Καθώς στο παρελθόν έχω αναφερθεί στη λογοκρισία στο διαδίκτυο στην ηπειρωτική Κίνα, οφείλω να παραθέσω ένα απόσπασμα από αυτά που είπε ο Κινέζος εκπρόσωπος, διαψεύδοντας μεταξύ άλλων τη νομική σχολή του Harvard, την OpenNet Initiative και το Google. Παραθέτω το εν λόγω κείμενο, όπως μπορείτε να το βρείτε στον επίσημο δικτυακό τόπο του Internet Governance Forum που έγινε στην Αθήνα.
Δεν γνωρίζω την επίσημη θέση της κινεζικής κυβέρνησης πάνω στο θέμα, αλλά ο κύριος Γιανγκ Σιαοκούν (Yang Xiaokun) ήταν ξεκάθαρος: «δεν έχουμε περιορισμούς».
NIELS ELGAARD LARSEN: This is Niels. Things like that happen in other countries, too, and it is just as bad. And that is my question. It seems like we Europeans are taking the high ground when in fact freedom of expression is under a lot of attack just in the European Union, and specifically Denmark and Sweden and so on. I am thinking about the filtering, the fight against me allowing to talk, and now the Danish police is going to monitor IP phone conversations and so on. So what does that leave Cisco? Are they supposed to be allowed to sell systems that can assist the Danish police in blocking my phone call to my wife that is in Canada right now? I don’t want this to be an excuse for China and so on to do repression. It’s bad where it happens.
NIK GOWING: You are talking about double standards. Please, there is an intervention here. Can you introduce yourself, please. We can hear you, yes.
YANG XIAOKUN: Good.
NIK GOWING: Are we getting translation? No. Could you just wait one moment. Is there a Chinese translator in there? Is anyone hearing the Chinese or English translation? No. We are not hearing you. They can hear you now, yes.
YANG XIAOKUN: First of all, I have to say that today we have talked a lot about China, and think that’s rather strange, because if we participate in forums like this, I think that we should spend more time reflecting on the issues that have been raised. And perhaps we have talked a lot about China. There are lots of millions of Chinese that have no access to the Internet and our deepest hope is that everyone will have access in the future, so that they will be able to communicate and take part in these exchanges. We are here because we would like to promote openness. But we have not really raised the issue of how we could participate more fully and how we could have better access to the Internet. My second point is that I heard what various people here said, and collusion and collaboration and cooperation with China. The Cisco example was given. Everyone knows that there is a lot of tourism in China, and towards China. I hope that everyone will be visiting us soon. But I think that we need to also protect tourists in our country. And I have to say that I am a Chinese citizen and I feel that I need to be protected. For example, we are threatened by terrorism. We do need protection. So we should make sure that everybody can come to China, enjoy our beautiful country. And I heard with great interest what our Pakistani colleague said. Now, on the equipment use and the software in China, I don’t think that we should be using different standards to judge China. In China, we don’t have software blocking Internet sites. Sometimes we have trouble accessing them. But that’s a different problem. And I know that some colleagues listen to the BBC in their offices from the Webcast. And I’ve heard people say that the BBC is not available in China or that it’s blocked. I’m sure I don’t know why people say this kind of thing. I work in Geneva. I am part of the Chinese mission to the U.N. And I listen to the BBC in my office.
NIK GOWING: (inaudible).
YANG XIAOKUN: I still have several points to make.
NIK GOWING: Could I, may I ask you a question? How would you define, for those who are not familiar with your government’s policy and the detail of it, what is the principle on restrictions of openness in China?
YANG XIAOKUN: We do not have restriction at all.
(από το ακροατήριο): Come on!
NIK GOWING: All right. Do you want to answer, would you like to elaborate on that? None at all?
YANG XIAOKUN: How can I elaborate on it if we don’t have any restriction?
NIK GOWING: Okay. What are the other points you wanted to make, quickly?
YANG XIAOKUN: Yes. Somebody talked about the — okay. Well, some people say that there are journalists in China that have been arrested. We have hundreds of journalists in China, very few have been arrested. But there are criminals in all societies and we have to arrest them. But these are legal problems. It has nothing to do with freedom of expression.
NIK GOWING: What was said from the Chinese representative was that the BBC is not blocked — can you clarify the BBC’s position on that?
RICHARD SAMBROOK: I’m glad he listens and reads us in Geneva, but if he was in China he would not be able to listen to our Mandarin service on short wave radio and not be able to read our Mandarin news site on the website. And this is now very well established and it is very effectively blocked on both the Internet and shortwave radio, and has been for many years.
