OPEN LETTER TO SENATOR THE HON. STEPHEN CONROY, MINISTER FOR BROADBAND, COMMUNICATIONS AND THE DIGITAL ECONOMY 

Censorship has failed in the past, is failing now, and will fail in the future. When people want material that governments decide is not in the communities’ interest for them to have, people will work out methods to circumvent the laws which stop them having that material.

In the interests of pointing out to you the futility of attempts to censor the Internet, you should know that the South African apartheid censors, in their ignorance and stupidity, censored a book called ‘Black Beauty”. After the outcry at their crass stupidity, the book was ultimately unbanned.

Political and fiction and non-fiction books and similar material in the form of magazines and journals were taken into South Africa from Mozambique and Swaziland, where such material, particularly in the English language, were not banned.

Australia has a long history of censorship, and most of the attempts of censors here have failed because people are able to obtain items which governments are determined to prevent them from having.

There are so many loopholes in all attempts at censorship that one wonders why governments persist in behaving like big brother and/or nanny.

If you want to control what is available in Australia on the Internet you will have to ultimately close down people’s ability to have the Internet, whether it is broadband or any other way of receiving what is out there.

It may be a good idea for would-be censors to read Antony Loewenstein’s recently published book, “The Blogging Revolution” and see what happens in totalitarian states around the world. Loewenstein’s latest article in The Age online (10 November 2008) included below gives a very good illustration of the hypocrisy of politicians in the realm of censorship. In fact, Kevin Rudd outdid himself yet again today, 11 November 2008, when he spoke about remembering those who have died defending their countries, and that the 21^st century should be one of peace and not war. This is the same politician who is sending more troops to Afghanistan to fight in what has been labelled by those who are involved in fighting there as unwinnable.

The same may be said of your attempts at filtering what may or may not be available on the Internet – you are fighting an unwinnable war, and the sensible approach would be to quit while you are still ahead – if ahead you actually are!

And most interesting of all is the fact that violence is censored in Australia far, far less than anything with the word “sex” in it or relating to it. What are you going to do about web sites which discuss sexual matters in all their shapes and forms – ban them all from the Internet?? 

Mannie De Saxe, Lesbian and Gay Solidarity Melbourne

PO Box 1675

Preston South

Vic 3072                                                              

Government uploads hypocrisy with internet censorship

·         Antony Loewenstein

·         November 10, 2008

BEFORE this year's Beijing Olympic Games, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd chastised the Chinese authorities for blocking full access to the internet for the assembled world media: "My attitude to our friends in China is very simple", he said. "They should have nothing to fear by open digital links with the rest of the world during this important international celebration of sport."

Although Rudd expressed no concern for the average Chinese web user being unable to view tens of thousands of banned websites, his intervention was nevertheless a welcome call for transparency and greater democracy.

But now the Rudd government is working towards implementing an unworkable filtering process in Australia that suggests a misguided understanding of the internet and worrying tendency to censor an inherently anarchic system.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy told Radio National's Media Report recently that the aim of the project is to "protect Australian families and kids from some material that is currently on the net . . . such as child pornography and ultra-violent sites".

Conroy tried to assure a sceptical interviewer that although the idea had been ALP policy for years, "we are committed to work with the industry to see if it is technically feasible".

He further claimed that similar kinds of filtering already exist in UK, Sweden, Norway, France and New Zealand and "there has been no detrimental effect on internet speed or performance".

But Conroy is and ignoring the wider social, moral and political implications of the issue. A number of politicians, including Family First Steve Fielding and independent Nick Xenophon, have advocated blocking online gaming sites and general pornography sites. What next?

It is not hard to imagine a push to block sites that allegedly "support" terrorism. Take Hamas, the democratically elected party in Palestine and yet regarded as a terrorist group by much of the West. For many individuals around the world, myself included, Hamas is not a terrorist entity and should be engaged. But will over-zealous politicians make it illegal to view the organisation's websites?

This is a feasible scenario, as US Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman this year successfully pressured YouTube owners Google to remove videos from "Islamist terrorist organisations".

Many in the Australian gay community are equally concerned about the current proposals. The Australian Coalition for Equality (ACE), which advocates for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, has called on the Rudd government to guarantee "websites will not be accidentally filtered out purely because they contain the words poof, fag or dyke".

Technologically, the ability for internet service providers to successfully censor banned websites is arguably impossible. Three of the country's leading players, Telstra Media's Justin Milne, iiNet's Michael Malone and Internode's Simon Hackett, have all spoken on the record about the difficulties of implementing ISP-level filtering.

