IFTF's Virtual China blog links to my post on the World Buddhist Forum & Internet Buddhism and highlights 'what is at stake in Virtual China'.

Human enhancement & bioethics conference at Stanford Law School next week:

Between the ideological extremes of absolute prohibition and total laissez-faire that dominate popular discussions of human enhancement there are many competing agendas, hopes and fears. How can the language of human rights guide us in framing the critical issues? How will enhancement technologies transform the demands we make of human rights?

With the Human Enhancement and Human Rights conference we seek to begin a conversation with the human rights community, bioethicists, legal scholars, and political activists about the relationship of enhancement technologies to human rights, cognitive liberty and bodily autonomy. It is time to begin the defense of human rights in the era of human enhancement.

Pico Iyer reviews Lhasa: Streets with Memories in Time Magazine.

Lhasa: Streets with Memories, by Robert Barnett, is, on its surface, a meditation on the city's past and future (see Ma Jian's latest book) by a lecturer at Columbia University in New York, who draws heavily on such cultural icons as Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Italo Calvino. But underneath the high-toned exterior, it is something much more interesting: Barnett spends part of each year in Lhasa, and appears in no hurry to alienate his Chinese hosts; at the same time, he was one of the few foreigners to witness the demonstrations Tibetans staged in Lhasa in 1987, and so can understand the pain and fear that lie just below the city's ever more modern surfaces. His rumination on the capital of Tibet is the rare book that can draw tears just with its assemblage of neutral, entirely unpolemical facts.

[...]

And yet, in the face of these losses, Barnett reports that more and more Chinese visitors now give offerings to the Buddhas in the Jokhang Temple, adopt Tibetan names, and even seek out lamas to instruct them. Might Tibet creep into Chinese souls and consciences even as China takes over Tibetan streets? Barnett is too subtle and skeptical to concentrate on anything more than the silences that lie at the heart of many a Lhasa conversation, and the human realities that remain too complex for any simple right or wrong. In Lhasa: Streets with Memories, though, he shows us with overpowering restraint a city that, increasingly, has no memory at all.Memory —like history and culture and religion—is just one more redundancy pushed aside to make room for more skyscrapers.

Time Magazine

Hangzhou, China is hosting the World Buddhist Forum over the next three days. China's 'Panchen Lama' defended China's record on religion, but the other delegates are reported to have ignored him. Neither the Dalai Lama, nor the Karmapa were invited. There are, however, some interesting glimpses of future policy in articles & speeches available on the forum's website

An Husheng, for example: A Brief Discussion on the Dissemination of Buddhism in the Internet Age

The Internet Age has arrived; it has accelerated the process of globalization. The Internet is not only the most important technology in contemporary society, but also the most important way of culture dissemination in this society, and it will certainly become the new century's major cultural competition occasion. Whoever grasps the dominance of the network will be able to more effectively influence society and guide the public and can thus gain strategic advantage in the field of culture. Internet as the most effective new way to popularize and spread Buddhism, has realized our aspirations of showing the Buddha's land at the end of a hair and turning the wheel of the dharma in an atom as described by the Avatamsaka Sutra (Sk.), 華嚴經/Huayan Jing (zh). The age of Internet Buddhism has quietly arrived.

China's Huayan school is based on the Avatamsaka Sutra, which contains the famous vision of Indra's Net:

The Hindu myth of Indra's Net provides an allegory of this interdependent organization. This net exists in Indra's palace in heaven and extends infinitely in all directions. At each node of the net where threads cross there is a perfectly clear gem that reflects all the other gems in the net. As each gem reflects every other one; so are you affected by every other system in the universe.

As the threads of Indra's net bind the gems to the net so do our physical bodies bind our minds and other physical entities bind other systems to the universe. Through the threads we reach each other, passing information across the expanses of space. Yet how did this ballet of information ever come about? You see new systems constantly spring to life, arising out of near chaos creating a small pattern that presents a new random twist to that thread of existence.

