The map is divided into 4 categories: political, social, security and internet tools.

Checking who controls what:

World Internet censorship in terms of severity

The most pervasive Internet censorship is applied in Burma, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, China, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

Substantial censorship in Bahrain, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen.

Nominal and other types of censorship are applied in: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile,Colombia,Czech Republic, Denmark, Fiji, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Ireland, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom, USA

World Internet censorship in terms of targeted content

• Political censorship: China, Iran, Burma, Vietnam, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan

China’s Internet censorship is considered to be the most pervasive and sophisticated in the world. Censorship prevents Chinese citizens from discovering or learning more about past and current failures of the Communist Party that could create or inflame anti-government sentiment. Censorship helps prevent unapproved reformist, separatist, “counter-revolutionary” or religious ideas, peaceful or otherwise, from organizing themselves and spreading. State control over the news media in China is achieved through a complex combination of party monitoring of news content, legal restrictions on journalists and financial incentives for self-censorship.

Censorship in Burma refers to government policies in controlling information on religious and ethnic subjects.

Censored content in Iran includes information that relates to women’s rights, democracy or freedom of speech.

• Social censorship is applied in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, China, Yemen, Oman, North Korea, and Pakistan. Less repressive social censorship is also applied in the following countries: Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, USA, Canada, Italy, Spain, Germany, UK, Norway, and Sweden.

Kazakhstan has recently introduced a new law on the Internet to regulate forums, chats, blogs.

US content isn’t filtered although the laws are forbidding spamming and online gambling.

Only e tiny proportion of Cuba’s population is allowed to use the Internet at home. Ordinary citizens must use Internet cafes for accessing the Internet and these ones have snooping software installed.

• Security censorship is applied in China, Pakistan, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Tunisia, and Morocco.

Censorship in India mainly targets religious issues. It is justified by the government as necessary to maintain communal harmony, peace, and tranquility, given the history of communal tension

• Internet tools content is blocked in South Korea and North Korea, China, Vietnam, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco, and Syria.

Tunisia is thought by many organizations to have one of the strictest Internet censoring procedures in the world. There is one internet server for the entire country, which is controlled by the palace, allowing the government to restrict and block access as it sees fit.

What censorship is there in your country?

Do you experience any restrictions while browsing the Internet? Is it political censorship? Do you have problems accessing sites containing unblocking tips like How-to-hide-ip?

>> Are VPNs legal? Countries where VPN usage is illegal.

Starting from the IP address

This actually is a simple explanation geared toward those who want a better understanding of how things work. So let’s say you are based in China. You know that whatever device you are plugging into the internet has a unique IP address attached to it. Every communication you make on the internet is “tagged” with this IP address. On the other side, any server or peer you are talking to on the internet also has an IP address. Just think of it as your postal address so that the factor knows which route to send your letter through.

Censorship directly on your computer

The first censorship can be done on your computer. Let’s say for example that you are working within an organization that has some policies with regard to using the internet (you are probably facing it: major sites like Facebook and Youtube are not allowed to be browsed from your company’s network).

In fact, some companies set some specific proxy configuration on your browser and do not allow you to change it. In fact, the IT administrator is forcing you to go through a proxy server by setting it on your browser. If you are falling into that specific scenario, you can be sure that the IT administrator has set up other ways to block you from accessing those websites. In fact, you usually are not allowed to change any settings on your browser. The only solution that comes to my mind for overcoming that kind of Internet censorship is to use some web-based proxy servers. Although it’s not really convenient (most web proxies serve you a lot of ads), at least you can end up accessing some blocked websites.

Why does this solution work most of the time?

It works since more often than not when blocking websites, IT administrators limit it on a per-destination basis: which means that they centrally maintain a list of websites that their users are not allowed to browse instead of a deny-all and only authorize approved website policy. This actually means that there is a very high probability that the web proxy that you’ll be using won’t be included in the list of websites that you are not allowed to browse.

In part 1 of this series about “simplified view of internet censorship”, we discussed how this censorship can be performed on your corporate computer. Now let’s go a bit higher on the connection path and discuss what can be done on the corporate firewall or proxy side of things.

Internet censorship with firewalls

Most of the times, companies have one or two internet connections: this connection being a limited resource, IT administrators tend to limit their usage. The censorship at this stage can take the form of bandwidth limitation (which is still fine since you can still browse most websites although it can be slow), or denial of access to some websites. This is usually done on the firewall side of the company’s router. Simply side, the filtering is done at the router that is acting as a gateway to the internet.