Hackett imagines a future where the government mandates a blacklist of IP addresses that by law an ISP is not permitted to serve to a customer. "Two problems with that", he argues. "One is collateral damage. What if that IP address is a virtual host with 2000 web sites on it and only one of them doesn't follow the government's morality? The other (problem) is, what if it's done by mistake? (What) if the IP address is just straight out wrong? Another obvious (problem) is that the internet is full of anonymous proxies. None of this stuff actually works."

Numerous programs such as TOR are used by users in repressive nations to communicate anonymously and without detection and are likely to be used by people in Australia.

Perhaps most worryingly, should we feel comfortable with the idea of privately owned ISPs being the gatekeeper of administering the law of permissible and blocked websites? Telstra's Milne rightly believes it should be the police implementing the rules of the land.

Furthermore, has the government even considered the massive financial burden on ISPs, especially the smaller ones, forced to play the role of Big Brother for Rudd's obsession with "protecting the children"? It seems clear that the will of small, unrepresentative Christian groups, including the Australian Family Association and the Australian Christian Lobby, are increasingly able to dictate social policy to Rudd ministers with little transparency as to their real role and influence.

The government completed a closed trial of web filtering products at a Telstra laboratory in Tasmania in June. The results were largely negative and found that most filters could not identify illegal or inappropriate content. It is not surprising that many industry insiders fear the government's moves are little more than populism dressed up as courageous social policy.

Colin Jacobs, chair of the online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said recently that Rudd's "model involves more technical interference in the internet infrastructure than what is attempted in Iran, one of the most repressive and regressive censorship regimes in the world."

This is certainly unnecessary rhetoric - I examine a host of authoritarian regimes in my book The Blogging Revolution, including Iran, and the Islamic Republic's censorship is far more extreme and life threatening than anything proposed by Rudd. But Jacobs is right to raise the alarm about the path Australia appears to be embracing.

Free speech is never absolute in any Western country but vigorous public debate should be the pre-cursor to any profound shift in freedom of the internet. History teaches us that governments have an unhealthy tendency to ban material deemed inappropriate for groups allegedly exposed. In this day and age, young children are seen as the most vulnerable. Cynicism is the only healthy response.

Antony Loewenstein is the author of The Blogging Revo-lution, published by Melbourne University Press.

At the height of the South African apartheid regime's censorship efforts, those enlightened political guardians of the morals of us degenerates censored Black Beauty, because, without ever having heard of the book, let alone read it! - they concluded the story would have to have been about a black woman who was a beauty, and therefore the book would have to be off limits to white people (read men!!) and must also be pornographic!!

Now we have a bunch of Australian politicians who are doing the same with photographic art and they are endeavouring to create a climate of fear and extreme censorship as they decide that Bill Henson's photographic art is pedophilia disguised as art - and what do we as lay people know about art???

Only politicians know and they must safeguard our morals - where have we heard all this cristian morality crap before??

The article below, from The Age newspaper of 22 May 2008, by Seth Finkelstein, is about one type of censorship concerned with the internet and so-called porn filtering. It is interesting that the article appeared a short time after another Finkelstein was censored elsewhere in an act which can only be described as another form of pornography - censorship of an academic and intellectual who dares to be critical of Israel and who was sacked from his "university"  of employment in that haven of democracy, the United States of America.

The person in question is none other than Norman Finkelstein, who has been turned into a pariah by the USA and Israel. What makes the treatment of Norman Finkelstein even more appalling was when he arrived to enter Israel and was immediately deported before he had time to enter that benighted country (the country which has the Law of Return for Jews from around the world to come to Israel) , and the fact that a week or two later Walt and Mearsheimer, two academic writers from the USA who have published several controversial articles and books critical of the state of Israel, were allowed to enter Israel and give lectures across the country which were, apparently, well attended!

Whether the two Finkelsteins are related or not doesn't really matter - the one writes about censorship and pornography and the other writes about and lectures on Israel and is given censorship and pornographical treatment by those two beacons of "democracy", the USA and Israel!

Again, a great deal of information about both Israel and the United States can be gathered by reading Naomi Klein's book "The Shock Doctrine". It is indeed just that!

