Spring Break
Researchers test 'Great Firewall' of China
Kitty Hurst
Issue date: 10/4/07 Section: News
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by Kitty Hurst
Daily Lobo
Internet censorship in China was believed to be caused by a firewall that blocks all information the government doesn't want its citizens to see.
But a UNM assistant professor and a team of researchers disproved the assumption there is a "Great Firewall" of Internet censorship bordering China.
"People need to understand Internet censorship is not just a firewall trying to block off any dissenting ideas," said Jed Crandall, who teaches computer science. "There's a lot more going on."
Crandall worked on a study of the firewall with three researchers from UC-Davis and an independent researcher.
The Tiananmen Square incident of 1989 and outlawed Falun Gong movement are known to be censored subjects.
About 28 percent of the tested Internet paths into China showed no signs of censoring for more than two weeks, the study found.
The remaining paths filtered sporadically, allowing up to a quarter of usually blocked words through during busy Internet periods, according to the study.
The researchers found the government's censorship works like a panopticon, Crandall said.
A panopticon is a type of monitoring, designed for prisons, where one central observer watches a large number of people, he said.
People behave as if they are being watched all the time, when they are only being watched part of the time, said Niame Adele, a sociology instructor who teaches a class about social control.
"(Sociology) has shown that people would rather conform than resist," Adele said. "When this type of social control motivates fear, people can be targeted because they have no privacy."
The researchers studied censorship of keyword searches because it can be done from outside China, Crandall said.
The government filters keywords in chats, blogs and e-mails, he said.
Keyword censorship may not block every illicit word, but it stops enough to keep people away, Crandall said.
Daily Lobo
Internet censorship in China was believed to be caused by a firewall that blocks all information the government doesn't want its citizens to see.
But a UNM assistant professor and a team of researchers disproved the assumption there is a "Great Firewall" of Internet censorship bordering China.
"People need to understand Internet censorship is not just a firewall trying to block off any dissenting ideas," said Jed Crandall, who teaches computer science. "There's a lot more going on."
Crandall worked on a study of the firewall with three researchers from UC-Davis and an independent researcher.
The Tiananmen Square incident of 1989 and outlawed Falun Gong movement are known to be censored subjects.
About 28 percent of the tested Internet paths into China showed no signs of censoring for more than two weeks, the study found.
The remaining paths filtered sporadically, allowing up to a quarter of usually blocked words through during busy Internet periods, according to the study.
The researchers found the government's censorship works like a panopticon, Crandall said.
A panopticon is a type of monitoring, designed for prisons, where one central observer watches a large number of people, he said.
People behave as if they are being watched all the time, when they are only being watched part of the time, said Niame Adele, a sociology instructor who teaches a class about social control.
"(Sociology) has shown that people would rather conform than resist," Adele said. "When this type of social control motivates fear, people can be targeted because they have no privacy."
The researchers studied censorship of keyword searches because it can be done from outside China, Crandall said.
The government filters keywords in chats, blogs and e-mails, he said.
Keyword censorship may not block every illicit word, but it stops enough to keep people away, Crandall said.
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