OpenNet Initiative releases "China’s Green Dam: The implications of government control encroaching on the home PC"

The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) has released a new research bulletin that reviews the functional elements of China's Green Dam software and explore the possible effects of its implementation on a national scale. ONI concludes that Green Dam is deeply flawed and poses critical security concerns for users, and may facilitate a much more intrusive mechanism for filtering and surveillance.

From the executive summary of "China’s Green Dam: The implications of government control encroaching on the home PC":

A recent directive by the Chinese government requires the installation of a specific filtering software product, Green Dam, with the publicly stated intent of protecting children from harmful Internet content. The proposed implementation of software as reviewed in this report would in fact have an influence that extends beyond helping parents protect their children from age inappropriate material; the filtering options include blocking of political and religious content normally associated with the Great Firewall of China, China’s sophisticated national-level filtering system. If implemented as proposed, the effect would be to increase the reach of Internet censorship to the edges of the network, adding a new and powerful control mechanism to the existing filtering system. CONTINUED

The full report is available here.

For more on Green Dam, checkout Jonathan Zittrain's recent interview on NPR's All Things Considered, "Chinese Internet Filter Spurs Criticism."