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Top 10 List of Worldwide Internet Censors
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Nov 13, 2006 02:35 AM
from the can't-stop-the-message dept.
from the can't-stop-the-message dept.
PreacherTom writes "Reports of internet censorship are nothing new and are quite expected from countries whose leadership depends on controlling the popular worldview. Reporters Without Borders, a Paris group that does advocacy work for press freedom, puts a number to the trend with a list of the countries that it says go the furthest to censor the Internet. Photos document the worldwide protests and continuing struggles. Not surprisingly, China is described as the pioneer of internet censors, dedicating more resources than any other country to restrict online freedoms." This week we also discussed the Reporters Without Borders' 13 Enemies of the Internet list.
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The 13 Enemies of the Internet 203 comments
Hennell writes "Reporters without borders has just released its annual list of internet enemies, a list of countries 'that systematically violate online free expression.' A couple of countries have been removed, but Egypt has been added. A detailed summary can be read on the BBC Website." From that article: "The blacklist is published annually but it is the first time RSF has organized an online protest to accompany the list. 'We wanted to mobilize net users so that when we lobby certain countries we can say that the concerns are not just ours but those of thousands of internet users around the world,' said a spokesman for RSF. Many of those on the internet blacklist are countries that are regularly criticized by human rights groups, such as China and Burma."
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Summary (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Summary (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Suspicion (Score:3, Interesting)
Still, it's a great reminder that democracy and free speech are not things that you can take for granted. Given another decade or two of passivity on the part of American voters*, and the USA could wind up taking a place on lists like that. On the other hand, if Americans were to start taking ideas like liberty seriously, they coul
Re: (Score:2)
A List of Fallacious assertions you just made (Score:3, Informative)
Straw Man Argument - You seek to align Libertarian with Emo Hipsters in an attempt to make them look retarded
False Dichotomy - You state that people who espouse libertarianism are either in bed with the corporations of the day or are emo hipsters. The reality of the situation is much more diverse in nature then you let on
Hopefully you will learn that
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Summary (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Summary (Score:4, Informative)
Technically we have a dupe here, the article [businessweek.com] is actually totally based on the Reporters without borders press release [rsf.org] we discussed [slashdot.org] a few days ago. The list of enemies is also identical with the list of censors:
Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam (Only Burma is called Myanmar.)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
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Do you want to know what they [slashdot.org] are?
Thirteen Countries, not Ten. (Score:3, Informative)
Did anybody (Editors/Submitter) RTFA? I mean the first line of the article is:
Some simple math, 1 = China, 2 = Myanmar, 3 = Belarus . . . and then add another 10 . . . That gives you 13, well at least around here it does.
It's 5 countries ! (Score:2)
Re:Thirteen Countries, not Ten. (Score:5, Funny)
Don't mix your abstractions, the headline says "Top 10," not "Top Ten."
Base 13, dude. Base 13
I must be serious, because nobody makes jokes in base 13.
KFG
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
There is a great disturbance in the force.... as if all over the globe, people are taking off their left shoe, and dropping it with a thunk!
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
"Base 13, dude. Base thirteen."
But I ultimately decided, in the interest of safety, not to go for the strange loopy metametajoke. They tend to be explosively unstable.
KFG
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Another X prize (Score:2)
I suggest a multi-thousand dollar prize for the first hacker who can open up their servers so the N.K. citizens can see the whole web.
Re:Another X prize (Score:5, Insightful)
Owning a tunable radio receiver (as opposed to the one with only the DearLeader presets) is a crime in North Korea. Computers/internet access, as nice as that sounds, just isn't an option.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Most of the citizens of NK actually believe in what their government is doing.
Re: (Score:2)
Probably yes.
Re:Another X prize (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't say there is much to recommend it. It is likely that there would be no meaningful payoff that would last more than minutes. Even if you were successful in creating temporary access to a wider range of internet sites, it is likely that the few North Koreas who use the web would be too terrified to make use of it, assuming they even knew about it. Given the nature of the regime, you can assume that their secret police record, monitor, review, and act on the traffic in ways that far exceed the most lurid fantasies about the NSA. Surfing unauthorized web sites would likely constitute a punishable act, especially if an unauthorized site was visited that contained unvetted political, economic, or religious [nysun.com] information. If you've stepped over the line in North Korea, you could easily fall prey to the "heredity rule", developed the Dear Leader's father. Under that rule, the North Korean secret police arrest and imprison three generations of a family [signonsandiego.com] for the misdeeds of one of them, often for life, which can be short in a North Korean "prison camp" AKA death camp.
Besides, the international incident with the paranoid, now nuclear armed, barbaric [guardian.co.uk] regime which is starving [timesonline.co.uk] its people wouldn't be worth it.
If anyone still insists on it, I suggest you stay away from at least the Koreas and Japan as North Korea has a long history of kidnapping people from those countries for various reasons. Given their ties to organized crime, due to their many criminal enterprises [heritage.org], they could reach even further. Life there is tough even when you are useful to them [cbsnews.com].
Parent
China has the most???? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:China has the most???? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
China #1??? (Score:2)
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Duplicate! (Score:2)
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/07/1
I'll come back next week and point it out again.
Top 10 List of Worldwide Internet Censors (Score:2)
Drat! Foiled again!
Or does this mean Slashdot is on the list?
