Internet Filtering in China 2004-2005

China's Internet filtering regime is the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world. Compared to similar efforts in other states, China's filtering regime is pervasive, sophisticated, and effective. It comprises multiple levels of legal regulation and technical control. It involves numerous state agencies and thousands of public and private personnel. It censors content transmitted through multiple methods, including Web pages, Web logs, on-line discussion forums, university bulletin board systems, and e-mail messages. Our testing found efforts to prevent access to a wide range of sensitive materials, from pornography to religious material to political dissent. We sought to determine the degree to which China filters sites on topics that the Chinese government finds sensitive, and found that the state does so extensively. Chinese citizens seeking access to Web sites containing content related to Taiwanese and Tibetan independence, Falun Gong, the Dalai Lama, the Tiananmen Square incident, opposition political parties, or a variety of anti-Communist movements will frequently find themselves blocked. Contrary to anecdote, we found that most major American media sites, such as CNN, MSNBC, and ABC, are generally available in China (though the BBC remains blocked). Moreover, most sites we tested in our global list's human rights and anonymizer categories are accessible as well. While it is difficult to describe this widespread filtering with precision, our research documents a system that imposes strong controls on its citizens' ability to view and to publish Internet content. This report was produced by the OpenNet Initiative, a partnership among the Advanced Network Research Group, Cambridge Security Programme at Cambridge University, the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School

Planet Netsweeper

Internet filtering technologies play a critical role in shaping access to information online. Whether we are connecting to the Internet from our homes, coffee shops, libraries, or places of work, software that inspects, manages, and/or blocks our communications has become commonplace. When used at the level of large, consumer-facing Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Internet filtering technologies can have significant human rights impacts. A growing number of governments employ Internet filtering systems at this scale in order to undertake national-level censorship of the Internet. Filtered content ranges from pornography, hate speech, and speech promoting or inciting violence, to political opposition websites, news websites, websites affiliated with various religions, and everything in-between. The growing responsibilities among network operators to filter content, either within private enterprises or on public networks, have given rise to a large and lucrative market. One industry report estimated the value of the web content filtering market at $3.8 billion USD by 2022. While network operators can manually configure their infrastructure to block specific websites or applications, the task can be time- consuming, complicated, and ineffective. Internet filtering companies provide professional services to ISPs and other clients to take care of this responsibility. Typically, Internet filtering companies dynamically categorize Internet resources and then let their clients choose pre-selected content categories or services that they wish to block. Customers can also add custom lists of their own to content that is filtered or blocked. In the hands of authoritarian regimes, such professional services can limit the ability of citizens to communicate freely and help impose opaque and unaccountable controls on the public sphere