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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.
Myanmar, China, Belarus, Iran, Tunisia, Cuba, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, North Korea, Syria, and Uzbekistan.
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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.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
What they don't say is the amount per user. China has the greatest number of internet users, which would take more people to handle the internet censoring. If you only allow 3,000 people to access the internet it is very easy to limit them. When you have 200,000,000 people it take more -- especially when there are many people trying to hack through their blocks.
Fight Spammers!
It was 13 not ten.
Don't mix your abstractions, the headline says "Top 10," not "Top Ten."
Base 13, dude. Base 13
I must be serious, because nobody makes jokes in base 13.
KFG
As an American who has relocated to work in China, I have yet to have problems with the censors. The ping times and transfer rates to and from the US are really slow, but I can get to everything I need. I can read the NYTimes, WSJ, CNN and, most importantly, ./. I can even read this post and all the comments, even the ones that bash the Chinese Government. I don't think it's because the censors are asleep today. For instance, there was a story today in the WSJ today that covered the riots at a hospital in southern China. I'm sure the official news, Xin Hua, forgot to cover the even, but that didn't stop me from reading the story. To say that the government has this firm grip on the Chinese people is nothing more than a clear sign of ignorance. There are far to many people here for the government to even think about trying to keep an eye on everyone or maintaining tight control. Also, the techniques that are highly effective for tracking people in the US don't exist here. This is a cash society. You can go for months or years without leaving any electronic record of your existence. In the US, you can't even drive down the road without your license plate number being picked up or buy breakfast without your debit card indicating that you where Noah's Bagels on University Ave. at 7:07AM and that you bought the Kona Blend. Organizations such as the NSA have deep pockets, tremendous resources, and some very smart people.
For 99.99% or the people here, we are free to go about our business. As long as you are not advocating the overthrow of the government or engaging in illegal activities you aren't going to have too many problems here. (disclaimer: business where there is a lot of money at stake are another matter) I need not remind you how the laws have been changing in the US for anyone implicated in overthrowing the US government. Try going to websites that advocate the overthrow of the US government and have bomb making instructions. Better yet, set one up inside the US and see how long it is till you get censored. See if the two governments are really all the different. Governments defend themselves. You might not agree with the ways they do it, but they do it nonetheless. And of course the US government has NEVER tried to cover anything bad they they did up...
I'm not implying that I'm a big supporter of the Chinese government. There are a lot of things they need to improve on and change. The list is very long. However, the Chinese government is making massive improvements every year and should be given credit for doing so.
I write this b/c I think there is a tremendous amount of misunderstanding in the US of what it is really like to live in China.
They forgot Denmark on that list. The danish courts have already started building the great firewall of Denmark. It's sad to see a country priding itself on their freedom of speech, allow private organisations to determine what the danish internet users should see or not see. I'm thinking of the IFPI vs Tele2 case in which the court decided that Tele2 should block access to the AllOfMp3 site. Mark my words... This is the beginning of the end of uncensored internet in Denmark. This is truly sad times.
http://www.moerks.dk
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.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
But Qatars not on the list, and has always been a step above the other muslim countries in the region as far as freedoms are concerned (even if that might not be saying much).
You might consider it inflamatory that he pointed it out (someone did), but that doesn't make it any less true, and it's certainly (IMO) an interesting point. As a previous poster pointed out, there's a lot of overlap with these countries and those that would like to wrest control of the internet away from the U.S.
One thing that does bother me is that pre-war Iraq probably wouldn't have been on this list, and yet we still have economic and political relations with China, Saudi Arabia, and a lot of other countries that we ought not be dealing with. This goes beyond and political divisiveness; both parties cow-tow to the nations that are precieved to bring us economic gain as if that's more important than human rights.
Stupid sexy Flanders.