Web of Intrigue
by Louise Williams
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
29th April 2000

Asian governments are scrambling to control cyberspace, where rebels can say
whatever they like,writes Louise Williams.

INFORMATION is power, or so the enduring dictators of history have
understood. The authoritarian, or quasi-authoritarian regimes, of the
post-colonial era in Asia have understood well the relationship between
control over information and political power. In so many of Asia's capitals
- from Beijing to Jakarta, from Rangoon to Hanoi, the scene was much the
same. In obscure back rooms, rows of desks were lined up, their surfaces
rubbed smooth by years of diligent effort, as the faceless agents of
authoritarian states dutifully pored over newspapers and magazines.

Carefully, the swarms of censors cut out "subversive" articles from abroad,
one by one, or bent low over "offensive" captions and photographs and
blacked them out by hand. They laboured over their newspapers, too, erasing
hints of rebellion and allusion to unpalatable truths tucked within the
reams of propaganda which served as their societies' only sources of
information.

When the Soeharto regime came to power in Indonesia in the mid-1960s it
shipped 10,000 of its artists, writers, unionists and activists off to a
barren, isolated island called Buru where it imposed total censorship.
Inmates, many of whom spent more than a decade eking out a living from the
poor soil, were denied reading material and access to the tools of writing -
pens, pencils, paper, typewriters - so that they would be unable to transmit
their ideas even among themselves.

Take a leap forward three decades to last May when the IT Security Unit of
Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs quietly wandered into the files of
200,000 private computers in what was later explained as an effort to trace
a damaging virus.

The breach was detected by a private computer enthusiast, forcing the
Government to announce that SingNet, the Internet arm of the largely
state-owned telecommunications giant, SingTel, had been "wrong" to use the
state security apparatus to conduct the scan without first seeking
permission from individual users. Better security was promised in the
future.

But for the citizens of a nation accustomed to government intervention in
almost every aspect of their daily lives, the scanning scare had already
aptly demonstrated the potential for any one of their business or home
computers to be externally monitored without their knowledge.

Similarly, in 1994 an overzealous technocrat had instructed another local
Internet provider to scan 80,000 email accounts of university researchers,
an unlikely group to be specifically targeted in a remote hunt for
pornographic material. Within the high-rise towers of Singapore's economic
success sit hundreds of thousands of computers in one of the world's most
technologically advanced nations. Recent government statistics claim 42 per
cent of Singaporean households are linked to the Internet, and 59 per cent
have home computers, the highest participation rate in Asia. In Australia 22
per cent of homes have Internet access (47 per cent of them with home
computers) and in Japan 13 per cent (42 per cent with home computers).

Just completed is a nationwide broadband Internet system, Singapore One,
delivering bedazzling at-home services such as immediate access to traffic
speeds on any street, thanks to global positioning systems set in all the
nation's taxis, online schools, movies on demand and live news which the
system "remembers" and can be rewound.

Conventional narrow-band Internet connections, such as the ones most of us
use, are free, various government agencies, libraries and private companies
offer banks of PCs to anyone who walks in off the street and regular
community education programs are held to encourage

Singaporeans to embrace the IT age.

For decades Singapore has fascinated political observers with its apparently
contradictory mix of free-wheeling market capitalism and political controls,
with information controls to match. Tough press licensing regulations,
internal security provisions and the use of punitive defamation laws have
fashioned a local media which often looks and sounds like a government
mouthpiece, and a society built around the smooth swoosh of escalators
within expansive shopping
malls, not the abrasive clamour of public debate.

At present, the Singapore Government blocks 100 Internet sites, but admits
this is only a token, and highly ineffective, effort to control a technology
which is the equivalent of information chaos.

The Internet is clearly the most profound challenge yet for national
governments which have used information control as one of the key pillars to
maintaining political power.

And now, as Singapore gears up to transform its economy into one of the
world's key IT hubs, it is proving a crucial test case for other like-minded
regimes in the region - China, Vietnam and Malaysia, for example - as to how
governments might handle the threat from cyberspace.

Has information technology - which has taken the control of communication
outside borders and thrown it into an anarchic global arena - effectively
defeated censorship? As such, will the power of the remaining governments of
the region which continue to use censorship as an important political tool
inevitably be eroded?

Or will governments be able to limit the impact of the Internet by using
"national security" laws, building higher and higher "firewalls" or turning
the technology back on its users, employing it as a giant surveillance
device?

Already one regional government has fallen with the help of the Internet as
a mobilising tool for student demonstrations and a source of daily
information: the Soeharto Government of Indonesia in May 1998.

In Malaysia, opposition opinions speed across the Net; sites such as
freeMalaysia.com offer the juiciest rumours on corrupt business deals with
personal scandals to match.

 From the United States, China is bombarded with anti-Beijing propaganda on
the Net; senior politburo members feature on mailing lists just to
demonstrate that the tables are being turned
on a regime which has itself specialised in propaganda. Vietnam is busy
trying to screen all incoming and outgoing email through a central censor.
Hanoi has bought "firewalls" designed in the US for corporate use and
installed them across the national network. Yet in cybercafes, groups of
computer geeks have discovered they can occasionally breach them by simply
hitting cancel over and over again.

The hermit state of Burma has responded by banning the Internet altogether,
choosing autarchy for its already impoverished citizens over the risk
information technology poses to the military regime.

In Communist Party-controlled Laos, the official local newspaper recently
made a serious tactical error in the battle for its readers' minds. A group
of Lao dissidents in the US had "borrowed" the newspaper's masthead and set
up an opposition version of the daily news, posting it on the Web. The
Vientiane Times disowned the copycat with outraged announcements in its own
pages, merely sending more and more curious readers off to the Internet.



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