Originally published February 21 2006
China censors internet users with help from internet companies
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The Chinese government has created the world's most sophisticated internet filtering regime, with the help of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and others. Some worry these companies would consent to censorship in the U.S.
Chinese searching the Internet for key, or "black" words are likely to be arrested, tried and imprisoned for up to 10 years on charges of subversion, revealing state secrets or spreading propaganda injurious to the state.
This is the biggest campaign of state censorship that has ever been carried out, John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, testified to Congress last April.
Some Westerners will shrug their shoulders, filing Internet censorship in their mental index of Chinese human rights violations.
Despite its rapid economic expansion, they presume, China is at best a second-world country when it comes to sophisticated technology.
But Beijing has the very best help.
A partial list includes Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and Skype.
Google removes from its Chinese site whatever the Chinese deem politically sensitive.
According to Reporters without Frontiers, "Cisco Systems has sold several thousand routers to enable the regime to build an online spying system and the firm's engineers have helped set it to spot 'subversive' key-words in messages."
In 2002, Yahoo signed a document called a "Public Pledge on Self-discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry."
That agreement led to disaster for Shi Tao.
Shi, 37, worked for a business daily.
On April 30, last year, he was sentenced to 10 years behind bars for revealing a top state secret, to foreign Web sites.
According to Joseph Kahn in The New York Times (IHT, Sept. 8, 2005), "Shi's case alarmed critics of the Chinese government because his posting did not reveal the sender or the source of the information.
All the American companies helping the Chinese police state insist they are merely obeying local laws.
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