The problem with porn ...
May 22, 2008
 
Seth Finkelstein looks at the insidious control that governments and corporations want over your internet use.
CENSORWARE was never just about teens looking at porn or workers goofing off.
The issue of whether the internet can be censored and how governments try to do it is being fought around the world.
The OpenNet Initiative (opennet.net), a partnership of four leading academic institutions, has published an analysis, Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering (http://tinyurl.com/4v5ofh).
It's a primer in methods and an atlas of studies, and prohibitions are examined across dozens of countries.
The results show that the idea of the internet destroying nations, arguably nations are domesticating the internet - or at least trying hard. As one telling sentence puts it: "A key aspect of control online is that states have, on an individual basis, defied the cyber libertarians by asserting control over the online acts of their own citizens in their own states."
In 1996, during a conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy, I literally talked myself hoarse trying to convince civil libertarians that censorware (a more accurate term than "filters") would be a serious threat to free speech (sethf.com/pioneer).
Prevailing views at the time were an odd doublethink - that censorware should be touted as a solution for parents who wanted to prevent their kids reading forbidden material but that the internet couldn't be censored by governments. More than a decade on, this book details how extensively governments have been attempting internet censorship.
The book's very existence is a milestone. Over time an issue can work its way up the political food chain from often-ignored grassroots activists to marginal but significant mentions in white papers by think-tanks, to full-scale consideration by policymakers.
And the issues here encompass everything from the complicity of US censorware companies with censorious regimes to the collaboration of information storage giants such as Google and Yahoo! with repressive state actions.
When I speak about censorware, I often try to impress on people that technical architecture is different from personal values. That is, if parents can limit what teenagers can see, then governments can limit what citizens see. And the other side is if citizens can circumvent governments, teenagers can circumvent parents.
But there's a refinement I usually don't have room to discuss. That is, it's arguably futile to try to eliminate sexual material in general due to the sheer amount and possible interest by virtually all (male) adolescents and adults. The number of people interested in, say, independence of Tibet from China or dissent in Burma is by contrast much smaller.
And that difference may make for a far more manageable banning problem. The details of how human rights reports or opposition sites have been blocked are putting this speculation to a practical test. Although it would be ironic if, at ground level, pornography-seeking uses of projects such as the Psiphon (psiphon.civisec.org) social networks-based program or the Tor anonymity system (torproject.org) ended up popularising the programs for political uses.
It's sometimes suggested that we are entering a new internet era with blogs and syndication feeds and massive digital sharecropping sites that will, on the whole, be more difficult to censor.
My response is to remind people that identical rhetoric was heard at the start of the internet's popularisation. And we're all witnessing how wrong those predictions were.
Indeed, there's every reason to expect that similar trends such as centralisation, willingness of corporations to collaborate, the power of the market for repression and so on will be applied to these forms of communication.
The failure of technological determinism just a short while ago should argue strongly against such baseless optimism.
Access Denied will certainly become a standard reference. But it's sadly not clear whether it will be more as a foundation for anti-censorship efforts or as an initial chronicle of how visions of freedom turned into realities of control.
THE GUARDIAN

When I got up today (Wednesday 28 May 2008) and saw the main news item on the front page of The Age newspaper concerning the ongoing censorship of Bill Henson's art work I felt personally violated. It seems that people in Australia are living in the nanny state extended and intensified by John Howard from 1996 onwards, and which we had hoped against hope would change with the change of government to Kevin Rudd and his cohorts.

How wrong can one be - or how wrong one can be!! We did believe that there would not be significant social changes under a Rudd government, but to end up going backwards and finding oneself living, yet again, in a police state such as the one I left in 1978 (South Africa), is a total violation of one's freedoms as a human being - known as human rights.

It seems as if some of those present at KRudd's talkfest 2020 have felt equally violated, believing that something better would come out of this new government that seemed to offer to listen to "the people", and discuss the social, politcal and economic way forward, but KRudd is just another megalomaniac of the Howard, Keating, Hawke, Fraser, Whitlam, Menzies types with which Australia seems to be overpopulated in 2008.

Censorship establishes regimens of thinking, seeing, hearing, controlled by Big Brother to ensure conformity and brainwashing at the lowest levels of intellectual challenge.

Not only did the Sydney exhibition, raided by the NSW police farce, get closed down, subsequent raids in Newcastle, Albury and other places have resulted in similar outcomes.

We even have the spectacle that as many of the country's politicians as possible are getting in on the act to destroy a famous artist, the Victorian premier being the latest - and everybody knows he is already as unpopular as Paul Lennon!

