Top 10 List of Worldwide Internet Censors

PreacherTom writes "Reports of internet censorship are nothing new and are quite expected from countries whose leadership depends on controlling the popular worldview. Reporters Without Borders, a Paris group that does advocacy work for press freedom, puts a number to the trend with a list of the countries that it says go the furthest to censor the Internet. Photos document the worldwide protests and continuing struggles. Not surprisingly, China is described as the pioneer of internet censors, dedicating more resources than any other country to restrict online freedoms." This week we also discussed the Reporters Without Borders' 13 Enemies of the Internet list.

Comments

Re:Another X prize

[megaditto]

Get real. The first order of business for NK-ans should be getting some food and some freedom.

Owning a tunable radio receiver (as opposed to the one with only the DearLeader presets) is a crime in North Korea. Computers/internet access, as nice as that sounds, just isn't an option.

Re:Another X prize

[cold fjord]

I suggest a multi-thousand dollar prize for the first hacker who can open up their servers so the N.K. citizens can see the whole web.

I can't say there is much to recommend it. It is likely that there would be no meaningful payoff that would last more than minutes. Even if you were successful in creating temporary access to a wider range of internet sites, it is likely that the few North Koreas who use the web would be too terrified to make use of it, assuming they even knew about it. Given the nature of the regime, you can assume that their secret police record, monitor, review, and act on the traffic in ways that far exceed the most lurid fantasies about the NSA. Surfing unauthorized web sites would likely constitute a punishable act, especially if an unauthorized site was visited that contained unvetted political, economic, or religious information. If you've stepped over the line in North Korea, you could easily fall prey to the "heredity rule", developed the Dear Leader's father. Under that rule, the North Korean secret police arrest and imprison three generations of a family for the misdeeds of one of them, often for life, which can be short in a North Korean "prison camp" AKA death camp.

Besides, the international incident with the paranoid, now nuclear armed, barbaric regime which is starving its people wouldn't be worth it.

If anyone still insists on it, I suggest you stay away from at least the Koreas and Japan as North Korea has a long history of kidnapping people from those countries for various reasons. Given their ties to organized crime, due to their many criminal enterprises, they could reach even further. Life there is tough even when you are useful to them.

Re:China has the most????

[pedantic bore]

Agreed -- I don't understand the accounting here, either. China at least allows access to a high fraction of the internet, and doesn't make general limits on who can see things. North Korea, on the other hand, is essentially off the net. It goes far beyond censorship -- NK is trying to pretend the whole thing doesn't exist.