The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said it, "deplores the irresponsible policies of United States Internet firms Yahoo! and Google in bowing directly and indirectly to Chinese government demands for censorship."

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Other US high-tech firms such as Cisco Systems have also helped the Chinese government acquire sophisticated technical means to spy on the Internet, its users and the messages they send, RSF claimed.

It said Cisco had sold several thousand routers to enable the regime to build an online spying system to spot supposedly subversive keywords in messages.

My background tells me that the criticism of Cisco is pure and utter bullshit. Similar criticism of Nortel that I've read is bullshit. I've checked a press release from Nortel describing the networking equipment sold to a mainland university and found a list that matched what a US or Canadian university should be buying. And at the Hong Kong Bookfair you could buy for $HK840 the entire self-study Cisco Certified Network Professional bookshelf and you could teach yourself to build your own "great firewall".

And if you didn't want to buy the equipment from Cisco or Nortel, I could build you a "great firewall" from a bottom of the shelf clone PC bought in Sham Shui Po or Shenzhen and a few pieces of free opensource software. Grown up versions of the toy software that parents use at home to try and keep their children from seeing pornography. In fact the central government often defers to the same vocabulary as the US government in promoting their form of governmental paternalism.

I haven't read of Reporters Without Borders criticising the US and the restrictions the US government has placed upon the sale of the assets of Global Crossing. If Reporters Without Borders wants to truly promote the free flow of information, then it should be promoting the separation of politics from telecommunications. Governments around the world can only interfere with the free flow of information when the flows are only a small finite number and the control of those is held by pro-government organisations. I have been informed that much business of the mainland avoids the "great firewall" altogether but these flows of information are not available to the general public. Some members of the general public turn to technical methods, proxies and encrypted data channels, to avoid detection by the "great firewall". The US government has often stood in the way of progress of the technical methods that avoid the monitoring and control systems rationalising that the bad guys might use the technology to avoid being monitored and controlled.

If the goal is the free flow of information in China, then it is misguided to blame Yahoo and Google and Cisco that the nets only get cast so far inside the "great firewall" or that individuals' fishing lines are stopped from catching certain information. The goal should be to open new flows of information, both content providers and content delivery systems. Inevitably some government will want to monitor and control and co-opt these flows, but it is so much easier for them to accomplish their goals of "law and order" when the numbers are small and finite. There are those that have pushed for the elimination of US classification of encryption technology as an export-limited munition of war. There are those that have pushed for the elimination of state-owned oligopolies of Chinese telecommunications and media. That have rightly written to the powers-that-be that nations as a whole are weakened when the masses are fed a steady diet of party-line lies, deceits, and conceits. That indeed "shit in" will invariably produce "shit out". Although a government may be able to maintain their position over the masses, but as the masses sink in to the mud, the government and nation will sink along with them. Only through the abandonment of the politics of fear and control will the goal of the Reporters Without Borders be accomplished.