Indonesian military to go surfing?

By James Balowski Over the last 18 months, Indonesia's repressive press laws have been used to ban leading newspapers and jail independent press activists. While this type of "information control" is commonly practiced by repressive regimes, the Indonesian government is the first to seriously consider censoring the Internet. Government plans are already in place to "protect" the population from "moral corruption" by scrambling international satellite TV signals. This an issue began to be discussed in earnest after the 1991 Dili massacre when it was realised that the thousands of Indonesians who now own satellite dishes had simply tuned into international new services to watch uncensored reports of the massacre. In an October 20 article in the Jakarta daily, Republika, titled "Fighting the Info Trash ABRI [the Indonesian Armed Forces] to Enter the Internet", the head of ABRI's Centre for Management and Compilation of Data, Sri Diharto, said: "There is so much information garbage in this network, including that which is erroneous about our country" that ABRI "must utilise this. If not, we will be left behind". When asked about ABRI's attitude to "sensitive" information such as about East Timor, Diharto answered: "War means a war of information, and anti-integration groups are using [such] information to damage other [unspecified] groups". According to official figures, Indonesia now has up to 5,000 Internet users using five different servers. The head of the ABRI Information Centre, Brigadier-General Suwarno Adiwijoyo, told reporters that ABRI must follow this technological development and "monitor the negative impact of the Internet". He added that ABRI shouldn't "leave it until this sophisticated technology is used to plant hatred". Adiwijoyo said ABRI would take two steps to "cut into" Internet users. First, they will require all users to have a licence to ensure that Internet"ethics" are upheld. Secondly, they will set up tools to filter out "poor" information. To control Internet traffic, ABRI will need to intercept data on the hard disk of an in-country server. This has been done before. In October 1994, an activist from a Sumatran non-government organisation told Green Left Weekly that messages from Europe and Australia sent to an environment organisation (NGO) in Jakarta had been "removed" from the NusaNet computer by Indonesian Intelligence. NusaNet is a network used by various NGO, student and human rights organisations.