The filtering can be implemented via different solutions:

– either by checking against regular expressions (or regex) the URL of the destination website the user is trying to see. It is then common that IT administrators limit any file download that has the .mp3 extension (or .torrent, .mp4, …)

– or filtering by protocols and ports: this is what is actually done when the IT administrator denies applications like peer-to-peer since those applications actually need to initiate communication via a specified port. This can be done on the corporate side or at the ISP side

– or by using some publicly maintained database of “blacklisted sites”. Most proxy servers nowadays can use those public databases of blacklisted sites

– or by limiting by the originating IP address: as I told earlier, the IT administrator has a clear map of the IP address-computer database. Because of that, they can say that for your particular IP address, some websites are not allowed to be reached. The only solution for you, for such a case, is to use another computer that has eventually less restriction …

Those are simple explanations on what can be done at the corporate or ISP side when it comes to “Internet censorship”. 

How this censorship can be done at the country-level side

We all have heard countries who ban access to different services: from China to some countries during the “Printemps Arabe” where major revolutions happened in most of the Arabic countries. It all started with blocking access to major user-generated-content platforms (Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, …). In fact, governments can do so by imposing some kind of control on all international internet gateways in their countries – every internet going through those gateways, they can filter out every traffic based on website address, IP address, protocols, type of content, …

In fact, the number of internet gateway for one country is limited, the main challenge for an entity who wants to filter is to take control (or at least be able to monitor) those gateways. Internet technology has it that everything is following standards and protocols, though easing the filtering process. While some protocols can use different ports randomly, the main challenge for the censor is to filter the initiating connection.

So how does it work from your user point of view: initially, you want to use the regular applications (Skype, instant messaging, …) or go to regular websites  (online mail like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, …) or social media platforms (Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, …) then try to use them as you normally do. You either see an error message stating that the access to the site has been blocked (well, at least if they are kind enough to inform you), or you see nothing happening on your computer …

So, what are the countries that restrict Internet access?

On the first search I have found out that there are a lot of countries that have an internet censorship policy: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brazil, China, Ethiopia, Iran, India,Korea, Morocco, Myanmar, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Syria, Sudan, Thailand, Turkey, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Yemen.

Then, I found a Censorship World Map on www.wikipedia.org. Take a look:

You find out that countries like the US, Canada, Australia also have a censorship policy. It this surprising? What do you think? Is this a good thing?

No one-size-fits-all solution

While there is no one-size-fits-all solution for each problem you may be facing, it’s always good to take the following precautions:

– Setup your workaround measures while it’s working. I can’t stress it enough. Figure out how can censorship come to you (based on the articles I just wrote or based on other online resources), and set and test the appropriate workarounds,

– Test either of the following workarounds:

• using some web proxy and endure the ads served by those web proxy service providers. Be careful though as some websites aren’t compatible with these implementations,
• use some VPN services so as to send your traffic through a secure and encrypted connection when going out of your country. However, as the China experience pointed out the Chinese Government has also begun blocking some VPN implementations (PPTP and L2TP based). Anyway, SSTP and OpenVPN implementations seem to be working yet (until the port used will be blocked too)

Moreover, with the convergence of ICT technologies, it is now possible to use SMS for example to update Twitter, thereby not using the internet-way, other solutions are expected to go mainstream.

So how can you overcome such censorship? Tor can eventually be your savior.

On the other side of the fence, there Chinese powers that be have put forth their intentions to wipe off all forms of pornography with the help of these restrictions, and all of this is being done in order to ‘preserve national long-term stability’, to build a ‘harmonious society’ and to prevent the ‘poisoning of young people’s physical and mental health.

What is SARFT?

The official organization responsible for this moral crackdown on more than four hundred sites is the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, more popularly (or, in the current circumstances, perhaps notoriously) known as SARFT.

SARFT has even devised a three-pronged strategy to ‘protect’ the unwilling citizens from the evils of freedom of internet surfing. The first is a mass crackdown on internet pornography crimes. The second strategy entails an extension of power and administrative capacity of its security section, enabling the same to deter the ‘criminals’ in addition to being able to handle and deter more extensively and efficiently. The third part of this brilliant plan is enhancing collaboration and communication between various concerned departments in order to function more smoothly and efficiently.

The Blacklist

They propose fabricating a blacklist and to ‘urge’ ISPs to make efforts to filter out pornographic material with increasing security and preventive technology. While one might think that SARFT is simply making a fool of itself, maybe one needs to think of the ulterior, hidden agenda of power, control, and censorship which are the ultimate result of any such crackdown behind the rather pathetic veneer of moral policing.

Scarily enough, it seems to be working, though one has to think that SARFT believes that the average person’s IQ is in single digits if they really hope to get away with the whole issue without anyone noticing.

What do you think of the Chinese censorship? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.