China's Internet Censors Thrive

The confusion over a major outage in China of Google Inc.'s search sites on Tuesday spotlights one of the most remarkable aspects of the Chinese government's Internet censorship apparatus: It is designed to be obscure.

By Wednesday, access to the sites appeared to have returned to normal -- searches for some terms, but not all, were blocked. Government officials declined to comment when asked if they were the source of Tuesday's outage, leaving the situation and Google's future in China a mystery for users.

China's sophisticated Internet-filtering system, unofficially dubbed the Great Firewall after China's most famous ancient defense installation, blocks access to a range of foreign content, from criticism of China's leaders to information about sensitive historical events.

China generally doesn't tell its people when it is interfering with their Web access, unlike some other countries, such as Saudi Arabia, that give explanatory warning messages when users are denied access to sites.

Instead, China's filtering can look to users like a technical glitch -- an error message in a user's browser that makes it seem like the connection to the Internet malfunctioned. Authorities don't discuss the methods or tools they use.

Isaac Mao, director of the Social Brain Foundation, a Shanghai-based Internet and new media research group, said the government's tactics cause users to 'think it's just a problem with the server of some sites.' This works to the advantage of authorities because people are more likely to tolerate or even support censorship if 'they don't have a clear concept of the criteria,' he says. Unpredictability also makes the system harder to circumvent.

The Great Firewall's mercurial nature makes it hard to tell when authorities are stepping up their filtering efforts, and helps to explain how Google was befuddled on Tuesday over what caused its search sites to become unusable in China for nearly 12 hours.

Because the block was a departure from the regular workings of the Great Firewall, many users saw it as an attempt to target Google, likely in response to the company's refusal to comply with Chinese censorship. Google on March 22 stopped operating its self-censored Chinese site, Google.cn, and began redirecting users in China to the Hong Kong site -- which China's Great Firewall censors for users on the mainland.

Google first blamed its own coding for Tuesday's outage, but later said the interruption 'must have been as a result of a change in the Great Firewall.' By Wednesday, Google said the issue seemed to be resolved.

It remains unclear what happened. China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which oversees the Internet industry, declined to comment, as did other agencies.

Many Google users in China -- accustomed to using Google.cn, which is inside the Great Firewall -- have been confused by their experience using Google sites on the other side of the censorship divide.

For example, a search on Google.com.hk of the Chinese word for 'carrot' causes an error message and temporary disruption of access to Google -- apparently because one of its three characters is the same as the surname of Hu Jintao, China's top leader. From Joozone.com.

Mr. Mao says the carrot problem wasn't new. ' 'Carrot,' ' he says, seems to have been 'part of censorship criteria for a long time.'