The End Of Freedom On The Internet

User ID: a police officer checks registrations at an internet café in Xuchang, central China. From next month, Beijing wants new computers to be installed with extra controls

Control, Halt, Delete -- Financial Times

This week, an open letter appeared on Chinese blogs and online bulletin boards. “Hello, internet censorship institutions of the Chinese government,” it said. “We are the anonymous netizens. We hereby decide that from July 1 2009, we will start a full-scale global attack on all censorship systems you control.”

Beijing’s attempts to manipulate the internet would, the message predicted, “soon be swept on to the rubbish pile of history”.

Chinese internet users, although skilled at dodging the censors, are angrier than they have ever been. The anonymous declaration of war is just one sign of the strains emerging as the global spread of internet access, and its embrace by activists of all stripes, triggers an unprecedented crackdown by national governments that threatens to transform the way hundreds of millions of people communicate.

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My Comment: If there is one thing that dictatorships, centrally controlled governments, and socialist states cannot tolerate .... it is criticism and independent thought. They will win the online war, because when things get too tough, they can always unplug the country from the rest of the world.