Great moments in internet censorship: Episode #7,907,541

Steven Stradbrooke
January 7, 2011
5 Comments

great-moments-internet-censorshipIsraeli media are reporting that the Ben-Gurion Airport Authority is employing an internet filter to prevent travelers from accessing ‘controversial’ websites via the airport’s WiFi system. The sites being blocked are a real dog’s breakfast, ranging from bandwidth-heavy sites that stream video and music, to the usual suspects of gambling and porn. (Gambling sites are already being blocked outside the airport.)

Curiously, political websites – on both sides of the political spectrum – are also being blocked. We guess that’s like the famous injunction against talking politics and/or religion in UK pubs – not that anyone ever paid that edict any mind in any of the pubs we’ve ever visited. Still, the censorship has one of the blocked site’s members sounding the alarm. “It’s regrettable that people leaving Israel should be made to feel as though they were leaving China or North Korea. Only backward countries bar Internet sites.”

Speaking of China, we recently told you about the 60k websites that were shut down by Chinese authorities last year for offending the government’s delicate sensibilities. For the record, that’s over 1k per week, but as a way of personalizing that number, we’d like to introduce you to one of the Chinese netizens who earned the ire of the government censors in 2010.

Enter 22-year-old Foshan City resident Lin Chenglong, who ran a photo-heavy blog entitled “Eating, Drinking, Whoring, Gambling” (waitaminit… isn’t that CalvinAyre.com’s motto?). Amongst other things, the blog detailed Chenglong’s regular visits to prostitutes, or as he referred to them, ‘servers’. From March 2010 until his arrest in November, Chenglong visited 70 ‘servers’ and blogged extensively about 48 of them. Writing under the pen name ‘the Foshan Cannon’ (seriously, Calvin, this guy thinks he’s you), Chenglong provided details about where he met the girls, how much he paid, and included notes on the ‘special services’ each of them offered.

The Foshan Calvin, er, Cannon’s blog got some 124k visits before it was shut down, prompting some of his critics to suggest that Chenglong was only out for attention. Chenglong rejected the notion that he was something of a fame whore, saying he just enjoyed keeping a diary, and that he found visiting prostitutes ‘interesting’. Well, really… Who doesn’t?

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Tags: Article, censorship, China, Israel
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