Word: censorship
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Internet freedom means different things to different people. Given the expansion of Internet technology, it is understandable why a state like China, with the world’s largest population of Internet users, would resort to censorship as a means to forestall the Internet’s harms...
...China has taken condemnable measures and abused the powers of the Internet for totalitarian gain. They have banned dissent blogs and have hacked into the email accounts of human rights activists and allegedly even Pentagon computers. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was justified in chastising China for its Internet censorship last month in a speech that propelled Internet freedom to the forefront of the United States’ diplomatic agenda...
However, to view the issue of Internet censorship as simply another blatant violation of human rights by the Chinese government is to impose our Western values on a country that considers its heritage and culture of benevolence to be superior to a culture based on property and rights. Such moral universalism is ethnocentric, and, might I add, it is also part of the reason why Google’s move to challenge China’s censorship laws has strained Sino-American relations...
...Chinese government views Google’s decision to challenge China’s censorship laws by threatening to leave the country as yet another instance of Westerners denying China its sovereign right to govern. Furthermore, while some of China’s laws may abridge freedoms considered essential to democracy, their legal weight does not diminish simply because they are the product of a legitimate, albeit authoritarian, regime, instead of the sanctioned handiwork of a puppet government propped up by the United States...
Chinese internet users can circumvent the censorship with a number of techniques, including using a virtual private network, a type of software that allows users to connect to an internal network from computers outside the network...