Vietnam's
online censors target politics not porn, says study
AFP -
August 11, 2006
Vietnam's increasingly sophisticated Internet censors mostly block political
rather than pornographic content, a new study by several of the world's top
universities has found.
The communist nation "is focusing its filtering on sites considered threatening
to its one-party system," said the report by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) of the
Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Toronto universities.
The state is targeting websites, blogs, email and online discussion forums, said
the study released internationally this week.
"While Vietnam claims its blocking efforts are aimed at safeguarding the country
against obscene or sexually explicit content, most of its filtering efforts are
aimed at blocking sites with politically or religiously sensitive material that
could undermine Vietnam's one-party system," it said.
Vietnam mainly filters out sites on political dissidents, other regime opponents
and human rights issues as well as pages on religious freedom, Buddhism and the
mainly Christian Montagnard ethnic minorities, it said.
"Surprisingly, Vietnam does not block any pornographic content, despite the
state's putative focus on preventing access to sexually explicit material," said
the report posted at
http://www.opennet.net/studies/vietnam/
The
government denied the claims Thursday.
"Our policy is to apply measures to prevent youngsters from unhealthy sites,"
Foreign Ministry spokesman Le Dung told a regular press briefing.
"We do not apply any measures for political goals. Our policy is to broaden
Internet access for our students."
By Asian standards, he said, "the rate of Internet users is rather high."
The 2005-2006 ONI study found the "technical sophistication, breadth and
effectiveness" of the filtering are increasing, and that the government has
targeted Vietnamese-language sites more than those in English and French.
"Vietnam's Internet censorship regime shares aspects of the Chinese regime,
reflecting the close ties between these states," said John Palfrey, head of the
Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
"Since 2001, we've seen more and more sophisticated Internet filtering systems
put in place."
Vietnam bans tools used to bypass filtering and prohibits web-surfers from using
foreign Internet service providers (ISPs), researchers said.
The two main local ISPs, FPT and VNPT, "filtered high percentages of politically
sensitive content, including content related to political opposition,
pro-democracy movements and human rights."
The country of 83 million people now has nearly 13 million Internet users, most
of whom use cybercafes, according to the business group the Ho Chi Minh City
Informatics Association.
Vietnamese law criminalises use of the Internet to oppose the state or to
destabilize national security, the economy or social order.
One of Vietnam's most prominent jailed dissidents, Pham Hong Son, is serving a
five-year sentence for translating and publishing online an article entitled
'What is Democracy' from the US State Department's website.
The OpenNet report pointed out that cybercafes are required to track all
websites their customers visit and record their ID card or credit card numbers.
"Similar to China, Vietnam has taken a multi-layered approach to controlling the
Internet," said the study. "Vietnam applies technical controls, the law and
education to restrict its citizens' access to and use of information."