China, with its shed loads of foreign reserves and booming economy, can afford to buy expensive technologies to keep its netizens in the dark. It naturally offends my libertarian sensibilities that it chooses to do so. But for Burma/Myanmar spend its limited cash on net-censoring technologies is not only offensive in terms of liberty, it strikes me as deeply wrong economically. (link via Boing Boing):

Myanmar “employs one of the most restrictive regimes of Internet filtering worldwide that we have studied,” said Ronald J. Deibert, a principal investigator for the OpenNet Initiative and the director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto.

Myanmar now joins several nations, including China, Iran and Singapore, in relying on Western software and hardware to accomplish their goals, Mr. Deibert said.

Microsoft, Cisco and Yahoo, for example, have all come under fire recently for providing technology or otherwise cooperating with the Chinese government to enable it to monitor and censor Internet use.

I would argue with the reporter that Singapore, unlike China and Iran, does not rely heavily on technology to limit Internet freedom. The number of sites the city state blocks is limited to a handful of symbolic targets such as Playboy. Singapore authorities exercise control via good-old-fashioned libel law and the sedition act.

With its periodic bans of blog-hosting sites, the free and democratic South Korea is much more guilty of blocking websites than Singapore.

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