This has all happened before -  very much in the 20th century by all the dictators that century produced - but also by so-called democratically elected governments around the world.

To see it all in perspective is to necessitate reading Naomi Klein's book "The Shock Doctrine" because so much of what happens to us in our daily lives is explained by her analysis of the politics of the world dictated to a great degree by that greatest of democracies, the United States of America!  

If it wasn't for the fact that in all my 81 years I have retained some measure of optimism for the future of the world, and also because my personal daily life is one I would not be anxious to leave, I would ask: what is the point of it all?

We feel in some small way we are able to contribute to the struggle to improve the circumstances in which we live, and the mere fact that we have this fantastic tool called the World Wide Web means we are able to be in touch with anybody and everybody in the hope that we may be able to convince some doubters about the rights and wrongs of the global village in which we live. 

A new international television series has been launched to universal acclaim. The series is called “Hetty Johnson Investigates” and features a woman who has a grudge against society and is determined to right the wrongs she sees around her.

Episode 1 features our intrepid hero tackling art exhibitions which feature nudes – female actually, not male, and her success sets her out on an international crusade to stop child pornography in areas such as Africa where child soldiers are imprisoned as regulars to fight illegal and terrorizing wars. The other African area this intrepid fighter is involved with in her fight for universal justice for young people is in South Africa, where men have sex with 3 month old female babies because they believe it will prevent them from acquiring HIV or, if they are already infected, it will “cure” them!

We can’t say too much about other incidents in the first episode because it will give too much away. Suffice to say Johnson goes into battle with all flags flying and banners blowing in the wind!

Future episodes planned involve:

1) Melbourne University’s gagging of a public transport spokesperson because he told the truth,

2) Melbourne’s lord mayor Soho, who has banned the showing of two art works because he “disapproves”,

3) Leichhardt Council’s removal of an exhibition from its library because the zionists didn’t like the fact that the exhibition was about Palestine and the Palestinians,

4) the University of Western Sydney because it closed down the communications and media faculty because one of the lecturers was teaching people to seek the truth in the media and not accept everything on face value,

5) the University of New South Wales because it behaved with a brutality unseen in many years to a protester who was complaining about the presence at a conference on “terrorism and the law” of the federal attorney general who was promulgating the laws.

There are so many other features of this new series which make it so attractive, one of the main ones being that it has the total support of the current prime minister, the current leader of the federal opposition, the New South Wales premier and opposition leader, the festival of light (read darkness) leaders and several other “top honchos” of Australian cultural society, or as Jean Brodie would have said, the “crème de la crème”.

With this new series, Australia is advancing backwards into the 19^th century at a rate of knots, or as we used to be advised when landing from a plane at Jan Smuts airport during the apartheid years “We are about to land at Jan Smuts airport. Please turn your clocks back 300 years”!

In a Churchillian quote we would say, “Never has so much been censored in so short a time by so few for so many”!

And of course we invite all who are interested in this new series to read the book “The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein, which will explain how the world we live in thinks and acts.

They can censor what we see, hear, read, but they cannot censor our minds!

The following quotation is from Sarah, who contributes to the anti-censorship email list on a regular basis. In this one sentence, she says it all!!!

They are developing the technology and gaining world wide support using child porn as an excuse.  Then when they are ready they will start clamping down on what they are really afraid of, and that is the common person having forums to whip up anti government support whatever the reason.

AND SO SAY ALL OF US!!

POSTSCRIPT: 

Naked Girl – Letter in The Age 26 May 2008:

I can’t wait for the painting over of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Not only does it contain images of nude children but it was foisted upon us by a homosexual! What an abomination.

Brendan L Strauch, Moorabbin

(my editing of Brendan's letter - for emphasis!)

If you thought there would be a new dispensation for censorship with a change in government from the extreme conservatism of the Howard government and its love affair with right wing reactionary religious bigots to the Rudd Alternative Liberal Party, think again!

For those of us who watched the film on ABC on Sunday night 6 January 2008 called the Chatterley Affair, many memories of the censorship of the post-war periods in the UK, USA, South Africa, Canada, the USA and other so-called "liberal democracies" came flooding back as we remembered with horror what had been perpetrated on us by bigoted right-wing reactionary religious-affiliated governments.

That was the 1960s, this is the 2000s, and we are still in thrall to the same forces of darkness now as we were then despite the Internet and all the modern technology we have today.