Capra uses this metaphor in The Turning Point

The similarity of this image to the hadron bootstrap is indeed striking. The metaphor of Indra's net may justly be called the first bootstrap model, created by the Eastern sages some 2,500 years before the beginning of particle physics." Fritjof Capra --Chapter 8 of The Turning Point - Fritjof Capra (1982) via Metaphors

If it is the case, as An Husheng argues, that "whoever grasps the dominance of the network will be able to more effectively influence society and guide the public and can thus gain strategic advantage", then Hangzhou's most famous son, the rocket scientist Tsien Hsue-shen, & his disciples work on complexity and social systems - fused with Buddhism could be central to that objective. But, compare the sophistication of senior Tibetan lamas understanding of science, dialogues with India and the West -- with the Chinese technocracy's understanding of Buddhism. . if Beijing is serious about the Middle Way, isn't it about time the Dalai Lama was invited to the table?

Richard C. Morais, (Cover story for Forbes)

. . . with engineering help from half a dozen Western firms, the Chinese Communist Party has erected a huge apparatus to censor free speech. A ragtag crew of hacker dissidents may succeed in tearing it down.
In a windowless room in New York City a computer engineer with owlish glasses--call her “Jenny Chen”--peers at a color-coded bar graph on her PC screen. Her group is launching attacks on the Chinese wall of censorship that blocks access to sites discussing verboten topics like civil rights and democracy. The graph displays how many Chinese that month evaded the country’s censorship to condemn the Chinese Communist Party.

Chen, a Beijing-born woman of about 40, runs her own IT businesses. Her group, and like-minded “hacktivists” (as they call themselves) spread around the globe, are chipping away at the Golden Shield, the term that describes the filtering system that censors the Internet and e-mail of China’s 110 million Internet users. The invaders slip contraband words and ideas in and out of the country via such means as mass e-mails, proxy servers that aren’t yet blacked out and code words that aren’t yet on government blacklists.

I'm sure I've been on about this for a while -- the more precise timekeeping system planned for Galileo could prove to be a major competitive advantage for the system over GPS:

the US must now recognize that it is in a “chronographical arms race” with the EU, and it cannot be passive.

SHEN ZHEN, China, Jan. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Golden Group Corporation (Shen
Zhen) Limited ("Golden"), the major subsidiary of China Security and
Surveillance Technology Inc. ("China Security"), has recently entered into 3
long-term contracts with police departments and major railways in the People's
Republic of China.

In 2006, a major milestone of Golden is going to begin the collaboration
with Police Departments in China. Golden has recently entered into 3 contracts
with police departments to share the traffic penalty on a pro-rata basis. The
contracts are on a long term basis with an average life of 10 years. The
company expects that the revenue from this segment will reach USD $12.2
million in 2006.

In addition, in 2005, Golden signed contracts with South Railway and Xi'an
Railway, the two major railways in China. These projects are expected to
generate a USD $1.3 million income for the company in 2006.

While RSF is calling for an ethical code for American Hi-tech companies doing business in China the EU is trying unsucessfully to engage China in a dialogue about its online censorship practices. This hasn't prevented China and the European Union signing a joint agreement to develop a high-speed, next-generation network. The project comes as both sides are working closely on the Galileo Project, an European alternative to the global positioning system developed by the United States. Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong explains how it all works, and he says U.S. companies need to take a stand against Beijing. Declan McCullagh notes new congresional intrest in the issue, Corporate America should not be "hand-in-glove with a dictatorship", while the Economist reports that there are signs that the concept of privacy is gaining currency in China...echoing the debates now common in western societies, many in China are beginning to bristle at the intrusiveness of nosy employers, data-mining marketers and ubiquitous security cameras.

