NYT: Chinese Censors and Web Users Match Wits

Chinese Censors and Web Users Match Wits
By HOWARD W. FRENCH

Published: March 4, 2005


....According to Amnesty International, arrests for the dissemination of information or beliefs via the Internet have been increasing rapidly in China, snaring students, political dissidents and practitioners of the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong, but also many writers, lawyers, teachers and ordinary workers.

Already the most sophisticated in the world, China's Internet controls are stout even in the absence of crucial political events. In the last year or so, experts say the country has gone from so-called dumb Internet controls, which involve techniques like the outright blocking of foreign sites containing delicate or critical information and the monitoring of specific e-mail addresses to far more sophisticated measures.

Newer technologies allow the authorities to search e-mail messages in real time, trawling through the body of a message for sensitive material and instantaneously blocking delivery or pinpointing the offender. Other technologies sometimes redirect Internet searches from companies like Google to copycat sites operated by the government, serving up sanitized search results....

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But if the government is investing heavily in new Internet control technologies, many experts said the sophistication of Chinese users was also increasing rapidly, as are their overall numbers, leading to a cat-and-mouse game in which, many say, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the censors to prevail....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/04/international/asia/04censor.html

"trawling through the body of a message for sensitive material"

didn't even occur to me that it might be monitored. But those two words probably rings all sorts of alarm bells.

Something like 80% of all spam sites are hosted on servers in China, where they are guaranteed not to be taken-down.

Can anyone think of a way we can use China's draconian suppression of free speech to thwart their spamming operations?