I commend the Commission for your outstanding work on this issue and for holding this important hearing on the impact of SARS on media control in China. We have all learned the tragic consequences, measured in hundreds of innocent lives lost, resulting from Beijing's systematic denial of the truth about SARS. And while some might have hoped that this deadly lesson would lead to greater openness on the part of the regime - and perhaps some restraint in its ongoing campaign to block the free exchange of information via the Internet and other media -- recent events have not been encouraging. Last week, four Chinese journalists were sentenced to prison terms ranging from eight to ten years for posting on the Internet statements critical of the communist regime. This week, one of these journalists, Xu Wei, has begun a hunger strike to protest the abuse he and his colleagues have suffered since their arrest and detention in March of 2001. This abuse, according to the group Human Rights in China, has included beatings and electric shock.

In fact, the communist regime is not simply continuing to apply its broad, unchecked authority to punish those who dare to speak truth to power. It is even expanding this authority. This morning, I've just come here from a meeting of the House Policy Committee, which I chair, and which received testimony from Martin Lee, founding Chairman of the Democratic Party of Hong Kong. Mr. Lee briefed our committee on the new "national security" law that will take effect in Hong Kong on July 9th, and will extend the worst of China's abuses of speech and press rights from the mainland into Hong Kong, including a prohibition on unauthorized disclosure of "protected information."

The Chinese government, and sadly, too many other regimes around the world, have been aggressively blocking access to the Internet, monitoring Internet activity, and punishing those who seek only to share information. Last month, according to Human Rights Watch, web publisher Huang Qi, after enduring a three-year detention, was sentenced to five years in prison for the crime of subversion. What was he publishing? The online equivalent of our milk carton notices of missing persons. His site allowed people to share information about missing friends and family members and actually helped rescue several young girls who had been abducted and sold into marriage. But because his site also featured criticism of several state-run agencies, he now spends his days in prison. Because of cases like this one and numerous others around the world, last year I authored the Global Internet Freedom Act to create a new Office of Global Internet Freedom within the International Broadcasting Bureau. The Office would develop and implement a global strategy to combat state-sponsored and state-directed Internet jamming and persecution of those who use the Internet. In the current Congress, my bill is known as HR 48 and it has been included in the House version of the State Department reauthorization bill.

Of course, when I was drafting this bill last summer and into early fall, no one had heard of SARS, but I believe this tragic incident has provided a case study on the need for this legislation, demonstrating as it does both the promise of the Internet in allowing the spread of vital information and the horrible human toll when the truth is suppressed. As we now know, while Chinese official media denied the existence of SARS for so long, the Internet provided the first trickle of information out of China as Western web crawlers picked up chatter on this deadly new disease among average Chinese. So too, the news became more difficult for the regime to ignore as increasing western coverage of the death toll, coming back into China via the web, made it increasingly difficult to sustain the lies. But the long period between first discovery of SARS late last year and official acknowledgement by the regime on April 18th of this year - and the numerous deaths that occurred as a result - could not have happened without the regime's aggressive and often successful blocking of independent reporting via the Internet and other media.

And of all these available media, the Internet with its growing population of users represents the greatest opportunity for free expression and communication. Mr. Berman on your panel today has noted the success that outlaw regimes now enjoy in jamming traditional broadcasting. My bill is an opportunity to capitalize on America's technology leadership by bringing to so many millions of enslaved people around the globe the tools to outwit the thought police.

I commend the Commission and you, Chairman Robinson, for your outstanding work on the issue of censorship in China and for gathering this esteemed panel, which includes some of the leaders in bringing technology to bear on this problem. There are a number of technologies which many of us have read about in the press and in fact that some of your guests today have developed to get around China's great firewall, and there are new ones which at the request of the technology developers I am not going to mention today, because the regime may not yet be aware of them. So I'm afraid my testimony today may be a terrible disappointment to any apparatchiks in Beijing who will be pulling it down from the Net. But I nonetheless appreciate your time this morning.