Senator Conroy is intending to force ISPs to filter porn to prevent children from having access to it. What is porn, you may well ask? And did the censorship of bygone days stop children from gaining access to so-called porn? Of course not.

Of course the pornography of wars and violence to which we are subjected by the governments with which we are "governed" and which we see all day and every day on our tv screens, computer games and other pieces of technology, are not able to be censored In any event, as everyone knows, including the youngest of the savvy technology-literate youth of today, there are ways of circumventing all of the above, and the time and money spent on trying to stop what governments are trying to stop could well be spent on educating young people about the dangers of believing in the religions with which they are bombarded on a daily basis, and thus there would be an understanding of the nature of sex and all its attributes, so that there would be no moralising on the subject and the taboos would diminish and ultimately disappear.

It is astonishing that religions still control the mindsets of the educators,  politicans, ethicists, so many in all walks of life to the extent that they are blinded to the realities of life as we live it.

There are, as the saying goes, none so blind as those who will not see. And therein lies the tragedy of governments in 2008. Democracy and human rights are not for the likes of us - they are reserved for the theoreticians, and we can just forget about being allowed to view, read, hear what we like - nanny and big brother will be watching you, or an ISP near you.

Totalitarian governments are just a step away!

4 OCTOBER 2007

The following article was in the Sydney Star Observer issue 887, and shows, yet again, how the federal government functions with the religious right making the agenda and calling the shots. It is yet another example of this government's retreat backwards to the late 19th, early 20th centuries, and indicates what you should expect more of if the government is re-elected at the next federal election, due before the end of 2007. Having said that, you can expect no difference if the Alternative Liberal Party (ALP) under Kevin Rudd is elected - they will not change or challenge anything Howard's government has perpetrated for the last 12 years:

by Harley Dennett

A second Melbourne store stocking imported gay and lesbian films has been ordered to empty its shelves after being targeted by the federal Attorney-General’s Department.

Rowland Thomson, owner of gay bookshop Hares and Hyenas, received a letter from the department ordering him to remove 10 DVD titles, including television soaps and critically acclaimed documentaries.

“They got the titles from the website,” Thomson said. “Things like Boy Meets Boy; Noah’s Arc; and The Aggressives, a documentary about butch New York lesbians.”

Also on the list was the 1997 film Bent, about the suffering of gay men in Nazi concentration camps, which has also been performed as a stage play in Australia for the last 20 years.

“Could you imagine if books had to be presented for classification? It’s a class thing; film being a more popular medium. We can sell the French Rugby calendar, but we can’t sell the Making Of DVD,” he said.

“This is a censorship due to minority interests.”

The cost to classify a three-hour film was quoted at $2,500, and came under attack in The Age earlier this week for unfairly hurting minority groups.

OutVideo owner Paul Hollingworth, who last month received a similar order from the department and faces removing more than half his stock, said feedback had been mixed

Adult stores have been able to stock unclassified material by ignoring the department’s warnings, but Hollingworth said that wasn’t the answer.

“Something needs to change; maybe an American-style system of voluntary classification that’s just a parenting advisory,” he said.

“It doesn’t only affect us. A lot of the foreign communities, with maybe only a few thousand people living here, still want to see something from their country.”

A spokeswoman for Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said the department was simply enforcing the law.

This article was received by email on 21 September 2007. It is something that everyone should be aware of as the insidiousness of the Howard govenment's censorship creeps on and on and on. It was published inThe Australian newspaper:

Coonan seeks to censor the Web

by Karen Dearne | September 20, 2007

 THE Federal Police commissioner will have the power to block and ban

websites believed to be crime or terrorism related under an internet

censorship amendment bill introduced into Parliament today by Helen Coonan.

 Communications Minister Senator Helen Coonan proposes to include

terrorism and cyber-crime sites on ACMA's hit list.

 The bombshell web ban bill was tabled in the Senate at 9:58am, without

prior notice.

 Communications Minister Senator Helen Coonan proposes to expand the

"black list" of internet addresses (URLs) currently maintained by the

Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to include

terrorism and cyber-crime sites.

 At present, ACMA has the power to act against websites containing

pornography or offensive content.

 Under the proposed amendment, Federal Police will inform ACMA of

websites to be blocked, and the agency must then notify the relevant

internet service providers. ISPs will be required to "take reasonable

steps" to prevent users accessing the website or content.

 Australian Privacy Foundation chair Roger Clarke expressed disbelief

that "the government of any country in the free world could table a Bill

of this kind".

