Using the Internet in China
Well, I'm back from China and I'm quite glad I did not take my personal electronics with me. I thought it might be useful to summarize my experiences with internet access in China, kind of as a report from the front lines, as it were:
- The one time I thought to go to an Internet cafe for access, I was waved off by my guide. Turns out I would have had to show my passport (which was back in the hotel in a safe) to get access.
- We had a Gmail account (since deleted) for email contact. Every time I tried to access it the processing got =very= slow. By contrast, all the connec
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Well, I'm back from China and I'm quite glad I did not take my personal electronics with me. I thought it might be useful to summarize my experiences with internet access in China, kind of as a report from the front lines, as it were:
- The one time I thought to go to an Internet cafe for access, I was waved off by my guide. Turns out I would have had to show my passport (which was back in the hotel in a safe) to get access.
- We had a Gmail account (since deleted) for email contact. Every time I tried to access it the processing got =very= slow. By contrast, all the connections to Chinese websites were quite quick. I strongly suspect that some serious filtering was slowing access.
- The same was true for access to non-Chinese, Western web sites. Efforts, for example, to navigate to cnn.com or google.com proved to be exercises in either patience or frustration. In the end, I had better things to do with my time and mostly gave up.
- The highlight (or lowlight) of the exercise was on my last attempt to get to the Gmail account. I was using Internet Explorer 7 (old stuff) and as I went to the Gmail page, an explosion of pop-up web pages started propagating. It got up to 58 different browsers opened before I could halt it with a 3-finger (CTL-ALT-DEL) hard stop. I haven't seen a virus (I assume it was a virus) like that on a US computer in several years.
Paul Rosenzweig is the founder of Red Branch Consulting PLLC, a homeland security consulting company and a Senior Advisor to The Chertoff Group. Mr. Rosenzweig formerly served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy in the Department of Homeland Security. He is a Professorial Lecturer in Law at George Washington University, a Senior Fellow in the Tech, Law & Security program at American University, and a Board Member of the Journal of National Security Law and Policy.
