Human Rights Watch Covering the Olympics from China? Need uncensored net access? This new guide from Human Rights Watch explains how. This question has been asked me more than once lately. Despite clear promises that foreign journalists would have free and uncensored Internet access while in Beijing, the reality is that journalists must pay an awful amount of money for net access here. Worse, they can only get a sanitized Chinese edition -- with blocked sites and filtered content. The announcement on Wednesday there would be no free access to the Internet was obvious a major embarrassment for both the Beijing Olympic Committee (BOCOG) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). If there was ever an Olympic promise broken by Beijing, it was here. The spin doctors at the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, nominally in charge of the foreign journalists, said the censorship was in line with the Chinese law. Nonsense: There is no Chinese law regulating this kind of system. I guess none of the journalists got a copy of that alleged law. Foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao suggested to BBC News that the blocked sites were to blame : "There are some problems with a lot of sites that makes it not easy to view them in China." (Indeed, a very creative way to describe the censorship.) Initially the IOC appeared surprised by the censorship announcement, but according to SCMP.com the IOC later admitted it knew in advance BOCOG had brok ...
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Human Rights Watch Covering the Olympics from China? Need uncensored net access? This new guide from Human Rights Watch explains how. This question has been asked me more than once lately. Despite clear promises that foreign journalists would have free and uncensored Internet access while in Beijing, the reality is that journalists must pay an awful amount of money for net access here. Worse, they can only get a sanitized Chinese edition -- with blocked sites and filtered content. The announcement on Wednesday there would be no free access to the Internet was obvious a major embarrassment for both the Beijing Olympic Committee (BOCOG) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). If there was ever an Olympic promise broken by Beijing, it was here. The spin doctors at the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, nominally in charge of the foreign journalists, said the censorship was in line with the Chinese law. Nonsense: There is no Chinese law regulating this kind of system. I guess none of the journalists got a copy of that alleged law. Foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao suggested to BBC News that the blocked sites were to blame : "There are some problems with a lot of sites that makes it not easy to view them in China." (Indeed, a very creative way to describe the censorship.) Initially the IOC appeared surprised by the censorship announcement, but according to SCMP.com the IOC later admitted it knew in advance BOCOG had brok ...