The triad of repression. In 25 Countries in the world internet is subject to censorship. The worst is Myanmar, followed by China and Iran. While millions of people use the net daily to communicate or look for information, tens of governements try to find a way of controlling them. The report on the censorship of internet, which was made public by OpenNet, a surveillance association expressly created by the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Toronto, reveals that the forms of limitation of the Net keep growing, and with always greater sophistication. The researchers found three types of censorship in the 200 thousand contacts in thousands of websites. The most widespread is political, which is exercised to limit or stop the spreading of ideas from rival political parties, defenders of human rights or dissidents. The list of the worst countries places Myanmar, China and Iran at the top. The second is social censorship, which does not permit access to contents connected to women’s rights or homosexual communities. In this case, the most repressive countries are Iran, Oman and Saudi Arabia. The third type of censorship is connected to social security issues, meaning that sites connected to terrorist or “rebel” groups are blocked. In this category the top three are once again Myanmar, China and Iran.

Western complicity. The most frequent methods of censorship are those that impose laws forbidding the use of certain terms (“democracy”, for example, or “human rights”), or filtres on the internet providers. These filtres are often built by western companies, who indirectly become accomplices of the censorial policies of some governments. The best known, SmartFilter, is built by the American company Secure Computing. The report does not include Cuba and North Korea in the list, not because these Countries don’t apply censorship, but because the authors of the report reported that the safety of their sources could have been endangered during the investigation.

Not last, the Ue. Last year 62 cyber-dissidents were arrested in China. Some nations, like Turkmenistan, have banned domestic connections and have considerably restricted the access to internet cafés. Myanmar forbids the use of e-mail systems such as Hotmail or Yahoo. Every five minutes, a scanner monitors all operations carried out in internet cafés. In a report published last year, Reporters sans Frontieres denounced not only those states with a reputation for repressive policies, but also the European Nations’ orientation in the matter, since they are guilty of leaving the decision of forbidding, banning and censoring to the companies operating on internet, “creating- was the comment of RsF – systems of private law where the computer technician has now taken the magistate’s place”.