Governments Use More Internet Political Filters

Future Pundit ^ | August 29,2009 | Randall Parker

[jmcenanly]

Governments Use More Internet Political Filters

Battles are playing out on the internet over control of information about political events.

The latest evidence of these clampdowns comes in a report on the Middle East and north Africa by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a collaboration of researchers based in the UK and North America. Among the restrictions it reports are clampdowns on Facebook in Syria and the use of hidden cameras in Saudi Arabia's internet cafes.

Most of these actions are aimed at stifling political debate. "Political filtering is the common denominator," says Helmi Noman of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society in Boston, who compiled the report. "It's the main target."

I can see on a smaller scale how government controls will fail. Point to point communications via private wireless networks won't pass thru government filter and firewall boxes. But on a larger scale it looks to me that governments can control the routing nodes.

Larger governments should be especially efficacious at control because they've got efficiencies of scale working for them. So does China's government win in the info control game?

China has developed an extensive system of filters which it uses to block access to content about sensitive topics, such as the protests in 1989 in Tiananamen Square, Beijing.

*** The war against email spam is in some ways analogous to government controls on web access. The spammers keep finding new ways to camouflage their messages and get thru email filters. Imagine software that converts a news report into text that reads like, say, personal relationship gossip. It could use different names and change verbs to make a story read like it is unrelated to political events. Software on the receiving side could translate the story back into a political news report.

[jmcenanly]

Hopefully, we won't have to use this here, but hving the technology ready is a good thing.