The internet is a strange beast. Many of us use it every day - not just when sitting in front of a computer, but every time when using a credit card, filling fuel, sending an SMS, taking a flight - in short just about every modern activity depends on the internet. The use of the internet is spreading everywhere, even to the most surprising places - some farmers in India receive current market prices for their crops on internet enabled cellphones, and the early warning system for tsunamis being developed after the 2004 ocean quake works through the internet.

Internet censorship is spreading rapidly, being practised by about two dozen countries and applied to a far wider range of online information and applications. A six-month investigation into whether 40 countries use censorship shows the practice is spreading, with new countries learning from experienced practitioners such as China and benefitting from technological improvements.

New censorship techniques include barring of complete applications, such as China's block on Wikipedia or Pakistan's ban on Google's blogging service, and the use of more advanced technologies such as "keyword filtering", which is used to track down material by identifying sensitive words. Recently, Turkish court ordered the blocking of YouTube to silence offensive comments about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, marking the most visible attack yet on a website that has been widely adopted around the world. Methods such as these are being copied as countries new to censorship learn from those with more experience.

Act to Combat

Many of the top universities in the world such as Duke, Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Princeton have set up such proxy systems to enable users around the world to bypass censorship. Besides universities and individuals acting on their own to protect the freedom of speech, there are many government and privately-funded projects set up specifically for the purpose of allowing users to bypass any form of internet censorship. The rise of peer to peer networking means that every single computer, even home PCs formerly not thought of as servers, can be used to serve up content to any other PC.

China spends billions of dollars, and employs over 40,000 full-time government employees in Beijing alone, to monitor and restrict Chinese usage of the internet. The Chinese government tries to control and restrict access to a wide variety of topics, such as the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, Falun Gong, Tibet, Taiwan, pornography or democracy. Despite the most sophisticated filtering system in the world, China has failed miserably at its attempt to censor the internet.

The second, slightly harder to bypass form of censorship, as implemented in China, is to have a list of banned words, and censor those on the fly. As users in China request a web page, the incoming page is first inspected by government servers, and blocked if a banned term like democracy is present on that page. Human censors are also actively looking at what people browse on the internet, and actively block websites as they see fit. This method is also easily bypassed by connecting to a proxy server which scrambles the page as it sends it to you.

The internet was designed from the ground up to resist damage - and censorship is just another form of damage to the internet. If the data doesn't make it through to its destination, then another route will be automatically tried, until all possible routes are exhausted. So if one computer, or a whole bunch of them, decides to block certain types of data, then they will be automatically bypassed. While internet censors are learning to apply new technologies to expand their efforts, activists wanting to circumvent the controls are using the latest internet methods to advantage.