Internet Censorship

Some interesting news has come from the OpenNet Initiative in collaboration with researchers at Harvard University, The University of Cambridge and the University of Toronto. It involves the increasingly worrisome issues of Internet censorship and surveillance. the latest report concerns the nation that most practices censorship and surveillance on the net- China.
In the latest study the researchers found that the Chinese government's Internet controls have kept pace with rapid changes in technology and have not hindered China's attempts to censor what Chinese users read while on line with a Chinese server. It warned that the sophistication of China's controls raises the prospect of what it calls a "broken Internet" and could show other governments that censoring their citizen's access to information from other than government approved sources on the net can be effectively done.
One of the researchers, Harvard University's John Palfrey, who participated in the study put it this way. "Do we want to have multiple Internets, a China Wide Web, a U.S. Wide Web. a Saudi Wide Web, or do we want the whole World Wide Web?" Good question..and for governments who try to limit their citizen's freedoms in fear the former may be their choice. The report cited examples of censorship in the net used by China's servers.
For example, China's filters can block specific references to Tibetan independence without blocking all references to Tibet. Likewise, the Chinese government blocks open discussions on China servers about Falun Gong. the Dalai Lama, Tiananmen Square and other topics it classifies as "sensitive". Numerous Chinese government agencies and thousands of public and private employees are involved in censorship at all levels, from the main pipelines hauling data over long distances, to the cybercafes where many. citizens are accessing the Internet. The government filtering tools can adapt to even the newer forms of Internet communication, like blogs or web journals.
Surely, not everything deemed "dangerous" is censored by the government. But China is the most successful of nations in keeping the extent of its censorship efforts a secret, said the the study. Elsewhere, visitors trying to access a banned site generally get a message saying it has been blocked.
In China itself, content the government wants to keep away from Chinese web users is usually simply edited out rather than replaced with that kind of notice. Even Google has admitted that its Chinese language news service leaves out results from government-banned sites. (Google says it just leaves out the sites so users won't be frustrated clicking on dead links). Open Net used volunteers from inside of China to conduct most of the testing that gave the study its results. They deployed software and "packet sniffers" to monitor traffic and to try to gauge where content gets dropped.
Here are some other results of those experiments.
- Though some Chinese dissidents complained that E mail newsletters sent in bulk are sometimes blocked, individual messages tend to get though uncensored.
-Much of the filtering occurs at the backbone, but individual Internet service providers sometimes deploy additional blocking. Cybercafes and operators of discussion boards also control content.
-Filtering tends to be triggered by the appearance of certain keywords, rather than by a specific visit to a site name. the keyword based filters also sometimes keep people from completing posts containing banned topic.
To learn more about this go to Open Net's web site at http://www.opennetinitiative.net Uh...that is, if you'll be able to get through to the site....