Internet censorship, what does it mean? Is it possible to censor amounts of information that are all alone unimaginable? The Internet was originally designed to "find a way around" in case of broken communications lines, and it seems that explicit material keeps finding its "way around" too. However, the question at hand is just how much censorship the government imposes. Because the internet has become the largest source of information in the world, legislative safeguards are indeed imminent. Explicit material is not readily available over the mail or telephone and distribution of obscene material is illegal. Therefore, there is no reason this stuff should go unimpeded across the Internet. Sure, there are some blocking devices, but they are no substitute for well-reasoned law. To counter this, the government has set regulations to determine what is categorized as obscenity and what is not. By laws set previously by the government, obscene material should not be accessible through the Internet. The problem society is now facing is that cyberspace is like a neighborhood without a police department. "Outlaws" are now able to use powerful cryptography to send and receive unbreakable communications across the Internet. Devices set up to filter certain communications cannot filter that which cannot .
be read, which leads to another other topic of interest: data encryption. .
By nature, the Internet is an insecure method of transferring data. A single E-mail packet may pass through hundreds of computers between its source and destination. At each computer, there is a chance that the data will be archived and someone may intercept the data, private or not. Credit card numbers are a frequent target of hackers. Encryption is a means of encoding data so that only someone with the proper "key" can decode it. So far, recent attempts by the government to control data encryption have failed. They are concerned that encryption will block their monitoring capabilities, but there is nothing wrong with asserting our privacy.
