Eye on Asia - Asia Observer’s blog

More than 40 countries try to filter content on the Internet. Most disturbing are practices in Asia.

It is like a cat and mouse game: Governments are becoming increasingly sophisticated in trying to censor the Internet. But at the same time also people fighting censorship are getting smarter.

Take the OpenNet Initiative - a collaboration among the University of Toronto, Harward Law School, the Cambridge Security Programme, The Oxford Internet Institute and several parner NGOs worldwide. The Initiative is carrying out extensive tests to document government censorship on the Internet.
And Asian governments are among the worst, writes OpenNet’s principal investigator Robert Deibert in Far Eastern Economic Review. He claims that Internet content filtering has been documented in Burma, China, Vietnam, the Maldives, Thailand, South Korea, Singapore, Pakistan and India.

It reminds me when I was a correspondent in Asia from 1997 to 2000. In Beijing I used a local Internet provider - and some evenings I would try to figure out which web sites were not considered politically correct at the moment. Big American newspapers, like New York Times and Washington Post, were blocked, of course. So were Playboy and Penthouse. However, you would find all other kind of porn, if you wanted to. Newspapers from Taiwan were filtered, as were Chinese dissidents from all of the world. Still, I would always find a few dissident sites that had been overlooked.
Bad it was. Fortunately people would find their ways around the filtering, for instance by using proxy servers.

Since then it has become harder. An estimated 30.000 government censors try to stop Chinese people from accessing web sites that are not deemed to have the proper content.
Even Google is cooperating. Go to this site, for instance, to compare picture searches for Tiananmen or Falun Gong on Google China and Google.com. The different result is quite shocking.
Fortunately many groups are figthing the censorship. One is the web site Anonymouse.org, which gives people living under censorship a way to access banned sites. And the OpenNet Initiative is continuously updating their map over Internet filtering around the world - with Asia being the most red continent.