Bit of a shitty article on the economist. Interesting but incomplete: http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displayStory.cfm?story_id=10754988&subjectID=348963&fsrc=nwl
here the integral text:
WHAT you see—or rather, what you don't see—on the internet may be determined by your government. The attitude of officialdom varies when it comes to filtering content of a social nature. In many places agreements are set with service providers to block nasty stuff such as child pornography. In a few countries intervention is stronger, up to the level of pervasive censorship. This week Pakistan's block on YouTube accidentally caused an international outage for that website. Iran and Saudi Arabia have also prevented their citizens from accessing the video-sharing site.
That's it. I would be intrigued to know more about it. For example: what kind of content is blocked in th UK? in Europe? in the US? why? who blocks it? how?
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I'm a US/UK citizen living in China (actually, I'll be starting my MBA at LBS this August...)
Anyway, I thought I'd share a little about the whole government censorship thingy. Living here in China, I'm subjected to it a lot and have to resort to various tricks to get around it.
Sites that are permanently blocked here (and no matter what tricks I try to get around the censor, I can't):
The US Democratic or Republican Party's webpages. Absolutely impossible to get to. Also, BBC News. No way, no how, I cannot read it.
CNN.com surprisingly almost always works, however when certain stories about China or democracy in the US are posted, the links are broken.
This past week with the riots in Tibet and the protesters that were shot, the central government has tightened restrictions more that usual. Two months ago a law was passed here that said any website showing streaming video had to be government controlled or owned, essentially shutting down YouTube and Chinese versions of it. This ban however had yet to be implimented... until this week. The government wants to make sure that there is not way that anyone living in Tibet can send photos or video out to the rest of the world (foreign media is banned from Tibet and Xinjiang Provinces due to "unrest"). There are some protest groups that if I were even to google their names, the government would take immediate note of my IP address and I would not be surprised if I had a knock at my door in the middle of the night from some special police. I'd be wary of even typing them here because I don't know what their ability is to read blog comments automatically.
Blogger's publishing tool is not banned here, but most of the time the actual blogs are. I have to use a tool called Anonymouse.org in order to view your blog or even my own.
You were wondering about the mechanism they use...
There are 4 levels.
Beijing central government has a list of banned sites. This is where the US political parties pages are blocked. Because Beijing is doing it, you'd have to have some serious hacking skills to get around it.
Next down, Provinces. Each capital city has an office dedicated to "cleaning" up the content of the internet before it reaches the masses. They have staff who search the internet all day long. If they find a webpage with "objectionable" content, they simply put it on the black list and anyone in China that tries to access it will not be able to (and will have their IP address noted by authories).
Then we come down to the city level. Same as the Provincial level. What the people in the city can see on the internet is up to a few people sitting in a office somewhere in the city. One week blogger and other blog sites may be blocked. The next week, one of the filter administrator's sons starts a blog so Daddy unblocks blogger for one week. Its arbitrary.
Then it comes down to a district level. I live 15km away from my office, but I can view different things in my house (different district). The powers that be in the district where I work will often block hotmail... as they have the power to read all email sent within China, if they read something that doesn't match the Communist Party lines, they will just shut down the email system for a week.
At each of the levels above, a select few have control over what millions of people are able to access. They can even control the content on Chinese forums and message boards. If a Chinese student writes something pro-democracy, their posting will be taken down within seconds and they will receive a warning. If they do it again, it is VERY likely that they will have a surprise visit in the middle of the night and be carried off to the police station were they may be kept for a few days.
I love this country... I love living here, I love the people, I love the food... but in order to live here and maintain your sanity you have to ignore the oppression by the government. If I thought about it as much as I have to write this comment to you, I'd spend my waking hours being furious on behalf of the Chinese populace.
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