On January 19th 2010, the Beijing Association of online media established a group called Mama Jury to censor obscene and pornographic information online. According to report from Southern Weekend, the idea of organizing mothers to “protect” the children from pornography is originated from Western countries. However, the Chinese mother group is run by the CCP associated organization rather than by independent civic group compared to its western counterpart.

(CNN) -- A growing number of software companies are capitalizing on an unexpected business opportunity: Internet censorship. In countries where governments continue to ramp up Web filtering systems, more people are searching for tools that will allow them to access inaccessible information -- and they are willing to pay for them. Such tools include virtual private networks (VPN), proxy servers and other workarounds that enable users to breach barriers to blocked information online. VPNs "tunnel" through to servers in a country with no Web controls, encrypting information under an anonymous computer address to conceal private traffic. Proxies also allow unfiltered Internet access but are considered less secure than VPNs.

The World Bank issued a press release on 15 February in response to a report in the Sunday Times (Chinese here for cyber censorship) noting that, The World Bank would like to clarify its position regarding the Institutional Development Fund (IDF) Grant for the Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (TRC), Sri Lanka. The signed grant agreement which came into effect in 2009 has no provision or scope to utilize these funds to implement an Internet censorship program as implied by the Sunday Times lead story titled “Chinese here for cyber censorship… [World Bank funding] does not include any provisions or scope to include Internet censorship and the Bank would not approve any such provision. The full press release can be read here. However, the TRC is currently headed by an outright apparatchik of the President. Even before, the TRC – a public institution - outrageously violated its own guiding principles by allowing the President’s Office to send, on two occasions, unsolicited SMS’s to all mobile subscribers in Sri Lanka. No action was taken by the Elections Commissioner at the time to reign in this abuse. Even post-war, sites like news.tamilcanadian.com and Tamilnet.com remain blocked without any legal injunction from ISPs in Sri Lanka. The fear of a partisan TRC acting as an extension of Executive whim to impose arbitrary and ill-defined measures to control and censor independent media online are therefore real and warranted.

Critics of government-mandated filtering schemes contend that such programs first focus on "child pornography" because it's such an unobjectionable target for censorship—but once the program is in place, it's much easier to extend it to more controversial areas, such as copyright protection. At least the French have the decency to admit that this is what's happening. The French lower house, the National Assembly, has just passed a security bill known as LOPPSI2, and it's expected that the Senate will follow suit in the next few weeks. As we've previously reported, LOPPSI2 is a grab bag of security items that includes state-sanctioned computer Trojans, a massive new database of citizen data (dubbed "Pericles"), and a requirement that ISPs start censoring sites on a government blacklist. The Internet censorship provision has received the most coverage to date, and LOPPI2 has been quite controversial in France; it passed the National Assembly 312-214.