Thursday, November 10, 2005
Can you get around any obstacle on the web?
Travis over at the Ipod Taking Over blog has a link to a 2003 article from The Economist that explains a key point about the ability of governments to control the web. Promoters of the Internet have always said that the very architecture of the network makes it impossible to completely block or filter out content because the redundancy built into the network would just bypass the filter and be routed through another set of servers that aren't controlled by that government. It seemed that the web was to powerful for any one government to stop unless they simply prevented their citizens from connecting at all. But that confidence seems to have been shaken in the last few years as the sophistication of security technology and software has developed to meet the very real criminal and terrorist threats posed by open digital networking. IT companies have been working overtime to make the network secure and manageable, technology and software have been developed to maker networking more efficient, faster and more easy to monitor and control:
Until recently, China's efforts to control how its citizens accessed information on the Internet were clumsy and ineffective. In its original form, the Great Firewall of China, as it has become known, was unsophisticated and presented little challenge to anyone with a modicum of Internet experience. Clambering over, around or through the wall, domestic surfers could roam the Internet with impunity.
Suddenly, though, all that has changed. The purchase, since the beginning of 2001, of more than US$46bn of mostly Western-made telecoms equipment has brought with it the engineering expertise of foreign networking companies whose eagerness to make sales outweighs any qualms they may have with helping authorities implement a complex, nationwide system of monitoring and censorship.
As a result, accessing outlawed websites from within China has become immeasurably more difficult. What is more, new technology has now armed authorities with the means to identify in real time where any given Internet surfer is looking, to track patterns of individual surfing activity over time, and even to scan the content of domestic e-mail traffic for suspicious content.
A digital revolution in political repression and control.
