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Date: 1998-05-28
Internet, Menschenrechte, Dritte Welt-.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- Internet, Menschenrechte, Dritte Welt Interessantestes Feature: Wie chinesische Dissidenten das Netz benutzen. Nicht ganz überraschender Tenor des Newsbytes/USA Today Berichts: Die eigentlichen Addressaten von Human/Rights/Websites werden via WWW nicht erreicht. Human rights sites not reaching needy 05/27/98 USA TODAY, 1998 MAY 27 -- By Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY. Name a dissident group, and it probably has a Web site. >From East Timorese demanding independence from Indonesia to peasant leaders in Mexico's Chiapas state, human rights advocates have flocked to the Internet as a tool to spread the word, and pass the hat. But so far, their tales of oppression are largely reaching audiences outside their lands. ''The people getting shot are not getting access to these Web sites,'' says Seymour Goodman, a Stanford University professor and lead author of a new study commissioned for the Defense Department on the global diffusion of the Internet. ''You and I are reading these things, not the oppressed in East Timor and Chiapas.'' Now approaching its 30th birthday, the Internet has grown faster than any other advanced technology in history. The Pentagon three years ago predicted it would be ''a significant long-term strategic threat to authoritarian regimes.'' But poverty, technological backwardness and government restrictions * including some imposed by the United States * have limited the Web's revolutionary reach. Goodman says two thirds of the 100 million Internet users are in the USA, and most of the rest are in advanced democracies. ''Things are changing but the Internet is not as pervasive or rampantly spreading as people think.'' China is among the developing nations where Internet use is growing fastest. Nearly a million Chinese have access to the Web, with that figure expected to triple by 2001. Fearing the political consequences, the Chinese government announced in December new rules imposing fines of nearly $2000 and unspecified criminal punishments for those who send or receive ''harmful information, as well as leaking state secrets,'' an assistant minister of public security, Zhu Entao, said at the time. Technological advances and the sheer volume of such channels as e-mail have made the new rules difficult to apply. A dissident journal called Tunnel is written in China, e-mailed to supporters in the United States and then e-mailed back to thousands of Chinese. But Wang Dan, a leader of the 1989 student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square who was released into U.S. exile last month, says ''the best means (for dissidents to communicate their pro-democracy messages) is still through broadcasting.'' Voice of America and the newer Radio Free Asia, for which Wang now does commentaries, reach far more Chinese than cyberspace. Radio is also the main means of beaming alternative information to Cuba, according to the study by Goodman and other experts calling themselves The Mosaic Group. Cuba remains among the least-wired nations in the Western Hemisphere because of poor telephone connections and extensive government controls. U.S. trade restrictions also are a factor. Even if it weren't the subject of an embargo, Cuba would be barred from importing most U.S. computer technology because it is one of the ''terrorist seven'' * countries the State Department brands as sponsors of terrorism. Commerce Department restrictions mandated by Congress limit computer equipment exported to these countries * Syria, Iran, Libya, Sudan, Iraq and North Korea as well as Cuba * to a level of 6 MTOPS (million theoretical operations per second). That's a standard so low that such machines can hardly be found in the United States anymore. ''If it's got a Pentium in it, it's at least 200 MTOPS,'' says William Reinsch, undersecretary of Commerce for Export Administration. The United States says such restrictions are necessary to keep technology with military potential away from repressive regimes. But the rules make it harder for the people of those countries to get beyond government propaganda. ''We should be parachuting (Internet) routers'' into Iran, says Grey Burkhart, a senior analyst with The Mosaic Group. ''Iranians have only been able to roll out a network slowly because they've had to sneak around to get routers,'' a technology crucial to Internet access that is dominated by U.S. companies. Burkhart spent the summer of 1996 trying to help wire Syria by bringing in old U.S. equipment. By the time he secured the necessary Commerce Department waivers, however, the Syrian government had changed its mind. ''A bomb had gone off in a bus station in (Syrian capital) Damascus, Benjamin Netanyahu had been elected prime minister of Israel and the Syrian government decided that everything related to the Internet in Syria should be closed,'' Burkhart says. While the Clinton administration hampers the development of the Internet in the ''terrorist seven,'' it is actively promoting efforts to boot up sub-Saharan Africa from Senegal to Mozambique. Under the Leland Initiative, named for the late Rep. Mickey Leland, who died in a 1989 plane crash in Ethiopia, the U.S. Agency for International Development is spending $15 million in 21 countries. The number of users remains small. Of perhaps 1 million in all of Africa, 6 out of 10 live in technologically advanced South Africa and most of the rest are in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco on Africa's northern coast. But the AID initiative, launched in 1996, has moved from capital cities to secondary cities. Technological advances and creative combinations of technology, such as the launch of a satellite this fall that will broadcast replies to Internet queries via digital radio, may help African nations. While it remains primarily a First World tool, the Internet's growing importance to global business and academic research could prove persuasive even to governments wary of losing their monopoly over information management. ''Governments are not stupid,'' says Bobson Wong, executive director of the Digital Freedom Network, a new Web site that publishes speeches and letters from dissidents from nearly two dozen countries. ''They recognize that the Internet has revolutionary potential. But they need foreign investment.'' (Copyright 1998, USA Today: <A http://www.usatoday.com/WIRES </A> ONLINE/) relayed by www.newsbytes.com. znx -.-.- --.- -.-.- --.- -.-.- --.- TIP Download free PGP 5.5.3i (Win95/NT & Mac) from Arge Daten http://keyserver.ad.or.at/pgp/download/ -.-.- --.- -.-.- --.- -.-.- --.- - -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- edited by published on: 1998-05-28 comments to office@quintessenz.at subscribe Newsletter - -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- 
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