NIK GOWING: I said I would come back to both Microsoft and Cisco and I have to keep moving forward. There are a number of questions. They are quite similar, about corporate responsibility in promoting free speech, and we heard that suggestion. Are corporations meant to be involved in securing openness and freedom to speak? Could we round off this section with your view and some of your responses to some of the things you have heard — not least what we heard from Vint about the limits to corporate responsibility in this particular area. Art.
ART REILLY: Going back to the point at which I entered the queue, the question was whether we have the ability to audit progress within China, and I wanted to mention one metric. Cisco entered the market in China in 1994 and in 1995 there were about 80,000 users on the Internet in China. In 2005, ten years later, they had gone from 80,000 to 130 million — a substantial increase in the use and the ability for information to flow within China as well as across borders. And as you can imagine, with issues such as worms and denial-of-service attacks, these are not unique to one part of the world, so the issues I raised before relative to the need for capabilities to protect against the threats from viruses and worms and denial-of-service attacks exist, and so the equipment that’s provided in China is the same as elsewhere. I very much agree with Vint on the issue of the power of a company like Cisco, or perhaps others, to in fact exert influence. The market in which Cisco is involved is a very competitive market. In fact, it is a competitive global market, and as many of you may know there are significant manufacturers of equipment that provide similar capabilities for the same purposes I mentioned: security and network management, to ensure and promote the free flow of information. So the actions that we are taking with regard to this technology are to allow that free flow, not to impede it. Thank you.
NIK GOWING: But the word he used was persuasion being probably the best you could hope for. Do you agree?
ART REILLY: Yes.
NIK GOWING: Fred.
FRED TIPSON: Yes, and I do also, Nik. I think massive bargaining power is an exaggeration, although we are actively exploring within the industry how we can better exercise our joint persuasive abilities in these areas. But I think it’s critical for the forum that we not portray the Internet as a threat to governments. That should not be the theme that comes out of this discussion, because the reality — take a country like China — the Internet is transforming the political culture of China. There is no question about it. And for someone who has worked in and around China for 20 years, it’s incredible to me how much is available when you search for it, how widely people are expressing their political views, often at great personal risk, on blogs in China and chat rooms and all sorts of other places. There are courageous people who are pushing the envelope of politics, but there are also courageous people in the Chinese government who believe in the importance of the Internet as a modernizing, educating force. There is not a monolithic determination to suppress the Internet in a country like China. But that’s obviously a much longer discussion. The point I really want to make is that if we are serious about human rights, if we really want to advance the cause of human rights for users in China, we must be specific about what it is we are concerned with. The Yahoo! case is a classic example. First of all we need to get the company right, but secondly, the Yahoo! case involved a situation where the police came to Yahoo! and said, “We believe that there’s a criminal sending e-mails across your service. We want to know who he is.” Yahoo!’s servers were located in China. If they had turned them down, all the people would have been arrested, and they probably would have been thrown out of China. Now, it could be the position of human-rights organizations legitimately to say that should be the result for Yahoo! — they should not be doing business in China if it means they put users at risk. The fact of the matter is Yahoo! didn’t know this was a journalist. Yahoo! didn’t even know he had gone to prison. You don’t know, when the police come in the door, whether they are after a journalist, a pedophile, or an IP polluter. And no country in the world gives you that information. In fact, you are required in the United States, and I believe in the UK, not to inform the person the police are looking for when they come in seeking information about that person. Now, our servers and the information relating to customers — and Microsoft’s — have been in the United States and, therefore, are not as easily accessible by police authorities outside the United States. But China, and virtually every country in the world, is headed toward a situation where they are going to require that personally identifying information is available to the police authorities in that society as a condition of doing business with their citizens. So that is the trend of the situation we’re watching. Not only that, the trend is for governments to say you must retain this data in available form for at least two years — in the case of some of the discussions going on in the United States — to make it even easier for the government, under legitimate circumstances and due process, to get access to this information. Now, that’s the reality of the kinds of human-rights challenge that companies have in trying to do business not only in restrictive societies, but arguably in virtually every country in the world, including my own. There are balances being struck and challenges that we need to address. Obviously, in certain countries the effort that’s going towards restrictiveness is much greater than in others. But that’s a conversation we need to have, because you would be surprised, when you look country by country, at what’s restricted, how many subjects, and how many countries have restrictive regulations. So I don’t want to monopolize this conversation at all, but I think if we really are serious about talking about human rights we need to talk about the rights that we want to protect and how best to protect them, and not broad-brush condemn this government or that government without reference to the facts.