Thread: Internet Censorship?

Originally Posted by sperk

what do all these terms mean? Enemy of the internet? Under surveillance - does that mean no censorship? Who are reporters without borders? Another one of these "independant" "truthful" groups?

Good questions: I just saw the map when I wanted to check what the general view was on the internet in Belarus.
there were several alternative maps and not all were showing the same countries as monitoring. But this one was the most common and it was used on Wikipedia. Was surprised to see Russia as worse than Europe. I thought it was the other way around.

Reporters without borders is clearly taking the inspiration for its name from Doctors without borders (Medecins sans frontiers). These organisations are supposed to be non-political, but you never know.

Australia is actually pretty harsh on the internet monitoring. They had a law proposal saying that they would filter what comes in through their under water pipes (due to the cut-off location, they have that option). They made a list with hundreds of thosusands of sites that were supposed to be banned, including certain types of porn and some famous porn sites, as well as some political sites. This was covered quite extensively in tech media and many Australians were furious. Not sure what happened, whether the law was passed or not.

I have only come across internet monitoring when some of my favourite torrent sites were taken down by the US dept. of Homeland Security like This domain name has been seized by ICE - Homeland Security Investigations
I once tried to visit a cite called http://www.kavkazcenter.com which is possibly linked to terrorism. (just wanted to see some press release there). I can not get to it with my normal connection.

Originally Posted by Hanna

I once tried to visit a cite called http://www.kavkazcenter.com which is possibly linked to terrorism. (just wanted to see some press release there). I can not get to it with my normal connection.

Works fine for me.

Originally Posted by Hanna

Reporters without borders is clearly taking the inspiration for its name from Doctors without borders (Medecins sans frontiers). These organisations are supposed to be non-political, but you never know.

RSF is very political (and very right-wing actually). Basically what they do is going around and telling everyone the USA are the best country ever, and if you don't support free-market and CIA you are obviously a communist and an enemy of freedom.

Originally Posted by Zubr

RSF is very political (and very right-wing actually). Basically what they do is going around and telling everyone the USA are the best country ever, and if you don't support free-market and CIA you are obviously a communist and an enemy of freedom.

Really? They are just exploiting the good name of MSF then! I bet almost everyone will assume it's apolitical.. That map is all over the internet. How creepy! It's a bit like when people are quoiting Radio Free Europe as a reliable source of information about Russia and the CIS region.

Originally Posted by bsod

So, in general we have only one company which has an access to Internet (Beltelecom) and can sell this access to internal providers. In this case Beltelecom always can supervise and filter all traffic. Sometimes they uses this ability (we saw this recently, on elections).

Ok that's interesting. How ridiculous to restrict access to those sites on the election day! All they achieve is annoy young people more. What would happen if you started using a VPN or proxy? Do you think they'd get suspicious and come and check you out?

I agree with those who said that it's probably too much information to monitor unless they focus on specific sites or use some very smart software to pick up certain words or phrases.

Thanks to the control over DNS, the US can do exactly the same... That happened to quite a few torrent sites recently. They can take down any site ending with .com and .net and .org I think. There is a big debate going on right now because some people have started using encryptions that US intelligence don't have the resources to decrypt and they want to stop that.

Originally Posted by gRomoZeka

What does under surveillance mean, and why it's (supposedly) worse than open censorship? I'm sure that Internet activity is monitored very closely in many countries, in the first place in the USA (as means of fighting terrorism among other reasons). Also it's obvious that most "non-censorship" countries simply don't have resources for it.

Yeah exactly. I agree with everything. you said.

Originally Posted by Basil77

You can access all this kind of sites from Russia. I think the reason they called Russia "under surviellance" are cases like this (there were about 2 or 3 of such cases during last several years).

That wasn't very serious I think... I think something similar would happen in the UK was slagging off the prime minister in an untruthful way. I don't think that's very shocking, although ideally he should NOT have been prosecuted at all. So basically this is all hyped up and the internet in Russia and Europe are equally free or unfree... but in slightly different ways. Anyway it's wisest for everyobe not to use their real name too much online, and to use a proxy or VPN I think.