Interesting BBC article on Net Censorship

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6665945.stm

""In five years we have gone from a couple of states doing state-mandated net filtering to 25," said John Palfrey, at Harvard Law School."

Those aren't US states, fortunately.

As no computer system is 100% impregnable to hackers - so no filtering system can be expected to be perfect, and there will always be, excepting one particular circumstance I can think of, a way for information to get through these government filters.

Even so, there are the inevitable sensitivities of reporting the other side of the story than that covered by the article linked above, reporting on the trends of governments' activities. On that other side of the story are the activities of the general population - their attempts to penetrate those firewalls. Any articles run in the larger media (BBC or whatnot, etc) trying to provide detailed figures on the relative successes and popularity of the assorted techniques citizens employ, run a strong risk of being counterproductive. The state (assuming it is not blind and hampered by Soviet-style bureaucracy) would use that as feedback for themselves, and clamp down more effectively, futher securing their methods.

Of course, as I - and countless others - have said no computer system (especially an internet-connected system) can be expected to be 100% secure. Especially in the long term.

That one circumstance I mentioned that I think would make it all the easier for a government to keep a far stronger hold on the internet activities of its citizens is the prohibition of private home computers and instead the installation of state-sponsored internet cafes - where the state can possess greater control over what software is installed and run.

In this latter situation, the use of easy-to-use filter-beating tools written by the more philanthropically-minded breed of hackers living wherever else in the world is more fraught with difficulty. On a home computer, privacy is all the more available. In an internet cafe, less so - especially with (IT savvy, of course) government minders breathing down the users' necks.

Here's hoping this latter example does not occur - and it may well prove uneconomical and so less desireable to larger countries like China, where the state is putting the economy as pretty high priority. The benefits to the economy of people being able to use internet-enabled computers in their private offices are fairly clear, I would have thought. Though then again - if the govt doesn't see the industrial smog that's destroying the health of their 1 billion strong populace as an economic disaster in the making, then who knows?


Well, perhaps they do see it as a problem after all:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6213051.stm