Posted on 06/05/2007 6:19:18 AM PDT by Valin
When it comes to censoring the Internet, China is a the leader in terms of filtering questionable political content. But politics is not what causes most nations to interfere with Internet use. The most frequent reason for net censorship is the search for pornography and questionable religious content. Another popular government ploy is not trying to keep their citizens from certain kinds of Internet content, but rather eavesdropping on who is saying what to whom. In all, we're talking about some three dozen nations here that meddle with Internet use.
In China, 30,000 Ministry of Public Security employees man the Golden Shield Project (also known as The Great Firewall of China), and monitor Internet use throughout the country. In the last decade, over a billion dollars has been spent on this effort. This has inspired other police states, like North Korea, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Syria, Iran, Cuba, and Myanmar to do the same.
A much larger number of nations censor Internet access to keep people away from "impure" material. Most of the nations in the Persian Gulf (especially the oil rich nations) spend lots of money on commercial filtering technology, and make it very difficult to reach web sites that allow gambling, show naked women, or say anything bad about Islam.
A lot of other nations recognize that fact that the Internet has replaced letters (on paper) and telephone calls. Police cannot bug criminal suspects unless they can do it on the Internet. But the law, in most countries, is a little vague on this point. So many countries just set up filters on all, or a great deal, of their Internet traffic, and fish for certain words or phrases. This has become a big deal in the war on terror, as Islamic terrorists have become big users of the Internet.
The Internet has changed the ways in which people communicate, and governments are responding in many ways. It's still rather confusing out there, if you are trying to figure out who is doing what to whom. It may be another generation before the situation clarifies.
‘The Great Firewall of China’
ha, that is actually cute.
Google doesn’t seem to mind
So, China keeps steamrolling any poor bugger who disagrees with their police state “government”. The ChiComs are dangerous and reckless, keep in mind the poisoned dog food and now, the fetid fish products they send all over the world, the fish are raised in sewer water, literally, and the standards the Chinese use to oversee their health requirements are nonexistant. The Chinese have become an out of control and arrogant danger to the free world. I will not buy anything from China - at least, as far as I can read labels and find out the country of origin. I have wanted to go to the Olympics for many years, now, since they are stopping any Catholics from attending or participating, I say forget it, I’ll wait for another four years
The thing is, it’s not just China. I’m seeing this in many “Gap” nations (See The Pentagons News Map), a number of Egyptian Blogger have either quit, or have been jailed, a couple of years ago a major Saudi Blogger (The Religious Policeman) moved to England, one of the reasons was harassment by the government.
"questionable religious content"
Questionable language for discussing censorship.
See reply 6.
I know a lot of folks here obess on China, but this is happening all over the world.
And we help them. Cisco helped build their network and Yahoo has provided the info to send a few dissidents to jail. The latter is why Google stores user search data outside of China and doesn't provide blogs.
I don’t believe in censoring the Internet, except to prevent children from accessing pornography in public places like schools and libraries. I’m especially wary of any government that wants to protect people from bad ideas. This usually means they don’t want the people to know how said government is screwing them.
Fortunately, it’s very hard to block the Internet, as the Chinese have discovered.
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