Chinese Government Cracks Down Liu Xiaobo's supporters

Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize,  was in prison at the time of his award but supporters of his that somehow found out about his victory despite the government censoring all mentions of his name or the Nobel Peace Prize  have been arrested, placed under house arrest, and otherwise suffer from constant surveillance and limited access to communication resources according to Freedom House.

The censorship of Liu Xiaobo and the Nobel Peace Prize goes beyond removing the search results from a search engine like Google.com or Altavista.com but rather even text messages or twitter tweets that contain the phrases are heavily monitored and removed.

Here in the US we say the internet is the first amendment personified but here we have a authoritarian state limiting the spread of ideas and knowledge through the same tool, by omitting information.

I'd think that some of the more savvy individuals that support Liu Xiaobo can access information online through the use of proxy servers and ways to break the Great Chinese Firewall, but I am unsure how effective these are if we are hearing about harassment and arrests. This also goes to show how important anonymity online can be in an oppressive environment.

For more information about this development please read the CNN article and the Freedom House entry linked
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From CNN: http://articles.cnn.com/2010-10-08/world/china.internet_1_great-firewall-china-proxy-servers?_s=PM:WORLD
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Freedom House Article: http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=599
* China Human Rights Defenders 1/18/2011: Rights defender enters fourth month of soft detention <http://chrdnet.org/2011/01/19/china-human-rights-briefing-january11-18>
* Boxun News 1/18/2011 (In Chinese): Netizen under house arrest since Nobel announcement <http://news.boxun.com/news/gb/china/2011/01/201101181206.shtml>

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