The World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG or 'upholdjustice' / zhuichaguoji ) has conducted an investigation into Microsoft's role in the Golden Shield project. This article is one part of a systematic exposure of the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners via Golden Shield System and Internet monitoring:

Investigation on Microsoft’s Involvement in the Chinese Communist Party’s Human Rights Abuses

MailSieve

According to the web site of Microsoft (China), HTMMS (Hi Team Mail Monitor and Management System), which was developed based on Microsoft platforms, is designed to monitor and manage all email communication on network in various enterprises and organizations,…including Outlook Web Access and major free WebMail. “The professional edition of HTMMS is used in the Public Security, the National Security, the military and other important information security departments…from one computer, one or a multitude of 1000Mbps can be monitored simultaneously”, and it is mainly installed at the gateway of MANs (Metropolitan Area Network) to “monitor email transmission” and “to automatically intercept emails”. “The professional edition of HTMMS is called MailSieve, which has currently been installed in the communication departments of many large cities.”

ISA + EIM

Heguang Software group says on its website introduction that “Microsoft (China) Ltd. and Haitian Software Co. jointly released an Internet regulation system based on Microsoft ISA Server 2000 to monitor the behavior of enterprise staff members who access the Internet. This system can effectively monitor Internet activities such as browsing the Web, downloading through FTP and the receiving and sending of e-mails, which demonstrates the “double-effect” Internet security solution by Microsoft and Haitian. Heguang is the sole certified national retailer for this “new package”.

Microsoft developed monitoring and filtering software for the Chinese education system

Excerpt from Document No. 49: “the CCP central committee and the provincial committee are very concerned with the battle on the Internet. In order to continue and deepen the battle against ‘Falun Gong’ evil cult organization; aside from achieving the three “zero” targets, the battle on the Internet is the criterion by which the performance of the local work units and schools is judged…To better conduct the battle over the Internet and especially block information on the Internet is an important part of the battle against Falun Gong evil cult organization. The Party committees of schools must solidly intensify the leadership over the Internet struggle, organize forces and increase input…school leaders, especially the leaders in charge should periodically check on the situation and listen to reports, analyze the situation of the battle, make work arrangements; “610 Offices” of the schools should fully cooperate with the school Internet control units…actively organize and block information online; the school network center should strengthen their awareness of the battle on the Internet,… effectively implement the work to block information from the Internet.” The Document No. 49 [8] requires the monitoring of online information on campus network must be “round the clock, …strictly forbid people in schools and especially ‘Falun Gong’ members to visit ‘Falun Gong’ websites through the campus network and schools’ computer system, search, read, download or upload ‘Falun Gong’ materials.” The same document also states the fundamental method to ensure the information blockade online is to “pay great attention to the technology of web blockade, increase financial and technological input, and upgrade and renew with the latest technology in a timely manner.”

The Third Research Institute of the Ministry of Public Security of China and Microsoft's “united laboratory”

On July 7, 2003, Microsoft China and the Third Research Institute of the Ministry of Public Security formed “The third Research Institute of the Ministry of Public Security of China-Microsoft China Limited Information Security Technology United Laboratory.” [11] Zhang Xinfeng, an assistant to Minister of Public Security, deputy head and director of National Golden Shield Project Leadership Group; Li Runsen, the head for the Golden Shield Project Leadership Group and Head of the Commission of Science and Technology of the Ministry of Public Security; officials from Bureau 11 and Science and Technology Bureau of the Ministry of Public Security; and Huang Cunyi, President of Microsoft Greater China attended the opening ceremony held on the same day. Yan Ming, the head of the Third Research Institute said, “The founding of the information Security United Laboratory indicates that the Third Research Institute has taken another step forward in the cooperation of information security research.

China's Golden Shield

In his presentation at the Fourth Plenary Conference of the Science and Technology Committee of the Ministry of Public Security, Li Runsen, the Director of Science and Technology Committee said, “The goals of the ‘Golden Shield Project’ include six major aspects. They are the construction of the information network, the construction of applied system, the construction of Internet standards, the construction of security system, the construction of management system and the construction of monitoring system for public network information security. In addition, the ‘Golden Shield Project’ has one more major task, which is, to construct the ‘national information network security monitoring center.’ Upon completion, the project would be independently managed and run by Bureau 11, which would be in charge of the work on information network security nationwide.

