How China censors the net: by making sure there´s too much information | John Naughton
(The Guardian China)

A new book shows how the republic´s government has adapted to the challenge of a networked ageOne of the axioms of the early internet was an observation made by John Gilmore, a libertarian geek who was one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. `The internet,` said Gilmore, `interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.` To lay people this was probably unintelligible, but it spoke eloquently to geeks, to whom it meant that the architecture of the network would make it impossible to censor it. A forbidden message would always find a route through to its destination.Gilmore´s adage became a key part of the techno-utopian creed in the 1980s and early 1990s. It suggested that neither the state nor the corporate world would be able to censor cyberspace. The unmistakable inference was that the internet posed an existential threat to authoritarian regimes, for whom control of information is an essential requirement for holding on to power.Flooding involves deluging the citizen with a torrent of information, with the aim of making people overwhelmed Continue reading...