Vietnam heavily filters content, but firewalls are leaking

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/svtop/firew081301.htm

BY MARK MCDONALD
Mercury News Vietnam Bureau 
Aug. 12, 2001 

HANOI -- When the entire e-mail system suddenly went dark throughout
Vietnam last month, the government-owned agency that administers the
Internet told its subscribers not to panic: The disruption was caused
by routine maintenance on the country's firewall.

Vietnam and other Asian governments have installed nationwide
firewalls, or electronic filters, that keep Internet users from
connecting to Web sites that the regimes consider politically,
religiously or sexually offensive. But one of the principal custodians
and censors of the Vietnamese firewall now acknowledges his wall is
overmatched and doomed.

``Control through the firewall is no longer effective,'' said Do Quy
Doan, chairman of the Vietnam Website Project at the Ministry of
Culture and Information. ``If anyone who has a wish to get over the
wall, they will. It is just a technical measure. If we put all our
future hopes on the firewall, we will fail.''

This startling admission from a senior technocrat doesn't mean it's
curtains for Hanoi's Internet Iron Curtain. The ruling Communist Party
here still takes many of its political and ideological lessons from
China, and Beijing has recently reinforced its already draconian
restrictions on Internet use. China uses its firewall to block all
manner of sites, including Western media outlets, human rights
organizations and the Falun Gong spiritual movement.

Other countries in Southeast Asia also are worried about the growing
political reach and grasp of the Internet, particularly when it's used
by opposition parties and activists.

Singapore, with a general election coming up, has announced it will
impose new restrictions on political Web sites and chat forums. And
Malaysia, which advertises itself as the most tech-friendly nation in
Southeast Asia, is said to be drafting tough new revisions to its
existing ``cyber laws.''

In Vietnam, the firewall already blocks well over 3,000 Web sites --
and those are just the pornographic ones.

Countless political and religious sites also get firewalled, in
addition to proxy servers and so-called back-door sites that usually
can be used to leap tall firewalls in a single bound. Doan declined to
give statistics on the number of those sites deemed to be off-limits,
although it's believed there are more than a thousand of them on
Hanoi's blacklist.

``Of course we have those bad political sites, but those people can
also get you their information through e-mail, fax, radio,'' Doan
said. ``Nobody can control all that.''

One of the sites that escapes Hanoi's firewall is Viet Mercury, the
Mercury News' Vietnamese-language weekly. (The regime's postal
inspectors and the censors in the Ministry of Culture and Information
confiscate, however, all newsprint copies of Viet Mercury mailed from
San Jose.)

The government clearly recognizes that its foreboding firewall drives
off potential foreign investors while hamstringing domestic
entrepreneurs. Indeed, firewall-free office space is dangled as an
inducement for businesses to relocate to Quang Trung Software City, a
92-acre corporate park in Ho Chi Minh City. Quang Trung is the only
place in the country -- other than the defense and public security
ministries -- that's legally beyond the firewall.

Nguyen Anh Dung, 37, managing director of SSL Vietnam, said his
company would simply not exist if not for the firewall exemption
inside the Quang Trung park. SSL Vietnam is developing a handheld
computer called MineTerapin that they hope to launch next month.

``When we had an office in the city, we had to go through the firewall
and that made the Internet so slow,'' Dung said. ``If we were still in
our old place, we couldn't do this project. It would be impossible.''

There are countless anti-Hanoi political sites operating on the Web,
of course, most of them run by refugees and emigres living outside
Vietnam. These sites are routinely blocked from users inside Vietnam.

``Of course they block us, but it's not because of our content,'' said
Pham Ngoc Lan, the San Jose-based Web master for Thong Luan, the
online newsletter of the Rally for Pluralism and Democracy, a
Vietnamese emigre group. ``We're moderates who are simply talking
politics, and that's enough for them to block us. The culture police
read us.''

Lan said friends in Ho Chi Minh City and Dalat occasionally can access
his site when temporary holes open in the firewall. ``So it appears
the system isn't reliable,'' he said.

Government censors in Hanoi also recently began to discover a
disturbing new phenomenon -- politically objectionable sites
originating inside Vietnam.

``Yes, we're finding these sites now,'' Doan said with no further
comment.

To deal with the handful of domestic dissidents who try to operate
over the Net, Hanoi will likely continue its highly effective strategy
of raiding homes, disconnecting telephone lines and confiscating
computers.

The pluckier dissidents have resorted to using Internet cafes -- which
seem to be growing exponentially in the major cities -- to send out
their anti-government broadsides. One activist who has had two
computers and a fax machine taken from him by the security police said
he now wears a hat and a disguise when going to Internet cafes. He
uses different cafes from day to day and repeatedly changes taxis en
route.

Vietnam first opened up to the Internet 3 1/2 years ago. There are
five Internet service providers, all of them state companies that
lease access to the country's sole gateway from a state-owned agency,
the Vietnam Data Communications Co. Even with a population of 77
million, Vietnam has just 135,000 Internet subscribers, due largely to
some of the world's highest sign-up costs and user fees.

Even with piles of complaints from businesses and consumers, even in
the face of a losing technological battle, the Vietnamese authorities
show no signs of tearing down their firewall. Doan said Hanoi will
launch a ``propaganda campaign'' to educate and warn its citizens
about the accessing of inappropriate sites. Also, new laws and decrees
will make it illegal to connect to naughty sites, with large fines
being the principal deterrent.

In the meantime, the task of tracking down new, offending Web sites
falls mainly to the service providers. Every ISP has its own
censorship team to prowl the Internet, ever on the alert for sex,
violence and political danger.

Poking anonymously through customers' accounts is part of the search,
particularly the accounts of foreign subscribers. Even the in-boxes of
foreign diplomats are not off limits.

One Western diplomat fluent in Vietnamese recalled the day a couple of
repairmen arrived at his embassy to fix a problem with the e-mail
delivery system. While the men were working at the computers, the
diplomat overheard one repairman tell the other that the problem had
been caused by one of the government's ham-handed Internet snoopers.



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