Radio Jamming and Internet Blocking
Further information: Radio jamming in China and Radio jamming in KoreaSince broadcasting began in 1996, Chinese authorities have consistently jammed RFA broadcasts.
Three RFA reporters were denied access to China to cover U.S. President Bill Clinton’s visit in June 1998. The Chinese embassy in Washington had initially granted visas to three but revoked them shortly before President Clinton left Washington en route to Beijing. The White House and United States Department of State filed complaints with Chinese authorities over the matter but the reporters ultimately did not make the trip.
The Vietnamese-language broadcast signal was also jammed by the Vietnamese government since the beginning. Human rights legislation has been proposed in Congress that would allocate money to counter the jamming. Research by the OpenNet Initiative, a project that monitors Internet filtering by governments worldwide, showed that the Vietnamese-language portion of the Radio Free Asia website was blocked by both of the tested ISPs in Vietnam, while the English-language portion was blocked by one of the two ISPs.
To address radio jamming and Internet blocking by the governments of the countries that it broadcasts to, the RFA website contains instruction on how to create anti-jamming antennas and information on web proxies.
On March 30, 2010, China's Web filter, known as "the Great Firewall", temporarily blocked all Google searches in China, due to an unintentional association with the long-censored term “rfa.” According to Google, the letters, associated with Radio Free Asia, were appearing in the URLs of all Google searches, thereby triggering China's filter to block search results.
Read more about this topic: Radio Free Asia
Famous quotes containing the words radio and/or blocking:
“The radio ... goes on early in the morning and is listened to at all hours of the day, until nine, ten and often eleven o’clock in the evening. This is certainly a sign that the grown-ups have infinite patience, but it also means that the power of absorption of their brains is pretty limited, with exceptions, of course—I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. One or two news bulletins would be ample per day! But the old geese, well—I’ve said my piece!”
—Anne Frank (1929–1945)
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—Julia Child (b. 1912)