Green Dam: How China planned to censor the web

Telegraph – China has a long history of restricting internet access, but the Green Dam initiative would have represented a new front in the war on information.
For the last decade, China has been fighting ““ and largely losing ““ a running battle against the internet, and the free access to information it brings. The government, so used to managing and monitoring the flow of news and disemmination of information within its borders, has at times appeared impotent in the face of a universal technology that has no respect for time zones or geography.
Web users in China are used to intermittent interruptions to services ““ access to websites such as YouTube and Google is frequently disrupted, while internet access to many foreign news websites, such as the BBC, is often prohibited. The government uses a sophisticated filtering system, dubbed the Great Firewall of China, to “sniff out” web searches for censored material, such as pornography, or politically sensitive terms, such as the outlawed religious group Falun Gong. When the firewall identifies these banned searches, access to the relevant sites is halted on the servers. Read article

Tags: Asia, big brother, censorship, technology