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New Report Finds Governments Censoring the Internet

By: Jed Nottingham

Posted: 05/22/2007

TORONTO - According to a recent report conducted by the University of Toronto, Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge, 26 of 40 countries surveyed utilize some degree of state-sponsored software filtering to censor Internet content.

Countries who admitted to using such filtering systems included China, Iran, Syria, Tunisia, Vietnam, Uzbekistan, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Morocco, and Singapore.

The study found that many of the Middle Eastern countries mainly filtered international news from their citizens. Saudi Arabia focuses its censorship on political sites, pornography and gambling. Tunisia focused its filter on pornography, but the country also filters sites that deal with human rights and political opposition to the government. 

SmartFilter, developed by Secure Computing in San Jose, Calif., is one of the more popular software-filtering tools found used today. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman, Sudan, and Tunisia currently use this software.

South Korea enabled filters to eliminate North Korean websites. Thailand, while not in the report, recently filtered YouTube and other video-sharing websites that disseminated videos critical of the country's king.

Among the countries that didn't enable any sort of state-sponsored content filtering included: Russia, Venezuela, Egypt, Hong Kong, Israel, and Iraq.

Other countries simply display a default page or a DNS error in an attempt to mask any censorship. China, by far the worst offender according to the report, recently censored the entire LiveJournal network in an attempt to block individual blogs.

A brief lapse in the Great Firewall of China resulted in major headlines last year. For a six-hour period, all users inside China were able to view and search for content typically deemed "un-viewable" by the Chinese government. The Chinese government, Skype, and Google since have declared it a right to continue censoring and promoting censorship as a cost of doing business in such countries. Last year, Yahoo! spoke openly against censorship in China, yet only one month later, it was discovered Yahoo! is one of the most censored western portals inside China.

"Once the tools are in place, authorities realize that the Internet can be controlled," said Ron Deibert, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. "There used to be a myth that the Internet was immune to regulation. Now governments are realizing it's actually the opposite."

The report did not include western countries, citing North American censorship typically takes place because of copyright infractions. None of the 40 countries observed during the analysis incorporated any filtering based on intellectual property concerns.