than stop — the violence, which left 19 dead. The police then quickly cut together the surveillance shots that made the Tibetans look most vicious — beating Chinese bystanders, torching shops, ripping metal sheeting off banks — and created a kind of copumentary: Tibetans Gone Wild. These weren’t the celestial beings in flowing robes the Beastie Boys and Richard Gere had told us about. They were angry young men, wielding sticks and long knives. They looked ugly, brutal, tribal. On Chinese state TV, this footage played around the clock.

The police also used the surveillance footage to extract mug shots of the demonstrators and rioters. Photos of the 21 “most wanted” Tibetans, many taken from that distinctive “streetlamp” view of the domed cameras, were immediately circulated to all of China’s major news portals, which obediently posted them to help out with the manhunt. The Internet became the most powerful police tool. Within days, several of the men on the posters were in custody, along with hundreds of others.

The flare-up in Tibet, weeks before the Olympic torch began its global journey, has been described repeatedly in the international press as a “nightmare” for Beijing. Several foreign leaders have pledged to boycott the opening ceremonies of the games, the press has hosted an orgy of China-bashing, and the torch became a magnet for protesters, with anti-China banners dropped from the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge. But inside China, the Tibet debacle may actually have been a boon to the party, strengthening its grip on power. Despite its citizens having unprecedented access to information technology (there are as many Internet users in China as there are in the U.S.), the party demonstrated that it could still control what they hear and see. And what they saw on their TVs and computer screens were violent Tibetans, out to kill their Chinese neighbors, while police showed admirable restraint. Tibetan solidarity groups say 140 people were killed in the crackdown that followed the protests, but without pictures taken by journalists, it is as if those subsequent deaths didn’t happen.

Chinese viewers also saw a world unsympathetic to the Chinese victims of Tibetan violence, so hostile to their country that it used a national tragedy to try to rob them of their hard-won Olympic glory. These nationalist sentiments freed up Beijing to go on a full-fledged witch hunt. In the name of fighting a war on terror, security forces rounded up thousands of Tibetan activists and supporters. The end result is that when the games begin, much of the Tibetan movement will be safely behind bars — along with scores of Chinese journalists, bloggers and human-rights defenders who have also been trapped in the government’s high-tech web.

Police State 2.0 might not look good from the outside, but on the inside, it appears to have passed its first major test.

Klein’s entire article paints a frightening picture of government power, all-seeing surveillance, and the willingness of the Chinese government to use the infrastructure of a surveillance state to brutally crack down on any acts of democracy or perceived threats to their power.

US Congress Pushing for Free Information in China

Wired’s Threat Level Blog reports good news coming out of the US Congress. Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ) is renewing his efforts to get the Global Online Freedom Act passed before the Beijing Olympics.

Republican congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey used a meeting with international human rights group Reporters Without Borders last week to lobby for passage of a bill aimed at curtailing U.S. tech companies’ participation in foreign countries’ internet censorship schemes. Smith is hoping that the bill reaches the floor of the house and passes before the Olympics begin in August.

Smith issued a joint statement with the international rights group on the day that mainland Chinese authorities noted that there are now as many internet users in China as there are in the United States.

“The gross mistake of allowing China to host the Olympics in light of its horrific human rights record will be significantly compounded if we do not speak up and call attention to the human rights heroes who languish in Chinese jails,” said Smith, in a little-noted statement issued Friday. “We also need to take action to protect journalists and pro-democracy activists who may otherwise become the next victims after the spotlight provided by the Olympics is gone from the world’s center stage.”

Smith’s bill, HR 275, the Global Online Freedom Act, has been endorsed by more than a dozen human rights groups, including Reporters Without Borders, Human Rights watch and Amnesty International. Among other things, the bill would make it a crime for U.S. companies to turn over personal information on their users to governments of “internet restricting countries” who would use the information to repress its citizens. There’s an exception for information turned over for “legitimate foreign law enforcement purposes.”

The Global Online Freedom Act was first floated a number of years ago, following Google’s partnership with the Chinese government to launch Google.cn. At the time, California Congressman Tom Lantos worked hard alongside Smith to hold American technology companies to a high standard of behavior when it comes to their dealings with oppressive regimes like China. A staffer for Democratic Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman says it is their hope to bring this bill to the floor before Congress adjourns in August.