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Censorship in China #gcf #censorship #green dam

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A VPN, or virtual private network, creates your own private, encrypted channel that runs alongside the normal Internet. From within any country, a VPN connects you with an Internet server somewhere else. You pass your browsing and downloading requests to that American or Finnish or Japanese server, and it finds and sends back what you’re looking for. Nothing can stop you, because it can’t read the encrypted messages you’re sending. Every foreign business operating in any country uses such a network. Every bank, every foreign manufacturing company, every retailer, every software vendor needs VPNs to exist. Closing down the free, easy-to-use proxy servers would create a milder version of the same problem. Encrypted e-mail, too, passes through without scrutiny, and users of many Web-based mail systems can establish a secure session simply by typing “https:” rather than the usual “http:” in a site’s address—for instance, https://mail.yahoo.com

#gcf #censorship #green dam

Chinese government surveillance: It is impossible to send anything privately from Internet cafes, chat rooms, and e-mail.

China's domestic laws. Those laws, the commission says, give authorities a lot of "wiggle room" to define actions that might "endanger state security" or "disrupt social order."

Software program called Internet Detective. The program, installed by Feiyu at the insistence of the police, "records the sites people surf, their identity card numbers, plus e-mails and message boards, and even games"

Dark Visitor Blog by Scott J. Henderson, inside the world of the Chinese Hacker follows Hacking in China. Representative Chen Wanzhi of the National People's Congress reportedly considers the network security situation in China to be grim.

THE “Human flesh search engine” - the idea of mobilizing thousands of individuals to dig out facts and expose them publicly - may no longer be a fun game to play as a draft amendment now bans government staff from seeking and publicizing private information. Several high profile scandals in China had seen the online vigilantes of the “human flesh search engine” engaging in what amounted to cyber lynchings of individuals and their reputations.

All keystrokes are recorded: recorded by the government.

Tech giants Cisco Systems, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo were called before Congress to defend their cooperation with Chinese government censors in order to do business in that nation. And a Chinese firm, also citing Congress' resistance, last summer withdrew a bid for U.S. oil firm Unocal.
Lenovo was based in China until it bought IBM's PC division has U.S. headquarters, an American CEO (former Dell executive William Amelio) and big investors including IBM and several U.S. holding companies. But the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a government body, remains the largest shareholder, owning 27%.

The Internet Detective: The Chinese government uses a special kind of spy software called the Internet Detective that records sites you visit, e-mails, games, message board activity and identity card numbers. The government says that it uses this spyware to make it easier to catch criminals who use Internet cafes.

Jurisdiction and Punishment

If you’re caught violating the laws of Chinese censorship and appropriate online behavior, you may have to go to jail. Find out how journalists, web surfers and even U.S. companies become entangled in the Chinese censorship movement.

Offending China online warrants jail time: If you are caught and convicted of offending China and the government, you may be sent to jail.
  • There’s no Twitter in China: Twitter is very often blocked in China, so don’t get your hopes up for tweeting action when you study abroad there.
  • You can check to see if your website is blocked in China: You can stop worrying about catering to Chinese readers if you know you’re blocked there anyway. Just use this tool from Harvard’s Cyber Law page.
  • YouTube and Flickr are often blocked: Sometimes these two media sharing sites are blocked completely, and other times, they’re just heavily restricted.
  • Blogger blogs are often blocked:
  • Even outbound links are restricted: In 2000, China passed a law that forbids China websites to link to outside news websites — or even reference news reported by outside news sites — without getting approval from the government.
  • The Tiananmen Square anniversary was heavily censored: The 20th anniversary for one of Chinese history’s darkest days — Tinanmen Square — was censored all over the Internet. Comment boards were shut down by companies afraid of being prosecuted for encouraging discussion about the massacre, and Twitter was shut down.
  • Falun Gong censorship: The Chinese spiritual group Falun Gong is one of the most widespread censorship targets in the country. It is a practice steeped in principles of morality and supposedly rose after the Maoist revolution. The group staged a silent protest in 1999 against an incident of beatings and arrests in 1999, and China has censored and abused them since.
  • Search engines are filtered: There is an effort on behalf of China to eliminate certain words from search engines like Yahoo! and Baidu.
  • University access blocked: Some online university systems have been blocked since 2004, making it impossible for students at schools like George Washington University to access assignments and notes from China.
  • Rogue ways of getting past censorship: Some savvy Chinese citizens intent on getting past censored sites have created applications with names like Gollum and picidae to get past servers and browse pages as images.
  • Forced restriction leads to self-restriction: Time reports that James Fallows of the Atlantic brought up a frightening reality: that Chinese who were afraid of being caught using the Internet in illegal ways were starting to censor their own use. Fallows wrote "The idea is that if you’re never quite sure when, why and how hard the boom might be lowered on you, you start controlling yourself, rather than being limited strictly by what the government is able to control directly."
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