Right now all around the world there are attempts to censor the internet, limiting what you can say, who’s version of the truth you are aloud to read and what you can see, download, or listen to. This crackdown ranges from school and municipal networks to entire countries. Their reasons are as varied as their levels of censorship, from blocking obscene and illegal material to blocking political speech, but they all have one thing in common: their attempts to stop a determined user from accessing this content just don’t work. They may be successful at blocking most people, but where there is a will there is a way, and it is becoming easier and easier to circumvent these blocks. The easier it becomes, the more people will use the tools and the attempts at censorship will become even less effective.

During the last Olympic Games the Chinese government promised visitors less restrictive access but many reporters found that they couldn’t even access the website of the people for whom they were working. This made doing their job more than a little bit difficult. Fortunately, a team of German Hackers developed and distributed for free the Freedom Stick, a USB Drive pre-installed with the TOR Browser, allowing easy access around the Great Firewall of China. The government’s attempt at censoring the internet was soiled by some free somtware and a cheap thumb drive. For a taste of what your internet would look like in China, without freedom advancing tools, check out The China Channel Firefox Plugin.

China isn’t alone in it’s attempts to control what people see online, Reporters Without Borders published a list of 13 “Enemies of the Internet” in 2006. No one on the list is really surprising, as it reads like a rogues’ gallery of a human rights abusers, theocratic dictatorships, and communist crap holes. There are some surprising countries that are trying to promote censorship as well, most notably, and most recently Australia. Australia is attempting to launch a system blocking specific websites to prevent access to objectionable material. This system, dubbed the Great Barrier Firewall, is almost completely useless, as before it was even implemented it had already been cracked with hackers finding a way around it’s limits. Rest assured, however, that isn’t stopping the government from rolling ahead with it’s plans, and iinet, the nation’s largest ISP has begrudgingly agreed to participate in live trials of the system. Iinet is not taking these tests lightly, using them as an opportunity to publicize every failure of the system, whether it is not blocking a site it should, or blocking a site it shouldn’t. Hopefully this kind of attention the project will be abandoned.

As long as there are attempts to censor the internet, there will be people fighting it, and even if statutes are passed and technology being used to block access, there will be hackers helping everyone to find away around it.