the Great Firewall is not really a barrier, but a surveillance system
China’s prohibition of the internet seems to have been more successful than predicted a few years ago. The system has been dubbed “the Great Firewall of China” calling to mind a barrier between China’s part of the internet and the rest of the world.
The researchers call the Chinese censorship system a “panopticon” rather than a firewall. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not, thus conveying a "sentiment of an invisible omniscience." A new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.
In 2006, a team at the University of Cambridge, England, discovered that when the Chinese system detects a banned word in data traveling across the network, it sends a series of three "reset" commands to both the source and the destination. These "resets" effectively break the connection. But they also allow researchers to test words and see which ones are censored.
New work by researchers at UC Davis and the University of New Mexico suggests that the Great Firewall is not really a barrier, but a surveillance system that sits on routers throughout the country, breaking connections when it sees words it doesn’t like, and implicitly letting users know that a) they are being watched and b) don’t bother looking up that topic again.
Because it filters ideas rather than specific Web sites, keyword filtering stops people from using proxy servers or "mirror" Web sites to evade censorship. But because it is not completely effective all the time, it probably acts partly by encouraging self-censorship, Barr said. When users within China see that certain words, ideas and concepts are blocked most of the time, they might assume that they should avoid those topics.
