Vietnam To Police Blogs With Random Checks, Self-Reporting
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BANGKOK—Vietnamese authorities plan to police the content of
dissident blogs through random checks and self-policing by the country’s
blogging community, a senior Vietnamese Internet security expert has told Radio
Free Asia (RFA)
“There
should be a legal corridor to assure better operation of the blogs,” the
director of the state-run Bach Khoa Internet Security Center, Nguyen Tu Quang,
told RFA’s Vietnamese service. “We’ll manage them by randomly
checking—we don’t need to control all the blogs.”
“When
we create a legal corridor, determining what is legal and what is a violation
of Vietnamese law, the blog community will detect such things on its own and
will let the government know of violations,” Quang said.
Earlier
this month, Information and Communication Deputy Minister Do Quy Doan was
quoted as saying Hanoi would seek cooperation from Internet giants Google and
Yahoo! to help "regulate" the country's flourishing blogging scene.
The
government will soon announce new rules, stressing that Weblogs should serve as
personal online diaries and not organs to disseminate opinions about politics,
religion, and society, senior officials were quoted as saying.
The
regulations aim "to create a legal base for bloggers and related agencies
to tackle violations in the area of blogging," said Information and
Communication Deputy Minister Do Quy Doan, according to the official Thanh
Nien daily.
The
ministry "will contact Google and Yahoo! for cooperation in creating the
best and the healthiest environment for bloggers," he added.
Quang,
speaking in a telephone interview, said getting help from Google and Yahoo!
would be helpful but not critical. “Our effort to detect blogs will be
more convenient if we can get help from the Internet companies,” he said,
but added: “We can detect blogs without help from Internet
companies.”
Quang
said under the draft rules being debated violators could face up to U.S.
$12,000 in fines and up to 12 years of jail time.
Wary
of online content
According
to recent government figures, nearly one in four Vietnamese use the Internet.
Activity in Vietnam’s blogosphere has recently increased and Hanoi is
becoming more wary of online content it considers politically threatening.
Authorities
currently block some Web sites run by overseas Vietnamese that espouse views
critical of the government, and they often seek to shut down anything seen as
encouraging public protest.
In
September, blogger Dieu Cay was jailed for 2-1/2 years on tax evasion charges
after he tried to persuade people to protest at the Olympic torch ceremonies in
Ho Chi Minh City last summer.
Reporters
Without Borders, a press freedom monitoring group, called on authorities to
release the cyber-dissident, whose real name is Nguyen Hoang Hai, and said that
he was being unjustly targeted because of his outspoken criticism of China's
claims over disputed South China Sea islands.
Vietnam’s
government is also extremely cautious of internal issues that could anger its
northern neighbor.
Abide
by local laws
Robert
Boorstin, director of policy communications at Google, said his company hadn't
been contacted with a specific request from the Vietnamese government but is
aware of the plans to further regulate bloggers in the country.
“We
believe that blogs are an expression of a person’s personal opinions,
whether those opinions concern culture, art, their daily life, or
politics—whatever they want to talk about. We don’t censor based on
the content of blogs and would not want to do so,” Boorstin said.
Boorstin
said Google censors “a great deal less” than other search engines
around the world, but he added, "If we don’t abide by local laws, we
will be thrown out” of certain countries.
He
said that Google’s policy in China, where authorities restrict much of
what may be accessed by netizens, is to filter results from its search engine
according to local laws, but to clearly show users that results are blocked.
Google
also refuses to offer its email or blogging service in China because this would
force the company to operate servers within the country from which authorities
could request personal information about users.
“That
is the kind of place where we draw the line and say ‘No, we’re not
going to venture into those kinds of services because the risk to individual
freedom and the risk to our users’ privacy is too great,’”
Boorstin said.
“We
push the limits as far as we can push them without being told to pack up our
bags and leave the country, because we don’t want to leave countries
where we’re providing a service of information to people. It may not be
every single piece of information that we want them to have, but much better
they have access to huge new quantities of information than the other choice,
which is to show them nothing at all.”
Original reporting by Mac Lam and Thien Gao for RFA’s
Vietnamese service. Vietnamese service director: Diem Nguyen. Executive
producer: Susan Lavery. Written for the Web in English by Joshua Lipes and
Sarah Jackson-Han.
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