In a move unlikely to surprise those who access the Internet from mainland China, the country's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently blockedseveral popular tools used to bypass the "Great Firewall" national Internet censorship system. Citing the need to protect "cyberspace sovereignty" and to "maintain cyber security and steady operation," the Ministry changed firewall rules to block three increasingly popular commercial virtual private network (VPN) services.
China operates the world's largest and most sophisticated Internet censorship infrastructure. Colloquially called the "Great Firewall," this infrastructure blocks a huge amount of content deemed contrary to China's interests as a nation. However, as with any such censorship infrastructure, people will try to access content despite the restrictions--creating a game of cat and mouse between censors, citizens, and online service providers.
Any online service which provides its users or readers with secure access is not amenable to fine-grained automated filtering. Censors have the choice of blocking the service outright, or running the risk that some forbidden knowledge may slip through. Outright blocking of large mostly-non-subversive services like Twitter and Gmail has a counter-censorship knock on effect. Since most content is non-subversive, regular citizens legitimately want to access some of it, but are unable to do so due to the censorship regime.
Read the full piece at The Committee to Protect Journalists website.
- Publication Type:Other Writing
- Publication Date:01/28/2015