Internet Lions Turn Paper Tiger in China

[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Tom Zeller Jr]
The issues on the ground in China are complex, and there are plenty of people who believe that Bill Gates is right when he says, as he did last week when discussing the matter at a Microsoft-sponsored conference in Lisbon, that "the ability to really withhold information no longer exists." That is to say, Microsoft or Google may agree to censor this or filter that, but in the end, censorship is no match for human ingenuity and the endless ways for the Internet to provide workarounds. "You may be able to take a very visible Web site and say that something shouldn't be there," Mr. Gates said, "but if there is a desire by the population to know something, it is going to get out." But even if that's true, Western technology companies have only themselves to blame if users in the free world quickly ask when Shi Tao, the journalist whose name Yahoo gave to Chinese authorities and who subsequently was sentenced to a 10-year prison term, will be released. Or that people use what-ifs to ponder the moral limits of saying that local law is local law. That's partly because it is only recently that any of the players have made any genuine efforts at transparency in their dealings with China.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/06/technology/06link.html?pagewanted=all
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* Google This
How far is the government willing to go in its zeal to stop the free flow of information in China?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/05/AR200602...
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* Activists Hound Google China Boss
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/05/BAGRNH345T1....

* Prying Eyes
A look at Google's dealings with governments in the US and China.
http://nationaljournal.com/about/congressdaily/columns/clark.htm