Repression 2.0

Their crudest tool is compulsory registration—to blog, to secure an Internet connection or even to get a terminal at the neighborhood Internet café. While Internet cafés worldwide opened without much state interference in the late '90s, before long every government that limits speech also required Internet-café goers to register with proprietors and to log in with government IDs. According to Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, some nations like Zimbabwe even deploy security agents—or people who act like them—to wander the aisles at cafés, glancing at screens. At the same time, digital records of which sites patrons visit are squirreled away for eternity in official databases. Today, Chinese café patrons would be taking a big risk searching "Tibet and crackdown," and they know it.

But Web 2.0 technology posed a new problem for censors. By indexing data on remote servers rather than downloading it to the user's workstation, social-networking sites like Facebook, Web-mail programs like Gmail and consumer sites like Netflix render themselves hard to watch. When almost all information online was transmitted by local Internet service providers and stored by local hosts, a government like Vietnam's could read data stored on a server in Ho Chi Minh City whenever it pleased—and respond by cutting off a user's access to that server. But Hanoi can't control what happens on Google servers in Mountain View, California. And it can't peek at every data packet going to and from America—the volume is too great.

Yet if governments can convince people that they are reading everything, they might not actually have to. And so the information-control agents from the world's most repressive regimes began thinking about what watchdogs call the "panopticon effect"—named for a type of prison conceived by the 18th-century social critic Jeremy Bentham. In it, a guard can watch the prisoners without their being able to tell whether he's watching. The question for authoritarians was the same: how do you make people feel as if they're being watched at all times and internalize the sense of omniscient authority? A crude answer is the simple broadcast message. Xiao Qiang, the director of the China Internet Project, says that university functionaries might send a note to all students: "This weekend, public-security authorities will install security software on our system." He adds, "You don't know how well it works or what it does, but you certainly know every student is being warned." Or the authorities might send a text-message like the one in Lhasa last week—a trick achieved by detecting which phones communicating with local Tibetan cell-phone towers are roaming domestic subscribers.

Newer, automated methods are targeting individuals more directly. These methods are hard to track in detail because they are invariably deep official secrets, but experts believe China is the leading state practitioner right now. The most famous example is the avatar duo of Jingjing and Chacha (puns on the Chinese word for police), who appeared in early 2006. They are two adorable cartoon cops with big heads, big eyes and tight mouths in the anime style. They live on the home pages of several ISPs, or else they arrive, uninvited, on the screens of Chinese Netizens. If a Web surfer visits a domain that has elected to host the cartoon characters, Jingjing or Chacha may appear spontaneously to dispense amiable advice about online behavior. "We will send kind reminders to people to establish online safety and … to respect online laws and regulations by regulating themselves to create a healthy Internet circumstance and to maintain harmonious order," Jingjing says on his blog. Chen Minli, the head of Internet security and surveillance in the southern city of Shenzhen, explained the point of these Web cops to the Xinhua news service, driving home the panopticon effect: "The purpose is to let all Internet users know that the Internet is not a place beyond the law. The Internet police will maintain order in all online behaviors."

Other examples of ham-fisted surveillance—the kind meant to be noticed—have been chronicled by the Open Net Initiative, a collaboration of several Western universities studying Internet freedoms. China is finding new and varied ways to apply its keyword-tracking technologies. First used to censor Web sites that contain certain phrases, they are now deployed to create the sensation that an intelligence agent is watching. The researchers report e-mails that sometimes arrive and sometimes don't, search engines that suddenly stop accepting particular queries, words that are sometimes excised and Web sites that arbitrarily become unavailable (browsers report a failure to connect or time out). For Netizens, it's impossible to know whether those effects represent censors typing away in a government data center or whether they're simply automated, like Jingjing and Chacha.

The trick about the new repression isn't just getting people to think the government knows—or seems to know—what they're doing; it's making them believe they'll pay the price. Here the technology of Repression 2.0 melds with old-fashioned strong-arm methods: those caught misbehaving are subjected to highly publicized character assassination, interrogation, threats to friends and families, trumped-up charges and show trials. Chinese police have shown up at the homes of Web surfers just minutes after they view an illicit site. Egyptian and Saudi courts try bloggers for sedition.