The Great Chinese Firewall, Real or Imagined?

I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
--T. S. Eliot

(Any excuse to post a picture of the bentpig's auto-icon is good enough for me.)

I thought this made interesting reading:

China's 'Eye on the Internet' a Fraud

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/chinas-eye-internet-fraud-14190.html

The "Great Firewall of China," used by the government of the People's Republic of China to block users from reaching content it finds objectionable, is actually a "panopticon" that encourages self-censorship through the perception that users are being watched, rather than a true firewall, according to researchers at UC Davis and the University of New Mexico.

Examples of words tested by the researchers and found to be banned included references to the Falun Gong movement and the protest movements of 1989; Nazi Germany and other historical events; and general concepts related to democracy and political protest.

...

"Imagine you want to remove the history of the Wounded Knee massacre from the Library of Congress," Crandall said. "You could remove 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee' and a few other selected books, or you could remove every book in the entire library that contains the word 'massacre.'"

By analogy, Chinese Internet censorship based on keyword filtering is the equivalent of the latter -- and indeed, the keyword "massacre" (in Chinese) is on the blacklist.