Are governments getting better at blocking sites?
Deibert: Oh yes, the precision of filtering has grown as well. A lot of that is due to advances in commercial filter products. Now governments can filter out local language content. Before, a government would block CNN, for instance. But now it is targeting blogs in Farsi or Chinese or Arabic while the Western media is relatively open. It’s the topics that hit close to home that they want to control; locals aren’t likely to read CNN’s Web site. ECT: I imagine you’ve been watching China closely. How does it manage to control all the content it is said to control? Deibert: There is a lot of inconsistency in how China censors the Internet. On one level, there is sophisticated and precise targeted filtering, but there are also so many cases of under-blockages and over-blockages. Something that you would assume would be blocked, for instance, is often not. Remember the on-again, off-again ban on Wikipedia? The truth is it hardly mattered whether the site was banned because China implements
