The Golden Shield is a project run by China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS), initiated in 1998. Theoretically it was designed to improve information systems for the police. Employing 30,000, it serves as a gigantic “Big Brother” system, filtering Internet content so as to keep the nation safe from evil. The ultimate aim, say some, is to create an all-encompassing online database and systems network for the security of the nation.The project is condemned by Amnesty International and the group Human Rights Watch. Google, the search engine giant, has been criticized for working with the MPS. From my limited understanding of what I read, the Golden Shield blocks certain Internet content from the people within the country. That is, it censors content by making it unavailable in China.
This raises certain questions. Should the State decide what is and is not acceptable for its people? And should Google, the company, work hand in hand with those censors? I guess if Google wants to make money in China, they have to play turkey.
Google has an informal motto to not be evil. Yahoo has a poster mocking this motto with a Google logo and the statement, “Sometimes Evil?”
But Yahoo has not been immune from controversy with regard to China, having turned over info that led to Chinese dissident Shi Tao being sentenced to ten years in prison.
Microsoft, in 2005, cooperated with Chinese censors by helping remove words like “democracy” and “freedom” from Chinese bloggers’ blogsites.
The search engine giants have some tough issues to work out with regards to operating inside countries that censor freedom of speech for their people. How far should these countries go with regard to helping the various “Big Brother” systems of the world?
And how many Internet police do we have in our own country? How much stuff is going on here that we don’t even know about because it has been censored?
Time to take a deep breath. Best not to think to hard on that one. Let’s just root for our American swimmers. They're sure bringing home a lot of gold.
1 comment:
The only censorship I've run into here came from Thailand, and that ended several months ago. Youtube used to be blocked from coming into Laos, by Thai government censorship, but it's not blocked anymore. I assume that Lao Telecom used to use a Thai server, but now has their own.
I don't know if Youtube is presently blocked in Thailand, or not. I haven't been across the river for nearly 2 years now.
I think I mentioned before that when you buy a telephone here, you pick out a phone number that you think is easy to remember, from a whole bunch of SIM cards under glass, in any number of shops that sell them. (A SIM card activates your phone, costs $5, and includes $2 worth of calling time, about 2 weeks worth of in-country calls at the rate I use my phone.)
The shops buy the cards in 10's, and sell them one at a time for a small profit. I could sell them myself out of my house, if I wanted to go through the trouble of buying 10 of them and then trying to peddle them off.
No one asks for your ID or passport or address, or even your name, when you buy your SIM card -- so obviously, the government here is not wiretapping people's phone calls.
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