 a cheeky letter to the editors of the economist follows along with the article i was commenting on rohit in your article about chinese attempts to censor google last week the search goes on sept NUMBERth the followup correctly noted that the most subversive aspect of google s service is not its card catalog which merely points surfers in the right direction but the entire library by maintaining what amounts to a live backup of the entire world wide web if you can get to google s cache you can read anything you d like the techniques chinese internet service providers are using to enforce these rules however all depend on the fact that traffic to and from google or indeed almost all public websites is unencrypted almost all web browsers however include support for secure sockets layer ssl encryption for securing credit card numbers and the like upgrading to ssl makes it effectively impossible for a man in the middle to meddle censorship would have to be imposed on each individual computer in china the only choice left is to either ban the entire site range of ip addresses but not the kind of selective filtering reported on in the article of course the additional computing power to encrypt all this traffic costs real money if the united states is so concerned about the free flow of information why shouldn t the broadcasting board of governors sponsor an encrypted interface to google or for that matter the rest of the web to date public diplomacy efforts have focused on public sector programming for the voice of america radio sawa and the like just imagine if the us government got into the business of subsidizing secure access to private sector media instead nothing illustrates the freedom of the press as much as the wacky excess of the press itself and most of it is already salted away at google and the internet archive project on second thought i can hardly imagine this administration promoting the use of encryption to uphold privacy rights never mind best rohit khare the search goes on china backtracks on banning google up to a point sep NUMBERth NUMBER beijing from the economist print edition in chinese the nickname for google an american internet search engine is gougou meaning doggy for the country s fast growing population of internet users NUMBERm according to an official estimate it is proving an elusive creature earlier this month the chinese authorities blocked access to google from internet service providers in china apparently because the search engine helped chinese users to get access to forbidden sites now after an outcry from those users access has been restored an unusual climbdown by china s zealous internet censors hardly more sophisticated controls have now been imposed that make it difficult to use google to search for material deemed offensive to the government access is still blocked to the cached versions of web pages taken by google as it trawls the internet these once provided a handy way for chinese users to see material stored on blocked websites after the blocking of google on august NUMBERst many chinese internet users posted messages on bulletin boards in china protesting against the move their anger was again aroused last week when some chinese internet providers began rerouting users trying to reach the blocked google site to far less powerful search engines in china duncan clark the head of a beijing based technology consultancy firm bda china ltd says china is trying a new tactic in its efforts to censor the internet until recently it had focused on blocking individual sites including all pages stored on them now it seems to be filtering data transmitted to or from foreign websites to search for key words that might indicate undesirable content for example earlier this week when using eastnet a beijing based internet provider a search on google for falun gong a quasi buddhist exercise sect outlawed in china usually aborted before all the results had time to appear such a search also rendered google impossible to use for several minutes 