Censorship: the Great Firewall of China
Introduction
Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Communist Party has been using both censorship and surveillance as weapons to maintain its power. Not only applicable to most notable contents as pornography, corruption and anarchy, but also, with the evolution of the cyber world, censorship in China has risen up to a higher level: cyber-censorship and cyber-surveillance through the Great Firewall.
The Great Firewall
The current situation
The Great Firewall of China is a surveillance program of the incoming and outgoing Internet flows, and a cyber censorship tool. The surveillance role of this firewall is led by a special unit composed of nearly two million cyber-policemen , whose job is to watch the Internet users: the reading of blogs’ contents represents their main task, as these writings, most of the time, express general opinions on the party to the power and its diverse policies. The cyber-policemen are technically asked to notify every single complain, bad-mouthing or gossip that circulates online about the party. As for the censorship role, it rests on an ingenious high-tech system of firewalls able to deny the access to certain identified web sites or subjects of research .
With the widest range of Internet users in the world (591 million Internet users), the existence of the Great Firewall implies the following:
591 million people do not have access to complete information (only the web sites and subjects approved by the party are available online, the others are not). For instance, e-Bay and PayPal are blocked by the firewall .
591 million people cannot freely express their opinion and share it with each other, in fear of the consequences (as long as you don’t say something that might be interpreted as harmful or reputation damaging to the party, you can write and share on whatever subject you want; but you can’t express your thoughts on recent policies or on actions undertaken by politics) .
This
Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Communist Party has been using both censorship and surveillance as weapons to maintain its power. Not only applicable to most notable contents as pornography, corruption and anarchy, but also, with the evolution of the cyber world, censorship in China has risen up to a higher level: cyber-censorship and cyber-surveillance through the Great Firewall.
The Great Firewall
The current situation
The Great Firewall of China is a surveillance program of the incoming and outgoing Internet flows, and a cyber censorship tool. The surveillance role of this firewall is led by a special unit composed of nearly two million cyber-policemen , whose job is to watch the Internet users: the reading of blogs’ contents represents their main task, as these writings, most of the time, express general opinions on the party to the power and its diverse policies. The cyber-policemen are technically asked to notify every single complain, bad-mouthing or gossip that circulates online about the party. As for the censorship role, it rests on an ingenious high-tech system of firewalls able to deny the access to certain identified web sites or subjects of research .
With the widest range of Internet users in the world (591 million Internet users), the existence of the Great Firewall implies the following:
591 million people do not have access to complete information (only the web sites and subjects approved by the party are available online, the others are not). For instance, e-Bay and PayPal are blocked by the firewall .
591 million people cannot freely express their opinion and share it with each other, in fear of the consequences (as long as you don’t say something that might be interpreted as harmful or reputation damaging to the party, you can write and share on whatever subject you want; but you can’t express your thoughts on recent policies or on actions undertaken by politics) .
This