Enemy of State – We Are Monitored!

My life in Beijing is very ordinary: I go surfing on the Internet every day, go swimming at times, and hang out with some friends on the weekend. Although I can not say that life here is better than in Taipei, I do feel satisfied with living conditions here expect for the chilling winter. However, this morning I turned into extremely uncomfortable and absolutely furious when , in the early morning, I found an stunning truth that all the civilian people in the country, including myself, are monitored on the Internet. All of the sudden, I have never demanded a freedom of communication more than the moment.

As my previous posts have mentioned, I can not access to my own Blogspot pages. I believed deeply that the Blogspot has been blocked by the country. Originally, I thought the situation will be changed very soon, because this blog services provider is well-known and thus gets some bargaining power to negotiate with the government. Nonetheless, couples of weeks have gone by and the frustrating situation remains. Eventually, I was forced to take some action to figure out a way to solve my own problem. In the process of solving the blocked issue, I validate the saying from some of friends that the government continues monitoring all the activities on the Internet. There is an ongoing X shield program, which designates to filter some key words transmit on the Internet and once probes those sensitive words, the page visits would fail in seconds. What related to this issue is that people in the country can not access to many services provided by Google, or at least would encounter some failure now and then, discouraging people to use Google and turning toward Baidu, a searching engine company which try their best to meet the requirements from the government. Google is not welcomed to the authority because it is unwilling to meet all the requirements about scrutiny of sensitive words typed by the public.

In fact, I am not a person who is eager to talk about politics and I don’t search those sensitive words on my daily online activities. However, the feeling of being monitored is very uncomfortable and annoying. I suddenly missed the freedom of speech in Taiwan.