Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Internet censorship spreads to Australia and Germany

China's policy of internet censorship seems to be encouraging more countries to follow its lead. Australia and Germany are beggining to make strides in the direction of censorship. The main reason for internet censorship is the proposed ban of wikileaks.

On Tuesday March 24, buildings in Germany which had connections with Wikileaks were raided by 11 plain clothed German police. The reason for this is that Wikileaks has been releasing information pertaining to censorship plans in Germany.

Australia is another country that has had censorship information leaked on to Wikileaks. Australia and Germany are trying to stop the leakage of important and confidential government information.

Australia and Germany are the only two democracies of the world considering a madatory internet censorship policy.

What these countries plan on doing is training machines blacklist internet pages, making them unavailable to the public

Australia plans to increase the size of its blacklist list by 10 times. Blocked sites are said to increase from 1200 sites to over 10,000 if the plan is implimented.

Although Germany and Australia are trying to protect its governments, they are slowly moving towards a fully censored internet which could start a worldwide trend. Instead of movingaway from censorship after seeing the criticisim of the Chinese government, some countries are beggining to subscribe to China's thinking.