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The Green Dam Phenomenon....in China and elsewhere

Ms. MacKinnon is a founding member of that wonderful and unique Global Network Initiative, an Open Society fellow and assistant professor of journalism at the University of Hong Kong.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal Asian, she addresses the Green Dam internet filtering system China is introducing, but more importantly, how the attempt to restrict unfiltered access to the www is spreading to other countries - and not only so-called totalitarian regimes. Think Australia, Britain and Germany as 3 examples. This is clearly a phenomenon to watch and resist.

"The Chinese government may be backing down from its plan to install new "filtering" software, Green Dam, on all Chinese computers. But it would be naïve to think that scrapping the Green Dam mandate means the end of headaches for computer- and device-makers world-wide. More and more governments -- including democracies like Britain, Australia and Germany -- are trying to control public behavior online, especially by exerting pressure on Internet service providers. Green Dam has only exposed the next frontier in these efforts: the personal computer.

First, some context: China currently has the world's most sophisticated and multi-layered system of Internet censorship. Objectionable content on domestic Web sites is deleted or prevented from being published, and access to a large number of overseas Web sites is blocked or "filtered." Decisions about what to censor are based on the Chinese Communist Party's desire to maintain power and legitimacy. There is no transparency or accountability in the censorship system, no public consultation in developing block lists or censorship criteria, and no way to appeal the blockage or removal of Web content.

Green Dam purports to take censorship to a whole new level. A report by the Open Net Initiative, an academic consortium dedicated to the study of censorship and surveillance, finds the Chinese government's mandate of censoring software at the PC-level "unprecedented." Companies installing the software risk becoming part of the existing opaque extension of regime power, at the other end of the chain that already includes Internet service providers, Web hosts and Web content companies."

Continue reading here.

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