Website tracks world online censorship reports

BOSTON -- When Shanghai blogger Isaac Mao tried to watch a YouTube clip of Chinese police beating Tibetans, all he got was an error message.

Mao thought the error — just after the one-year anniversary of a crackdown on Tibetan protesters in China— was too suspicious to be coincidental, so he reported it on a new Harvard-based website that tracks online censorship.

Meanwhile, more than 100 other people in China did the same thing. The spike in reports on Herdict.org in March pointed to government interference rather than a run-of-the-mill technical glitch, even before Google Inc. confirmed China was blocking its YouTube video-sharing site.

"We saw reports coming in as soon as the blocks were happening and certainly before any of the media were reporting it," Herdict founder Jonathan Zittrain said of the months-long YouTube blackout that coincided with the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in June and recent ethnic riots in the Xinjiang province.

Herdict users report their website problems anonymously — numeric Internet addresses are recorded but only general location is displayed — so people can post more freely, encouraging reports about sensitive topics like HIV and AIDS-related sites, and from people in countries with possible government repercussions.

The site doesn't investigate reports, though, so there's no way to know for sure that an outage is related to government meddling rather than a cut cable or other problem unrelated to censorship. Although surges in reports do suggest a government role, a widespread technical glitch can also produce a similar spike.

Website inaccessibility can also result from network or server errors, firewalls at schools or offices or a new phenomenon called reverse filtering, in which companies block access to copyright-protected material outside a specific country.

Zittrain, law professor and co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said Herdict does not aim to present a flawless picture of online filtering, but to let patterns of accessibility speak for themselves.