Who is watching us on the web? :: China Censorship Internet Papers

Who is watching us on the web? I. Background P.R.China is a communist country with rather strict control over its citizens' political activities. The decentralized Internet - which is growing extremely quickly in mainland China - puts a new challenge to our Chinese government, who was used to have fully control over newspapers, television, and any other media. In 2001, approximately 52.38 million Chinese visited world famous searching websites google and AltaVista according to CNN. In Jun 2002, China blocked Google and AltaVista along with other famous Chinese websites hosted in the United States like Wenxuecity, Chinesenewsnet, and Dajiyuan. Chinese officials announced that Google logs all search terms together with the IP number, a time stamp, an unique cookie ID, and browser information. Current U.S. laws require Google to provide the information to the feds. If the information is available to the National Security Agency from Google, especially when the Internet user is a non-U.S. citizen in a country that is of national security interest to the U.S, China has to block the use of U.S. engines to protect their own national security. Was that true? The privacy policies of search engines generally do not cover items such as IP number and storage of search terms. In the case of portals that use Google results, it is important to know the portal do NOT forward the IP number to Google along with the search terms. Interestingly, China unblocked the U.S. searching websites a few months after. Like many people, I may never know the true story behind China's blocking and unblocking U.S. searching websites. However, we can learn the truth from Xiao Qiang, the executive director of New York-based Human Rights in China. He said, "Our Chinese government was deluged with outcries from the nation's 46 million Internet users when access to Google was cut off. Internet users in China are an apolictcal crowd. They tend to be people who are doing well, and they do not usually voice strong views. But this stepped into their digital freedom." Well, what is the workaround then? The quick workaround is that Chinese authorities tweaked the national firewall, making the new Google China different from the site that was turned off. Today, Chinese who use Google to search on terms like "falun gong" or "human rights in China" receive a standard-looking results page.