Top 10 List of Worldwide Internet Censors

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.

Summary

Myanmar, China, Belarus, Iran, Tunisia, Cuba, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, North Korea, Syria, and Uzbekistan.

Re:Summary

I'm starting to see a pattern emerge here...give me a few more minutes and I'm sure I can come up with it...

Re:Summary

and..Mom

Re:Summary

Myanmar, China, Belarus, Iran, Tunisia, Cuba, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, North Korea, Syria, and Uzbekistan.

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.)

Thirteen Countries, not Ten.

It was 13 not ten.

Myanmar, China, Belarus, Iran, Tunisia, Cuba, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, North Korea, Syria, and Uzbekistan

Did anybody (Editors/Submitter) RTFA? I mean the first line of the article is:

Reporters Without Borders calls out China, Myanmar, Belarus, and 10 other countries for quashing online political and religious expression

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.

Re:Thirteen Countries, not Ten.

It was 13 not ten.

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

Another X prize

From TFA: "In North Korea...Dictator Kim Jong-Il has absolute control of North Korea's media, and grants only a few thousand citizens access to the Internet. When these privileged Net surfers log on, however, they find only around 30 Web sites, which are filled with photos of the leader and praise for the government."

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

Get real. The first order of business for NK-ans should be getting some food and some freedom.

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.

Re:Another X prize

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.

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].

China has the most????

What they don't say is the amount per user. China has the greatest number of internet users, which would take more people to handle the internet censoring. If you only allow 3,000 people to access the internet it is very easy to limit them. When you have 200,000,000 people it take more -- especially when there are many people trying to hack through their blocks.

Re:China has the most????

Agreed -- I don't understand the accounting here, either. China at least allows access to a high fraction of the internet, and doesn't make general limits on who can see things. North Korea, on the other hand, is essentially off the net. It goes far beyond censorship -- NK is trying to pretend the whole thing doesn't exist.

I would like to say...

CENSORED COMMENT

China #1???

I don't know why anyone would think China is the worst, just listen to the Chinese government [newstarget.com]. They just have trouble accessing the internet sometimes, so you can't blame them for that. I mean, I'm sure they know if they're censoring their own people or not, and why would they lie to us anyway? What could they gain from that??? (was that sarcastic enough? I can never tell...)

Dupes these days, they're getting harder spot!

FTA:"Reporters Without Borders calls out China, Myanmar, Belarus, and 10 other countries for quashing online political and religious expression" (3 countries, plus 10 others makes 13, not the top ten).

Last line of summary: "This week we also discussed the Reporters Without Borders' 13 Enemies of the Internet list."

The dupes are getting harder and harder to spot! This is just BusinessWeek's spin on it, isn't it interesting how news changes?

Duplicate!

What a surprise. Another duplicate article.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/07/13 28259 [slashdot.org]
I'll come back next week and point it out again.

Top 10 List of Worldwide Internet Censors

Nothing to see here, please move along.

Drat! Foiled again!

Or does this mean Slashdot is on the list?

Behind the Great Wall

As an American who has relocated to work in China, I have yet to have problems with the censors. The ping times and transfer rates to and from the US are really slow, but I can get to everything I need. I can read the NYTimes, WSJ, CNN and, most importantly, ./. I can even read this post and all the comments, even the ones that bash the Chinese Government. I don't think it's because the censors are asleep today. For instance, there was a story today in the WSJ today that covered the riots at a hospital in southern China. I'm sure the official news, Xin Hua, forgot to cover the even, but that didn't stop me from reading the story. To say that the government has this firm grip on the Chinese people is nothing more than a clear sign of ignorance. There are far to many people here for the government to even think about trying to keep an eye on everyone or maintaining tight control. Also, the techniques that are highly effective for tracking people in the US don't exist here. This is a cash society. You can go for months or years without leaving any electronic record of your existence. In the US, you can't even drive down the road without your license plate number being picked up or buy breakfast without your debit card indicating that you where Noah's Bagels on University Ave. at 7:07AM and that you bought the Kona Blend. Organizations such as the NSA have deep pockets, tremendous resources, and some very smart people.

