China steps up web censorship and blocks HSBC

The Guardian – by Rory Carroll

China has blocked access to HSBC’s banking portal and possibly thousands of other websites in what appears to be a new censorship campaign days before it hosts a major internet industry conference.

Greatfire.org, a group that researches Chinese internet censorship, said on Tuesday HSBC had been caught up in a crackdown against so-called mirror sites which let users access censored sites such as YouTube.

Greatfire.org said Beijing had shut access to HSBCnet and EdgeCast, one of the world’s biggest content delivery networks (CDN) in order to block a pathway to forbidden sites.  

“This was a deliberate attack on the websites that we have mirrored,” Charlie Smith, the pseudonym of a Greatfire.org co-founder, told the Guardian via email. He said it was “startling” that authorities would disrupt commerce, and risk infuriating its own internet users, to block access to forbidden sites which received relatively light traffic.

Greatfire.org set up what it termed “collateral freedom mirror sites” on the global cloud infrastructure knowing that censors who operate the so-called Great Firewall of China could not distinguish traffic to mirror sites and other traffic to the cloud provider.

It was a gamble that China would not risk major disruption by blocking global CDNs – a gamble that Greatfire.org concedes it has now lost, resulting, it said, in “collateral damage” of blocking of sites such as Sony Mobile’s global and Chinese sites and the back-end framework drupal.org.

The group said it amounted to an attempt to cut China off from the global internet.

“I think that it is quite revealing,” said Smith. “I think it also reveals a fundamental lack of understanding of how connected China truly is to the global internet.”

HSBC, one of the world’s biggest banks, makes two-thirds of its profits in Asia, notably Hong Kong. EdgeCast, a subsidiary of the US telecommunications company Verizon, delivers content and services for web companies, including the Atlantic magazine and Mozilla, the Firefox browser, as well as cloud service to sites and apps in China.

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The attacks came in the lead-up to the World Internet Conference which is due to open in eastern Zhejiang province on Wednesday, showcasing China’s burgeoning role in technology and internet governance issues. Organised by China’s newly formed Cyberspace Administration, it is expected to draw policymakers and senior industry figures, including the chief executives of Alibaba and and Baidu.

EdgeCast, which is based in Los Angeles, said in a blogpost that its operations had been disrupted. “This week we’ve seen the filtering escalate with an increasing number of popular web properties impacted and even one of our many domains being partially blocked … with no rhyme or reason as to why.”

It said it was trying to mitigate the filtering but warned it would be “an ongoing issue” and sympathised with frustrated customers. “We share your frustration, as does the whole content delivery and hosting industry.”

Chinese authorities shut HSBC’s banking portal last month, Greatfire.org reported, in the process of blocking access to Akamai, a CDN which it used to host mirror websites. HSBC uses an Akamai domain reserved for encrypted websites.

The bank posted a notice on its site acknowledging the problem but gave no details, saying only it was “working with local providers to deliver a prompt resolution”. The notice subsequently disappeared.

A US-based spokesman for the bank declined to comment, saying he was “looking into the matter”.

Greatfire.org said authorities were willing to stifle commerce to plug a small leak comprising tens of thousands of visits to forbidden sites – a tiny fraction of overall traffic, said Smith. “If the authorities think they can block the dissemination of information by continuing to cut off access to global CDNs, then they will be in for a big surprise when their own netizens stand up and express their discontent.”

Smith said the web conference was a coincidence of timing but hoped it would compel the authorities to explain the censorship. The conference aims to “promote the development of (the) internet to be the global shared resource for human solidarity and economic progress”.

Organisers have sent accredited journalists a warning about restrictions: “If the conference has not arranged an interactive session, please do not ask questions or interview at the scene. During the meeting please do not walk about at will within the venue.”

William Nee, a China researcher at Amnesty International, warned that the event underlined China’s goal of promoting its domestic internet rules as a model for global regulation.

“This should send a chill down the spine of anyone that values online freedom. China’s internet model is one of extreme control and suppression. The authorities use an army of censors to target individuals and imprison many activists solely for exercising their right to free expression online.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/18/china-blocks-hsbc-web-crackdown-censorship