Golden Shield: Because brutalising peasants is fun.

Or at least, that's what the Chinese Government seems to think. Not content with nation-squatting in Tibet since 1949 and killing over 1.2 million Tibetans, destroying over 6000 monastaries and imprisoning thousands of Tibetans, they're now cranking up the heat on their own Citizens like never before. Golden Shield is the State's nanny Firewall from hell, and has now been found to block Religious sites too - of course, the Dalai Lama recieves a digital kicking, carrying on the noble tradition of abuse against Tibet that their government seem to enjoy so much. But other, less obvious targets are hit, including (strangely) the Hong Kong diocese - hey, enjoying that 1997 handover yet?

Of course, we assist in this growing cyberabuse of the Chinese. Western multinationals and big businesses create and develop the technology we now use to put everyone from farmers to students in prison because they dare to discuss such scary, sensitive information as posting essays on farming and worrying about being tortured again if rearrested (they use ironic humour here by then torturing said person to death - clever, eh?)

As I've said before, freedom of speech is not free of a price.

And there's growing evidence that America's twitchy international paranoia is encouraging the idea that this cyber-clampdown is a good thing - 68% wanted implementation of a national ID card; and 54% approved of expanded government monitoring of cell phones and e-mail (the latest Harris Interactive poll on this can be seen here).

Step forward (once again), Peer-to-Peer technology - the only foreseable saviour of free speech without getting your head busted open. Peek-a-booty V2 will be with us eventually, but until then, how about Freenet, yet another P2P system that someone thought would be more useful than a source of virus-laden MP3's. The shining example of this technology is Freenet-China.org, and whilst it may not make a lot of sense to you, its one of the handful of anonymously published sites fighting back...but for how long?

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been taking 12 year olds to court for some time now, and any form of P2P is currently being demonised - not a good sign for anyone wanting to free up some speech using said application. In addition, Western countries are now bringing in certain types of Web-Censorship (BT's Cleenfeed springs to mind)...though currently used to block illegal pornographic websites, it's not a leap of the imagination to see that these new laws, regulations and general feeling of comtempt for the little guy (ie all of us) could easily abused in order to shut down free speech forever.

I leave you with this - Yahoo now actively censors their Chinese-based search engines (and Google now has shares in Baidu, a Chinese-language search firm, which censors its results...for the record, Google themselves don't do this. Yet.) Type in free Tibet on the Chinese Yahoo, for example, and you'll just get a blank page. So its a fair bet that searching for any of the 61 Internet users currently imprisoned in China won't turn up any results if you're in said Nation. For convenience, I've named them all for you.

Links:
Golden Shield
Nortel's role
America's shield?