May 02, 2005
The Great Firewall of China
A researcher laments from a recent trip to China, where he noticed that access to news sites and email were censored by Chinese authorities. Freedom of speech and from censorship should not be taken for granted in this world, even in the world of cyberspace. Can you imagine 30,000 people working day and night to make sure the 94 million Chinese internet users can't find more information about Falun Gong? Yikes.It was once I sought to access common news sites that I found myself face to face with the “Great Firewall of China.” Google News, a popular aggregator of news stories from around the world, would not load into my browser, apparently blocked by a filtering system that employs 30,000 people to regularly monitor Internet traffic and content. Similarly, while the BBC website would load, attempts to access news stories on that site yielded only error messages.
