~ Le Viêt Nam, aujourd'hui. ~
The Vietnam News

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Vietnam's online censors target politics not porn, says study

HANOI - 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."

By Frank Zeller - Agence France Presse - August 10, 2006.


Filtering in Vietnam emphasizes politics

NEW YORK - Looking at Internet filtering practices in Vietnam, one could conclude that the government is more worried about politics than porn. University researchers said in a report Wednesday that the practices run counter to the government's own statements. "Vietnam purports to prevent access to Internet sites primarily to safeguard against obscene or sexually explicit content," the report said. "However, the state's actual motives are far more pragmatic."

Vietnam's Internet service providers did not block any of the pornography sites tested but filtered most of the sites "with politically or religiously sensitive material that could undermine Vietnam's one-party system." China and other regimes worried about political sites also turn their attention to blocking porn, said Derek Bambauer, a research fellow with OpenNet Initiative, a collaboration of Harvard University, the University of Toronto and the University of Cambridge.

Bambauer also said Vietnam's filtering got more sophisticated in just the six months studied. The report found filtering the responsibility of government-owned or -licensed service providers, with the two main ones in Vietnam taking different approaches.

One uses traditional filtering, and attempts to access a banned site produce a message saying the site had been blocked. The other took records of the banned sites out of its domain-name servers completely, producing "site not found" errors as if the sites had never existed, Bambauer said.

"It's something we've seen in isolated incidents in other states," he said. "It's the first widescale usage of this technique."

By Anick Jesdanun - The Associated Press - August 9, 2006.