 "Without warning, the Government, through Senator Coonan, is proposing

to provide Federal Police with powers to censor the internet," Dr Clarke

said.

 "Even worse, ISPs throughout the country are to be the vehicle for

censorship, by being required to block internet content."

 Greens Senator Kerry Nettle said the Bill would give the Police

Commissioner "enormous power over what political content Australians can

look at" on the web.

 "This gives the Commissioner sweeping powers which could potentially be

applied to millions of websites," she said. "The Government has dropped

the Bill into the Senate on the eve of an election with virtually no

explanation."

 Senator Nettle said environmental organisations such as Greenpeace had

been accused of crime or terrorism-related actions. "Will the Police

Commissioner call for Greenpeace's website to be shut down?"

 The requirement to filter or block content would impose another enormous

burden on local ISPs at a time when the IT industry faced growing costs

related to other national security legislation, she said.

 Meanwhile, Senator Coonan today extended the Government's $189 million

NetAlert - Protecting Australian Families Online program to agencies

such as Medicare, Centrelink, Child Support and the Tax Office.

 Information about internet filtering and the free content filters from

NetAlert will be promoted through the agency shopfronts as part of the

plan to prevent children accessing inappropriate material online.

If you listen to the radio or watch news on television - the non-commercial varieties, you may be wondering what has happened to such "events" as the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Darfur, and other such "trivia" occurring in remote and far-away places.

Well, there is an election in the offing, and the federal police state controls media such as ABC radio and television and so you now see and hear just what the government permits you to see or hear.

Fortunately they have not yet learnt to control the Internet - nor will they - and we are still able to get uncensored news from around the world. Otherwise you could be forgiven for believing that all that matters is the federal government and its loyal opposition.

The above cartoon from The Age on 8 August 2007 couldn't have put it much better, and no doubt the worst is yet to come.

The bullletins could well start: "The time is six o'clock and here is the abuse!"

Goodbye and good luck!

Google enters the murky world of censorship in China to make more fast bucks than it already has!

                                                                                             28 January 2006

A report in The Age newspaper of 26 January 2006 by Jonathan Watts in the UK’s Guardian tells the sordid story of Google on the make in the world’s fastest growing industrial giant.

“Google will join Microsoft and Yahoo! in helping China, the world’s biggest censor, in blocking access to websites containing politically sensitive material.”

This in a country which has one of the worst records on human rights and where the death penalty is one of the largest in the world. Google used to have as its mission statement: to make all possible information available to everyone who has a computer or mobile phone.

Is this a case of Mephistophelian selling of their soul to the devil so that they can become even richer, and their shareholders, since they went public, reap more dividends on their investments?

The end result is that those of us who still have some semblance of belief in the possibility of human rights around the world will no longer be able to support, or use the services of, a company so in breach of any human decency that they forfeit the right to that support.

“After a year of soul-searching, Google executive have grudgingly accepted that this is the price they have to pay to base servers in China. The move will improve the speed – and attractiveness – of the service in a country where Google faces strong competition from the leading Mandarin search engine, Baidu.

But Google faces a backlash from free speech advocates, internet activists and politicians, some of whom are already asking how the company’s policy in China accords with its mission statement.”

Google will thus be required to abide by the rules of the world’s most restricted internet environment. China is thought to have 30,000 online police monitoring blogs, chat rooms and portals. The scale of censorship in China is likely to dwarf anything Google has done before.

“Sophisticated filters have been developed to block or limit access to ‘unhealthy information’, which includes human rights websites, foreign news outlets and pornography. Of the 64 internet dissidents in prison worldwide, 54 are from China.

Google has remained outside this system until now. But its search results are still filtered and delayed by the giant banks of government servers, known as the great firewall of China. Now, Google will actively assist the government to limit content. There are technical precedents. In Germany, Google follows government orders by restricting references to sites that deny the Holocaust. In France, it obeys local rules prohibiting sites that stir up racial hatred. And in the US, it assists the authorities’ crackdown on copyright infringements.

Google acknowledged the move was contrary to its corporate ethics, but said a greater good was being served.”

Greater good for whom? Google’s shareholders? China’s citizens, who are already suppressed and repressed as far as political dissent is concerned, already live in a society where capitalism is rearing its US type ugly head with the economic growth of the country, but with this increasing wealth to a limited number of its citizens, freedom of thought is now to be censored even further with the help of a compliant Google!!