RESPONSE TO "CENSORS COME CALLING" by Lisa Murray

In Censors come calling printed on the 23rd September 2006 by Lisa Murray, i have provided a response to the facts that are present in the article. 

1. "in some countries loose talk is banned and many are punished for their ideas" 

Yahoo once said "China should not punish people for expressing their political views on the Internet". Many people in china are punished for the simple action of creating a blog and expressing their true ideas. As mentioned in the "Censors come calling" article china employs 30,000 Internet censors to track down dissidents and block unauthorised websites. In china they have the most sophisticated filtering system. When only searching for a simple word that breaches the Internet laws, computers with freeze or the page will be redirected to a blank one. 

2. "so called war on terrorism has justified the increasing use of the Internet for surveillance" 

A wide range of blogs have been created that are based on anti-terrorism and terrorism its self in general.  Censorship on these blogs in some countries have stopped the true ideas on terrorism to be expressed. In some countries such as Egypt many people were jailed due to the genuine expression towards terrorism posted on their blogs. 

3. " Amnesty international recently released a report condemning google, yahoo!, and Microsoft for limiting freedom of expression in china" 

Yahoo has been repeatedly attacked because they have handed over emails to the Chinese government that have led to the jail of Chinese censor search results due to the strict censorship in china. Google is criticized for their decision to  on their new Chinese site, though they are given a bit of credit for informing users when search results have been altered. Microsoft is best known part in censorship involves blogs on MSN spaces, where the company has agreed to prevent words like "democracy" from appearing in blog titles or content. 

Censorship and the suppression of speech in many countries has banned citizen journalism completely. The expression of speech has been banned to the point where its illegal and a major crime.