        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

Oh really? I live in Beijing myself. Here are some websites for you to try accessing:
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.stm
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)

Well, this shows what is wrong with voting

How exactly did North Korea NOT end up at the top? From the article itself only 3000 people got internet access at all and that is limited to 30 websites. Not 30 websites that are blocked, no, 30 websites is all the web there is in North Korea.

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 very fact that chinese citizens are arrested for accessing information offlimits to them is "good" news. Not for the individual in question offcourse but at least it shows that the chinese citizens as a whole know there is information hidden from them.

Have a show trial for a person accessing an illegal foreign news source and all you will do is advertise to your citizens that this news source exists.

Mom to kid B: Okay I have Kid A a severe spanking for stealing cookies from the kitchen.

Kid B: There are cookies in the kitchen?

Worry less about the countries from wich we here horror stories about repression of information. Worry about those countries we hear nothing from at all.

They forgot Denmark

They forgot Denmark on that list. The danish courts have already started building the great firewall of Denmark. It's sad to see a country priding itself on their freedom of speech, allow private organisations to determine what the danish internet users should see or not see. I'm thinking of the IFPI vs Tele2 case in which the court decided that Tele2 should block access to the AllOfMp3 site. Mark my words... This is the beginning of the end of uncensored internet in Denmark. This is truly sad times.

list composition

What is our list made of?
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 opposed by the US. We should not be surprised as internet is an american invention and is mostly dominated by english language / western content.

Re:list composition

But Qatars not on the list, and has always been a step above the other muslim countries in the region as far as freedoms are concerned (even if that might not be saying much).

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.

Also...

Denmark (believe it or not) - because there is a 'voluntary' system (all ISPs participate anyway) to block access to known pedophile sites, and a court order for ISPs (Tele2 so far) to block access to allofmp3.com because IFPI belives it sells unauthorized copies of music. The matter is currently under appeal to a higher court, which suspends the banning order awaiting the decision. The ISPs intends to take the appeals onwards to higher courts as needed because they believe that the dispute between IFPI and allofmp3.com is a private matter they need to resolve between themselves, and that the blocking order is pure censorship intended to circumvent the international judicial system.

Anyway - if a court, which is representative of the government and its laws, orders censorship, the country would qualify for the list of countries with censorship, right? - I'd say so.

Yeah right up there on my 2-do list

With "Provide solid gold Prostitutes to starving people in Africa"

Internet Freedom Test

Want to know if you have freedom of speech on the Internet. Try this simple test. Post a message stating:

<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.

i said this before

and I am saying it again.

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.

North Korea??

It's my understanding the North Korea does not maintain ANY Internet connectivity. So they should either be #1 on the list or not included at all (since they're not even in the game).

Privatized Censorship?

Is it censorship if the Internet content/connection suppression is performed not by the government, but by a cartel of corporations [eff.org] that control the nation's traffic on their backbones?

China is the LEAST censored

...if you measure it per capita!

Related Story

"Some 17,000 attendees of the protest voted for the nation they believed is most in need of greater Internet freedom, and China came in second, with 4,100 votes. Myanmar, under the militaristic regime of the Junta party, was believed by 4,500 participants to present its citizens with the greatest threat to freedom of press on the Internet. The remaining nations, in descending order of votes received, were Belarus, Iran, Tunisia, Cuba, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, North Korea, Syria, and Uzbekistan. "

In a related story representatives from China, Iran, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela have petitioned the ITU and the UN to force the US to give up control of the internet root domain servers. The EU has for some unknown reason sided with these oppressive governments.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/11/soa/unint ernet.htm [thenewatlantis.com]
http://bildt.blogspot.com/2005/10/european-union-i ran-saudi-arabia-cuba.html [blogspot.com]

Major hole in story ...

China is described as the pioneer of internet censors, ...

Not even close. Back around 1990, when the commercial world was first discovering that new interweb thing, lots of local ISPs (and a few big ones) were forming rapidly in North America and Europe. Right off, there were widespread reports of ISPs that blocked or seriously interfered with their customers' attempts to access competitors' web sites.

China is now doing the same sort of thing, where "competitor" is meant partly in a political sense. But they're hardly pioneers in the task.

And note that here in the US, we're still fighting the battle. Except now the hot new buzz phrase is "network neutrality". Changing the terminology is a good way to obscure the fact that we're just talking about yet another scheme for the rich and powerful to restrict their subjects' access to information.

Re:South Africa too...

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.