watching the watchman, er, brutal enforcers

[twoeleven]

dïe überblönde passed on this article analyzing the great firewall of china and what it censors. the authors tried a statistical probe to see what terms got banned. i thought the results were pretty interesting:

Table 1: Search block status on 24 October 2011 of the 20 terms with the highest Twitter/Sina log likelihood ratio scores. Search blocked terms are noted with a †.
†	term	gloss
†	何德普	He Depu
†	刘晓波	Liu Xiaobo
	北京市监狱	Beijing Municipal Prison
†	零八宪章	Charter 08 [reformer manifesto]
	廖廷娟	Liao Tingjuan
	廖筱君	Liao Hsiao–chun
†	共匪	communist bandit
†	李洪志	Li Hongzhi, founder of the Falun Gong spiritual movement
†	柴玲	Chai Ling
†	方滨兴	Fang Binxing
†	法轮功	Falun Gong
†	大纪元	Epoch Times
†	刘贤斌	Liu Xianbin
†	艾未未	Ai Weiwei, Chinese artist and activist
	王炳章	Wang Bingzhang
	非公式	unofficial/informal (Japanese)
†	魏京生	Wei Jingsheng, Beijing–based Chinese dissident
	唐柏桥	Tang Baiqiao
†	鲍彤	Bao Tong
†	退党	to withdraw from a political party

Table 2: Sensitive terms with statistically significant higher rates of message deletion (p < 0.001). Source designates whether the sensitive term originates in our Twitter LLR list (T), Crandall, et al. (2007) (C), or Wikipedia (Wikipedia, 2011) (W).
δw	deletions	total	term	gloss	source(s)
1.000	5	5	方滨兴	Fang Binxing	T
1.000	5	5	真理部	Ministry of Truth [official propaganda]	T
0.875	7	8	法轮功	Falun Gong	T
0.833	5	6	共匪	communist bandit	T, W
0.717	38	53	盛雪	Sheng Xue	C
0.500	13	26	法轮	Falun	T, C, W
0.500	16	32	新语丝	New Threads	C
0.379	145	383	反社会	antisociety	C
0.374	199	532	江泽民	Jiang Zemin	T, C, W
0.373	22	59	艾未未	Ai Weiwei	T
0.273	41	150	不为人知的故事	“The Unknown Story”	W
0.257	119	463	流亡	to be exiled	W
0.255	82	321	驾崩	death of a king or emperor	T
0.239	120	503	浏览	to browse	C
0.227	112	493	花花公子	Playboy	C, W
0.226	167	740	封锁	to blockade	W
0.223	142	637	大法	(sc. Falun) Dafa	W

Table 3: Deletion rates of terms from Crandall, et al. (2007), previously reported to be blocked by the GFC, that appear frequently (over 100 times) in our sample. Terms that are currently blocked on Sina’s search interface are noted with a †.
†	δw	deletions	total	term	gloss
†	0.20	88	443	中宣部	Central Propaganda Section
†	0.20	24	120	藏独	Tibetan independence (movement)
	0.19	30	154	民联	Democratic Alliance
†	0.18	132	733	迫害	to persecute
	0.18	124	686	酷刑	cruelty/torture
	0.18	80	457	钓鱼岛	Senkaku Islands
†	0.18	28	153	太子党	Crown Prince Party
†	0.17	102	592	法会	Falun Gong religious assembly
†	0.17	88	526	纪元	last two characters of Epoch Times
	0.17	56	333	民进党	DPP (Democratic Progressive Party, Taiwan)
	0.16	142	863	洗脑	brainwash
†	0.16	42	256	我的奋斗	Mein Kampf [why?]
†	0.15	83	567	学联	Student Federation
	0.15	32	208	高瞻	Gao Zhan
	0.14	51	360	无界	first two characters of circumventing browser [ie, one with a VPN to tunnel around the great firewall]
	0.14	36	250	正念	correct mindfulness
†	0.14	28	198	天葬	sky burial
	0.14	17	122	文字狱	censorship jail
	0.13	90	677	经文	scripture
†	0.12	91	732	八九	89 (the year of the Tiananmen Square Protest)
†	0.12	67	564	看中国	watching China, an Internet news Web site
†	0.11	35	310	明慧	Ming Hui (Web site of Falun Gong)
†	0.10	56	582	民运	democracy movement

as the authors note, it's a mixture of inconvenient people, codewords to dodge the censors, and names of foreign media sources. i'm amused by the inclusion of the number "89"; i wonder how hard it would be to get them to block all the digits. (perhaps convincing the forces of good to start using them as codewords might work.)

it's also odd that (as the authors mention) the censorship appears to be all done by hand; it's stochastic rather than deterministic. this suggests me that it may be possible to overwhelm or spoof the censors to the point of rendering them useless. that its, the crude word-bombing attacks people have attempted against (hypothetical) western eavesdropping may actually work on the great firewall.