Study Shows China Tightens Internet Filtering

Torrey Clark writes "China is the world's leading censor of the Internet, filtering web sites, blogs, e-mail, and online forums for sensitive political content, according to a study released Thursday. The OpenNet Initiative said that China employs thousands officials and private citizens to build a 'pervasive, sophisticated, and effective' system of Internet censorship. 'ONI sought to determine the degree to which China filters sites on topics that the Chinese government finds sensitive, and found that the state does so extensively,' said the study. 'Chinese citizens seeking access to Web sites containing content related to Taiwanese and Tibetan independence, Falun Gong, the Dalai Lama, the Tiananmen Square incident, opposition political parties, or a variety of anti-Communist movements will frequently find themselves blocked,' the report said."

Comments

Re:Which is one good reason why...

[John Seminal]

...we are working on Freenet and supporting efforts like Freenet-China. We are also beefing up Freenet's security to more effectively thwart Chinese censorship, allowing extremely vulnerable users set up a "global darknet", where they only communicate directly with people they trust.

There is a philosophical question under all this. Do people have an inherent right to have any and all information free? I don't think anyone wants ALL information floating around free. What most would consider freedom advocates will still want all spam shut down. Somwhere a little to the right of that, some will want websites teaching how to make bombs shut down. A little more to the right, some will want porn shut down.

So the question arises, should countries, with their own values, be able to determine what content their people are exposed to? For example, can China declare communism is best, and ban all websites promoting capitalism? Can Iran declare western film evil, and ban all websites with western film content?

Logographic language filtering

[mogrify]

I know that not all the content the Chinese censors need to filter is in Chinese, but this report made me wonder... how would applying filters to a logographic language such as Chinese differ from filtering content in Western language systems?

It seems like it would be a lot easier to block an idea if it were represented by a unique character than by a set of phonemes that could easily be 0bfu5cat3d without losing meaning. Does a language like Chinese generally lend itself better to computerized manipulation?