WOIPFG finds a direct link between western telecom corporations' complicity in the construction of Golden Shield and the imprisonment, torture - and in three cases - the death of Falun Gong practicioners:

According to incomplete statistics, WOIPFG has found that as of the end of April 2004, as a result of Internet-related activities, 108 Falun Gong practitioners have been incarcerated, illegally sent to labor camps, and tortured. Three identified Falun Gong practitioners arrested for Internet-related activities were tortured to death. Among the Falun Gong practitioners who have been arrested and persecuted as a result of Internet surveillance, those with advanced degrees constitute a relatively high percentage.

It has been confirmed that among these 108 practitioners, at least eight are university professors and teachers from Qinghua University, Southwest University, Southwest College of Petroleum, Shenyang University of University Industry, Beijing University of Chemical Engineering, and the China Academy of Science.

In addition, more than 20 other victims of Internet surveillance have bachelor’s degrees or more advanced degrees. More than 12 have master’s degrees and Ph.D. degrees. Around 90% of these 108 Falun Gong practitioners are under 40 years old. The majority had good and stable jobs such as bank employees, company professionals, and governmental staff. Some of them were college students. These statistics are provided to show that the people who are being persecuted, vilified, and tortured by China’s suppression of freedom of information and belief are exemplary and law-abiding citizens.

For more information, please take note of WOIPFG's latest report at www.upholdjustice.org. If you would like to supply WOIPFG with more information, please email it to media@upholdjustice.org.

"… it’s a little strange to tie free trade to human rights issues, it is basically getting down to interference in internal affairs."

Bill Gates, then CEO of Microsoft, standing shoulder to shoulder with Jiang Zemin during a photo-op in Beijing, 1994.


Microsoft Corp. has acquiesed to a request of the Chinese government and shut down the internet journal of a blogger and NYT researcher who discussed 'politically sensitive' issues.

"When we operate in markets around the world, we have to ensure that our service complies with global laws as well as local laws and norms," said Brooke Richardson, of Microsoft's MSN online division.

Investigative journalist and blogger, Rebecca MacKinnon broke the story:

On New Years Eve, MSN Spaces took down the popular blog written by Zhao Jing, aka Michael Anti. Now all you get when you attempt to visit his blog at: http://spaces.msn.com/members/mranti/ is the error message pictured above. (You can see the Google cache of his blog up until Dec.22nd here.)

Note, his blog was TAKEN DOWN by MSN people. Not blocked by the Chinese government.

Anti is one of China’s edgiest journalistic bloggers, often pushing at the boundaries of what is acceptable. (See a recent profile of him here, and an interview with Anti here.) His old blog at the U.S.-hosted Blog-city is believed to have caused the Chinese authorities to block all Blog-city blogs. In the final days of December, Anti became a vocal supporter of journalists at the Beijing Daily News who walked off the job after the top editors were fired for their increasingly daring investigative coverage, including some recent reporting on the recent police shootings of village protestors in the Southern China.

MacKinnon picks up on Article 19's latest position paper (produced with UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, the OSCE Representative on
Freedom of the Media and the OAS Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression
) : Joint Declaration: International Mechanisms for Freedom of Expression. The declaration calls for companies and governments to adhere to the following global standards:

· No one should be required to register with or obtain permission from any public body to operate an Internet service provider, website, blog or other online information dissemination system, including Internet broadcasting. This does not apply to registration with a domain name authority for purely technical reasons or rules of general application which apply without distinction to any kind of commercial operation.

· The Internet, at both the global and national levels, should be overseen only by bodies which are protected against government, political and commercial interference, just as freedom from such interference is already universally acknowledged in the area of the print and broadcast media. National regulation of Internet domain names should never be used as a means to control content.

