U.S. Businesses Help China Suppress Internet (Cisco)

Children are running by, boats are paddling, the smell of roast lamb fills the air, and Michael Robinson, a young American computer engineer, sits rigidly, facing an empty cafe on the shore of Qinghai Lake, speaking in a low voice of the crackdown. "What is better? Big Brother Internet? Or no Internet at all?" he asks.

Robinson was hired as the lead support engineer in 1996 by the Chinese government and Global One, a Sprint-France Telecom-Deutsche Telekom joint venture, to build the first network in China providing public access to the Internet.

One day sticks in his mind. The Chinese engineers working with him suddenly convened a special meeting, demanding to know if it would be possible to do keyword searching inside e-mails and web addresses on the Chinese Internet.

Not really, Robinson replied; all information that travels the Net is broken into little packets. It's hard to "sniff" packets of information, particularly coded packets. You would need to intercept packets as they travel, and then there's the problem of collating the information they contain, actually making sense of it.

On the third go-round, it dawned on him that his fellow computer geeks wanted to end the meeting, too. But at a higher level, someone required assurance. Before Internet construction proceeded further, they would need to monitor what Chinese users did with it.

For the engineers, this was just cover-your-ass stuff. As long as the foreigner assured them that down the road the Chinese would be able to build an Internet firewall against the world and conduct surveillance on its own citizens, the engineers could continue working with him. Yes, yes, it can be done, Robinson told them, and they went back to work.

Americans make dreams, and every generation carries new ones to China. Since 1979 that dream has been the fall of the Chinese Communist party and the rise of the world's largest market, an event that U.S. businessmen and China hands keep predicting is on the horizon or even imminent.

Yet Robinson was not naive. He understood the self-serving nature of much of the freedom-is-just-around-the-corner rhetoric. Working inside, he sensed the Chinese leadership's true motives in building an Internet.

One of his friends, Peter Lovelock, who heads up the Insight Division at madeforchina, an IT research consultancy in Beijing, puts it this way: "These are Marxists. Control the means of communication; embrace the means of communication. Fill it with Chinese voices. If they can block the outside, and block relationships between Chinese forces, no one will listen."

But for Robinson, any reservations over complicity with Chinese government objectives were outweighed by a bedrock faith in the Internet's ingenious architecture. A system originally conceived, in part, as a method to relay U.S. command messages over a damaged network after sustaining a Soviet nuclear strike could surely find a way to get messages through, securely, amid the white noise of millions of Chinese users.

Resistance would be futile. Even the Chinese Borg could not stop it. With the genie of free speech out of the bottle, it would just be a matter of time before those predictions of freedom in China come true.

That vision has now been called into question, not by a failure of the Internet's architecture, but in several cases, by a failure of American corporate values.

Let's start where Robinson left off, with the expansion of the Chinese Internet. I treated a top Chinese engineer (who wishes to remain anonymous) to a 30-course imperial meal by the shores of Beijing’s Beihai Lake. As hoped, the shark's fin soup loosened his tongue, on the subject of Cisco Systems.

In the United States, Cisco is known (among other things) for building corporate firewalls to block viruses and hackers. In China, the government had a unique problem: how to keep a billion people from accessing politically sensitive Web sites, now and forever.

The way to do it would be this: If a Chinese user tried to view a Web site outside China with political content, such as CNN.com, the address would be recognized by a filter program that screens out forbidden sites. The request would then be thrown away, with the user receiving a banal message: "Operation timed out."

Great, but China's leaders had a problem: The financial excitement of a wired China quickly led to a proliferation of eight major Internet service providers (ISPs) and four pipelines to the outside world. To force compliance with government objectives, to ensure that all pipes lead back to Rome, they needed the networking superpower, Cisco, to standardize the Chinese Internet and equip it with firewalls on a national scale.

According to the Chinese engineer, Cisco came through, developing a router device, integrator and firewall box specially designed for the government's telecom monopoly. Cisco also appears to have offered a significant initial discount in the price of the firewall boxes.

The Chinese engineer claimed that a similar Cisco product sold in the West could sell for as much as $50,000. At approximately $20,000 a box, China Telecom "bought many thousands" and IBM arranged for the "high-end" financing. Accordingly, in China "every firewall has Cisco routers.”

Robinson confirms: "Cisco made a killing. They are everywhere." All across China, as users searched for the forbidden Internet, operations timed out.

Cisco does not deny its success in China. Nor does it deny that it may have altered its products to suit the special needs of the Chinese "market" – a localization scheme the company avoided elsewhere in the world – but it categorically rejects any responsibility for how the government uses its firewall boxes.

Cisco's Motto: 'We Don't Care' David Zhou, a systems engineer manager at Cisco, Beijing, told me flat out: "We don't care about the [Chinese government's] rules. It's none of Cisco's business."

I replied that he has a point: It's not the gun but the way it's used, and how can a company that builds firewalls be expected to, well, not build firewalls?

Zhou relaxed, then confidently added that the capabilities of Cisco's routers can be used to intercept information and to conduct keyword searches: "We have the capability to look deeply into the packet." He admitted that Cisco is under the direct scrutiny of State Security, the Public Security Bureau, and the People's Liberation Army (PLA).

Does Cisco allow the PLA to look into packets? Zhou didn't know or wouldn't say.

But consider, for example, the arrest of veteran activist Chi Shouzhu last April. He was picked up in a crowded train station minutes after printing online materials promoting Chinese freedom.

Incidents such as this have mushroomed in China, suggesting that Cisco may not be the only one capable of looking deeply into the packets. In fact, Cisco's ability to thrive in China may well depend on cooperation with the Public Security Bureau and the PLA.

Cisco's firewall has proven to be far from foolproof. New sites on forbidden topics crop up daily, and with the proliferation of ISPs that just want more subscribers surfing, the lag time between updating the government's list of banned sites and implementation can be erratic. So Chinese security organs also needed to control the search engines through which new sites can be found.

This article, by Ethan Guttman, originally appeared in Weekly Standard. Purchased and reprinted with permission through Featurewell syndicate. Next: The role of Yahoo!

Didn't Big Brother have the equivalent of "internet" in the 2-way TV of Orwell's 1984 ?

I maintain that Hitler was able to kill not because he had weapons but because his victims had been disarmed.A rifle still trumps a computer face-to-face.

Yuck. Unfortunately, I am reminded of what Marx said, regarding how a capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.

I am ultra plus-pro Capitalism though. Its the only system that allows us to vote with our dollars and attempt to influence the moral behavior of corporations. I think maybe it's time to switch to other Internet companies, and let Cisco know why we won't be buying from them anymore. Unless you approve of what they are doing...in which case, keep on buying from them *heh*

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