Censorship at the Olympics

The Chinese government and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) acknowledged Wednesday that reporters covering the Olympics will be blocked from accessing Internet sites that Chinese authorities consider politically sensitive; this after having said time and again that it would not censor reporter access to the Olympics.

In answer to the censorship, Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based advocacy group issued a guide on how to use proxy servers to get around China's censorship. The Web-based guide also advised reporters covering the Games, which begin Aug. 8, that their telephone calls and e-mails are liable to be monitored by Chinese security agencies without prior notification. The reporters must keep in mind that the Chinese government has years of practice in repression and censorship and must tread the waters carefully in order to report the goings on to the outside world.

However, the Chiense government, which uses an extensive array of monitoring software to comb through whatever people call up on their screens and block sites that China's security or propaganda officials consider unacceptable, blocked the guide. Sites run by Amnesty International, the human rights group; Falun Gong, the spiritual movement; Tibet independence sympathizers; and a host of other human rights groups hostile to aspects of Communist Party rule have been targeted by the censorship equipment, which is backed up by an estimated 30,000 monitors employed by the Public Security Bureau.

IOC official Kevan Gosper, with responsibilities for media relations, told reporters in Beijing that Olympic officials had negotiated with the Chinese government an accord under which China's censors would continue blocking politically sensitive sites for reporters covering the Games. The pledge of unrestricted access applied only to sites related to the Olympic competitions, he explained.

Sun Weide, a spokesman for the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic games, said at a news conference that Chinese authorities would do their best to make sure reporters could cover the Games without hindrance, despite the censorship. He suggested the banned topics were not part of the athletic events and should not be of interest to reporters anyway.

Journalists at the Main Press Center, which is to house up to 5,000 reporters, raised their complaints after discovering they could not call up an Amnesty International report issued Monday criticizing China's human rights record leading up to the Games. They also could not access Falun Gong sites without going through a proxy server and said the overall speed of the Internet at the press center seemed to be way below par.

Reporters could access Wikipedia's home page at the Beijing International Media Center, but they could not search the site. the British Broadcasting Corporation's Chinese-language site was blocked, but major global news sites were available. But The Internet here has been painfully slow, particularly in areas where monitoring is heavy because of China's extensive filtering system, which responds to a long list of key words maintained by the Public Security Bureau.

"Disappointed that they clamped down on the Internet" is how Dennis Wilder, the White House's Asian affairs director, told reporters in Washington that he felt. "There have been questions about the access to the Internet and other issues at the Olympic centers," he said. "We think the Chinese government needs to heed those concerns, that if China is going to demonstrate it is truly moving forward as a modern society, this is part of it."

At TicosLand.com, we ask ourselves, if you have nothing to fear and you have nothing to hide, then why would you censor anything? We leave it up to our readers in Costa Rica and around the world to respond.