Behind the Great Wall (Score:5, Informative)
For 99.99% or the people here, we are free to go about our business. As long as you are not advocating the overthrow of the government or engaging in illegal activities you aren't going to have too many problems here. (disclaimer: business where there is a lot of money at stake are another matter) I need not remind you how the laws have been changing in the US for anyone implicated in overthrowing the US government. Try going to websites that advocate the overthrow of the US government and have bomb making instructions. Better yet, set one up inside the US and see how long it is till you get censored. See if the two governments are really all the different. Governments defend themselves. You might not agree with the ways they do it, but they do it nonetheless. And of course the US government has NEVER tried to cover anything bad they they did up...
I'm not implying that I'm a big supporter of the Chinese government. There are a lot of things they need to improve on and change. The list is very long. However, the Chinese government is making massive improvements every year and should be given credit for doing so.
I write this b/c I think there is a tremendous amount of misunderstanding in the US of what it is really like to live in China.
Re:Behind the Great Wall (Score:5, Informative)
www.wikipedia.org (do a wikipedia search on tiananmen massacre and then see what happend)
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4960762.st
www.blogspot.com
Oh here's an interesting tidbit of knowledge for you slashdoters. Accessing most Western websites from China is blasted slow. But running bittorrent is just as fast as if I was back home. (For some reason I recently started to be able to stream youtube videos, haven't quite figure that one out)
Parent
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(of course, I agree with you - people generally have the worse misconceptions about foreigners)
Re: (Score:2)
I was in Beijing from October 14-23 at an international (read: U.N.) conference hosted by China at the Beijing International Conference Center, not far from where the Olympics will be in 2 years.
While American press web sites were pretty readily accessible, the BBC rather pointedly was not. (I'm American, but I like some diversity in my news.)
Also, when it came time to upload some coverage of the last day of the conference to a web site in Can [www.iisd.ca]
Well, this shows what is wrong with voting (Score:2, Insightful)
How does this then compare to China wich allows most of its citizens access except to certain sites.
The first is a dictator's wetdream, you, the ruler in total control of all the information. The second is just trying to put out the fire in a vulcano with a spoon.
The
They forgot Denmark (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
The worst part is that it is trivial to break (certain sites return a fake ip) so it does nothing, but look nice.
list composition (Score:2, Interesting)
6+4+3=13
6 Muslim countries (Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Syria), 4 communist countries (China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam), 3 dicatorships (Myanmar, Belarus, Uzbekistan).
While I am not sure about Uzbekistan, I feel pretty safe about the classification. Countries classified as muslim/communist probably can be tagged as dictatorships too (or as undemocratic to say the least).
So it can be safely said that internet censors are those with ideologies that are/were opp
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Although there are elements of truth to what you have to say, the stark manner in which you have presented it will cause the Slashdot mainstream to vilify you and force you to wear a polka dot hat.
Let us hope that the Commander Tacoyev reforms of 2007 are accepted. Then, Slashdot will be as civilized as any other blog and:
- You will no longer be forced to wear polka dot hat.
- I can continue to drink fermented barley water
- Pretty girls riding the bus can ask sit on my lap
Goodbye! Dzienkuje!
Re:list composition (Score:4, Interesting)
You might consider it inflamatory that he pointed it out (someone did), but that doesn't make it any less true, and it's certainly (IMO) an interesting point. As a previous poster pointed out, there's a lot of overlap with these countries and those that would like to wrest control of the internet away from the U.S.
One thing that does bother me is that pre-war Iraq probably wouldn't have been on this list, and yet we still have economic and political relations with China, Saudi Arabia, and a lot of other countries that we ought not be dealing with. This goes beyond and political divisiveness; both parties cow-tow to the nations that are precieved to bring us economic gain as if that's more important than human rights.
Parent
Also... (Score:2)
Yeah right up there on my 2-do list (Score:2)
Internet Freedom Test (Score:3, Interesting)
<Name of my national leader> is a drooling idiot
If shortly thereafter, we never hear from you again, your nation does not enjoy freedom on the Internet. Judging from posts to Slashdot, the US enjoys truly extraordinary freedom.
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i said this before (Score:2)
Government should be delegated a right to censor Internet the same way the censor any public media: television, radio, newspapers by various means.
There is nothing new about and nothing to worry. You have to worry WHO you elect to the government.
Censorship is just a tool. You can use it bad way or good way depending on the person using it.
Same concerns all social institutions.
Grow up.
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Politicians are voted in and out of office depending on the information the voters possess. If you give politicians unrestricted access to censor the information the voters receive, the democratic process collapses. Voters cannot make informed choices if their c
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All the lists comparing different aspects "human rights" in different countries are just plain vanilla idiotic imperialistic propaganda machines for one simple reason: peopple of different cou
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Why? Also, what about countries that were founded from a mix of ethnicities, such as the US? And what about countries that would collapse if not for the food aid they get, such as North Korea?
What makes you think I am an American?
North Korea?? (Score:2)
Privatized Censorship? (Score:2)
China is the LEAST censored (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This is because US Telco carriers charge firstly to connect to US networks and secondly for data transmitted in both directions
I recall reading about one African country (I don't think it was South Africa) which had it's internet completly disconnected due to failure to pay access charges
South Africa's reasons (and I suspect some of the other poorer countries on the list) is purly financial.