· The right to freedom of expression imposes an obligation on all States to devote adequate resources to promote universal access to the Internet, including via public access points. The international community should make it a priority within assistance programmes to assist poorer States in fulfilling this obligation.

· Filtering systems which are not end-user controlled – whether imposed by a government or commercial service provider – are a form of prior-censorship and cannot be justified. The distribution of filtering system products designed for end-users should be allowed only where these products provide clear information to end-users about how they work and their potential pitfalls in terms of over-inclusive filtering.

· No one should be liable for content on the Internet of which they are not the author, unless they have either adopted that content as their own or refused to obey a court order to remove that content. Jurisdiction in legal cases relating to Internet content should be restricted to States in which the author is established or to which the content is specifically directed; jurisdiction should not be established simply because the content has been downloaded in a certain State.

· Restrictions on Internet content, whether they apply to the dissemination or to the receipt of information, should only be imposed in strict conformity with the guarantee of freedom of expression, taking into account the special nature of the Internet.

· Corporations which provide Internet searching, chat, publishing or other services should make an effort to ensure that they respect the rights of their clients to use the Internet without interference. While this may pose difficulties in relation to operations in certain countries, these corporations are encouraged to work together, with the support of other stakeholders, to resist official attempts to control or restrict use of the Internet, contrary to the principles set out herein.

On the flight from Paris I read an International Herald Tribune article by Nicolai Ouroussoff (As Israeli barrier goes up, views harden on all sides). The article focuses on Eyal Weizman's critique of the concrete barrier that is encircling Palestinian terriroty:

on a fundamental level, it is also a piece of architecture. And its construction has generated an architectural debate as charged as any in the political realm.

That debate has pitted strategists who mine the leftist architectural theories of the 1960s for ideas on contemporary urban warfare against architects who see the barrier as a perversion of those ideas, along with the utopian visions of Modernists who believed society's problems could be solved with concrete, glass and steel. It is not only unfolding in the halls of academia but in Israeli and American military circles. And it presents a vision of the wall as a system of complex, interweaving spaces - some concrete, some invisible - that is far from our normal perception of an international border.

At the center of this debate is Eyal Weizman, an Israeli architect and activist who has been a controversial figure in his homeland since 2002, when he published a report for a local human rights organization that essentially accused Israeli architects of being collaborators in colonizing the West Bank.

Building is never a neutral act, of course, and Weizman, 35, makes no distinctions between architecture and politics.

I first understood Eyal Weizman’s extraordinary cartography of Israeli control over the West Bank through a series of essays in openDemocracy and it really allowed me to see the Israel-Palestine conflict in a new way. What is rather interesting is that IDF's Operational Theory Research Institute has been reading into Deleuze:

Among the most provocative counterpoints for Weizman's analysis is Shimon Navez, a retired brigadier general in the Israeli Army. Navez, who revels in the kind of jargon heard in architecture studios, directs the Israeli Defense Forces' Operational Theory Research Institute, which trains senior military staff in innovative war tactics.

"We were looking for new modes of thinking that could be suitable to military strategy," he said. "The Americans were looking for technological solutions; we wanted to understand the whole depth of the problem. It struck us that architecture could be a very helpful metaphor."

Navez has little faith in the barrier, which he called "too simplistic, too vulgar" to accomplish its task. "It is a tragic regression in terms of strategy," he said. "It derives from a necessity, but in the longer range it will create a lot of damage - a lot of antagonism. It is a huge violation of space that will be hard to remove."

Navez speaks of "striated" and "smooth" spaces - of a world shaped by solid walls and a more fluid one virtually without boundaries. In his view, the West Bank is an example of smooth space.

It is segregated into carefully defined zones, some of them controlled by the Israeli military and others jointly with the Palestinian Authority. Satellite and aerial surveillance has become ubiquitous.
And an Israeli company is developing a handheld thermal-imaging machine that will let soldiers detect human figures through concrete.

