OT: national control of internet

From: Mark Tapley <mtapley_at_swri.edu>
Date: Thu Mar 7 09:45:23 2002

Sellam said:

>...governments want to try to control the
>content, for various political and social reasons (political dissent,
>porn, etc.) As we all know, try as they might, they won't be able to
>control it, ....

        There is a scary article in last week's Weekly Standard that makes
this a more shaky proposition. Basically the contention in the article is
that the internet in China effectively *has* been placed under the control
of the Chinese government. The key technology there has been developed by
Cisco, AT&T, and other telecom giants given suitable financial inducement
by the chinese government, and as I understood the article, it involves
putting firewalls around the entire country, with enough power to sniff
packets for subversive terms to effectively render the internet unusable to
elements unfriendly to the government.
        The article does hold out hope, based on cryptography, "pirate"
links from Hong Kong, etc.
        Anyway, I'm not currently convinced that internet access is
currently synonomous with freedom of information exchange.
                                                                - Mark
Received on Thu Mar 07 2002 - 09:45:23 GMT