Internet Censorship and the role of Anonymous Proxies

Sites such as Wordpress (that’s quite a few bloggers) and Google Groups have been banned in countries like Turkey.  It has gotten to the point where late last year a Oxford Professor by the name of Richard Dawkins had his website banned by the Turkey Government because of a disagreement with a famous Turkish Creationist.  No matter what your scientific or religious beliefs are, giving the power to block what people see online to a single person is a frightening thought.  Even You Tube has been banned in Turkey for supposedly hosting adult content on their site.  If it really happened that way may be another story all together.

I in no way want to single out the country of Turkey… during many of my trips there I noticed the country to be reasonably democratic and secular in their beliefs.  I am simply using them as an example of how far the censorship has spread across the world.  In certain countries simply visiting a site that talks about opposing political views is enough to have you arrested and placed in jail.  The people that make the decisions on what is censored material is different in every country, but you can see a strange list of reasons behind sites being blocked on a Wiki Internet Censorship Page.

Thankfully the methods used to actually censor the internet are rather cumbersome, basically based on DNS editing and URL filters that can be easily gotten around.  People will most often times look for anonymous proxies that come from outside their own country that are not blocked by local ISP’s, giving them access to most of the blocked web sites.

Proxies that are anonymous are widely available on the internet, but be cautious.  More often then you would expect, these proxies are a product of incorrectly setup servers by the administration, but also may be the product of the server being hacked allowing access to all the data as it passes by.  Remember that by using an anonymous proxy server while surfing the web means that you are handing the trust of your personal information over to that server.  If that is not enough, these services are most times so slow you might decide that these free proxy services just are not worth it.

Luckily there are several different methods for surfing the web anonymously that get around Internet blocks and censorship using commercially based products.  The product I prefer to use is listed below, but there are several different ones available.  Using a professional service will provide you with the speed and safety you need with a cost effective price.