Navez does not direct Israeli military policy. But his views have exerted an influence over a small group of Israeli generals whom he refers to as his "disciples."

He has also met with officials at the Pentagon and American military research groups like Rand to discuss urban warfare in the Middle East, where "swarming" - the idea that soldiers infiltrate enemy space like "clouds" in small, loosely coordinated groups - has become a catch phrase. In such a scenario, the traditional command structure does not apply. Urban soldiers communicate directly with one another in a fluid, amorphous world, free to react to whatever situation arises.

Compared to such a dystopian vision, a concrete barrier erected to separate Israelis from Palestinians can seem like an apparition from antiquity, a counterpart to the crude wooden barrier Trajan built to keep out warring tribes - to separate civilization from barbarity.

Yet to Weizman, these are simply two forms of the same evil. Navez, he said, "is simply trying to replace one form of control with another that is less visible."

The Go lounge at CCC   more »

Security experts have revealed tantalising details about a group of Chinese hackers who are suspected of launching intelligence gathering attacks against the US government.   more »

China's double-digit growth now biggest threat to environment reports Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor on the front page of the The Independent.   more »

Lu Banglie is alive and has been speaking to the BBC about his ordeal. The Beeb also has a good piece on local elections in a land without the rule of law. Benjamin Joffe-Walt and Jonathan Watts profile the popularly elected village chief (today is the anniversary of Gandhi's birth,

A film about Gandhi changed his life. He believes the aggression and hyper-control of the Chinese authorities can be combated only with dialogue, teaching, learning, petitions. Mr Lu studied the doctrines of non-violence to appreciate simplicity, to focus, to spread the word in the villages.

Martin Jacques, currently a visiting scholar at Renmin University, explains more about the background story: sharply increasing inequality and a flood of hundreds of millions of migrant workers sucked into the cities - totally unsustainable ..

In the early phase of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms the farmers were the main beneficiaries, but by the end of the 80s the rural communities began to lose out to the cities, a process that has accelerated in recent years and is the single biggest cause of the alarming growth in inequality. The sense of rural injustice and grievance, fuelled by widespread corruption, is reflected in the huge increase in protests reported last year compared with previous years.

Stephen Bowen of Amnesty international writes,

The story of Lu Banglie and Taishi village is incredibly significant ('They beat him until he was lifeless', October 10) - a fork in the road at which the authorities can move towards human rights and democracy, or impunity for abusive officials. But, sadly, it is a far from isolated case. .

How democracy activist in China's new frontline was left for dead after a brutal attack by a uniformed mob   more »

By Xiao Qiang :: 2005-09-30, 09:14 PM :: Human Rights
The Asian Wall Street Journal publishes Xiao Qiang's commentary on the recent Internet Regulations.   more »

"It is now 2:33am. I can hear gunshots. Put, put, put. I hear them every year at this time."

Why do you blog? A question that's asked both in a ...   more »

www.chinaview.cn 2005-09-23 13:26:18: BEIJING, Sept. 23 (Xinhuanet) -- A Paris-based media watchdog released a free guide Thursday to help bloggers and cyber-dissidents avoid political censorship in countries as far apart as Iran, Vietnam and Cuba.

The guide, published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and partly financed by the French Foerign Ministry, identifies bloggers as the "new heralds of free expression" and offers advice on how to set up a blog and run it anonymously.

"Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure," wrote Julien Pain, head of RSF's Internet Freedom Desk.

"Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest."

The 87-page "Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents" was launched at the Apple Expo computer show in Paris on Thursday. It can be downloaded from the RSF website (www.rsf.org), and is available in English, French, Chinese, Arabic and Farsi . . .

The Beijing Olympics are shaping up to be the most technically advanced in history, writes Tang Yuankai

A bullet proof transparent window sheeting, a multi-directional surveillance camera and iris recognition ...   more »