Somebody Think Of The Children

Behind the Great Firewall: Interview with an Aussie in China

Stephen Conroy’s mandatory ISP filtering plan has been criticized as being a carbon copy of China’s Internet censorship regime. Not in regards to the technical side of blacklisting websites, but the underlying desire for the Government to control the most important information resource ever created.

I spoke briefly with one Australian living behind the Great Firewall of China to find out how censorship had impacted his life, and how similar he thought Mr Conroy’s plan is. He chose to remain anonymous.

How have you been affected by China’s Internet censorship?

It’s a pain in the neck at times. It is annoying not to have access to the English Wikipedia and the BBC websites in particular. Even more annoying, however, is the “collateral damage” caused by the blocking of sites that have many types of content. Contrary to most perceptions outside of China, the greatest amount of blocking is aimed at pornography sites and not sites with political content. Many, many sites that have mostly perfectly innocent content also have some content that could be regarded as pornographic.

One particularly annoying example is some webstore that I rent. It is on a server in the US. Obviously, someone on the same webstore as I use at some time uploaded some pornographic pictures, because now my webstore is blocked in China. Almost any website that allows people to create their own content falls into this category.

Senator Conroy says his plan is nothing like what is occurring in China. Do you see similarities?

I see very little difference. The aim is identical. The only difference is the criteria for blocking. From what I can see the Australian criteria are a large subset of what the Chinese are blocking.

Have you ever self-censored when speaking about China’s censorship regime?

No. Not really. My reason for remaining anonymous is mostly for reasons of not wanting to embarrass my employer.

Have you used methods to bypass the firewall?

Yes. It’s actually not very hard to bypass the firewall if you have the ability to set the proxy settings of your browser. The Chinese government makes sure people don’t do this in web cafes by the simple expedient of keeping video surveillance of all the screens and their users. The majority of Chinese access the internet by web cafes still, although broadband penetration is now in the tens of millions of homes. For those who don’t like proxy hopping (proxies keep getting blocked and they pop up and down), there are places that offer SSL VPN services, although I haven’t tried that.

China just announced strict new regulations for websites that share video. How do you feel about that?

I haven’t looked at the regulations, so can’t really comment. I know Youtube was briefly blocked last year and there was a public outcry.

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