Blog Post #6, The Great Firewall of China

Here is a link to a news article about the Great Firewall of China. This news story does a good job at showing us how Chinese leadership does not offer a choice when it comes to censorship. I thought it was very interesting to see how western internet companies are forced to obey the leadership or they are denied as a service provider. The article mentions an example where a Chinese blogger's site was shut down by MSN, a well-known provider here in the states.

Something I found especially interesting in the article was the number of employees whose job it is to search Web sites, blogs, and chat rooms looking for offensive content. The agencies employ over 30,000 people to do this job. The article contrasts this to the United States CIA which employs an estimated 16,000 people. Also, it amazes me that the government would filter people's e-mail and text messages. The article mentions how phone companies were ordered to install software that blocked any text messages with offending terms. Here in the United States, we can hardly imagine what it would be like to have every technological communication we send or receive be intercepted by something else first.

Even with the huge "gateways" that filter already, China's monitoring system is "becoming far more complicated" because more sites now have podcasts and user-generated video which is harder to examine compared to text files. It will be interesting to see how China keeps up with the ever increasing technology!