China's Censors Thrive in Obscurity

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    Date: 
    31 March 2010

    BEIJING—The confusion over a major outage in China of Google Inc.'s search sites on Tuesday spotlights one of the most remarkable aspects of the Chinese government's Internet censorship apparatus: It is designed to be obscure.

    By Wednesday, access to the sites appeared to have returned to normal—searches for some terms, but not all, were blocked. Government officials declined to comment when asked if they were the source of Tuesday's outage, leaving the situation and Google's future in China a mystery for users.