China leads way in policing cyberspace
- From: ano457@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: 29 Aug 2005 20:51:00 -0700
China leads way in policing cyberspace
>>From Jane Macartney in Beijing and Michael Theodoulou
CHINA'S police have developed what are probably the most
sophisticated internet filtering methods in the world. They had the
advantage of starting early and knew exactly what they did not want -
political dissent and porn.
Access to the web in China has been restricted from the start to
state-run telephone networks. The Public Security Bureau has used legal
and technical means to throw up roadblocks at all the main gateways to
restrict the entry of all content deemed unsuitable for Chinese
surfers.
Logging on to the BBC website in China is next to impossible. Such a
restriction involves only a block on that site. Yet China's net
regulators are far more sophisticated and effective: they use controls
to bar access via web pages, online chat rooms and even e-mail to a
wide array of sensitive material, from pornography to religion. The
police do their best to monitor all of these, although cannier users
turn to "proxy servers" to carry messages that hide banned words.
Search providers, such as Microsoft, set up their own filters as
required by the authorities to block the use of certain keywords, such
as "democracy", "human rights" and "Tibet independence".
Most sensitive of all is "Falungong", the name of a quasi-religious
sect whose ability to mobilise and organise the public en masse sends
jitters through Communist Party rulers. An attempt to search for the
sect via Google results in the entire search engine shutting down for
20 minutes. Other sites that are inaccessible by normal means include
Amnesty International.
Saudi Arabia has some of the strictest controls. It makes all traffic
flow through a central agency where it can be monitored. But the
authorities are faced with constant challenges from new technologies,
such as Bluetooth.
Iran's filtering system is "one of the world's most substantial
censorship regimes," according to The OpenNet Initiative, a
partnership of researchers in the US, Britain and Canada. Thirty-four
per cent of more than 1,000 web addresses they tested were blocked.
These included pornographic sites, "anonymiser tools", sites with
gay and lesbian content, some politically sensitive sites and weblogs.
.
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