The Censors Right Here at Home.(International Edition)(website Herdict)

Byline: Christopher Werth

Internet censorship used to be pretty easy to spot. When China blocks YouTube or prohibits anything on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, it's not hard to figure out what's going on. But as governments and commercial firms get savvier about the Internet, censorship is getting more subtle. A slow Web site could be an accidental glitch or something more intentional.

A new Web site now promises to add some much-needed data to what's so far been mainly anecdotal evidence. The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University has for years produced reports on filtering practices by country. In March it launched Herdict (a combination of "herd" and "verdict"), a Web site that uses the power of crowd sourcing to produce just-in-time data about what's blocked and what's not. Users report sites that are unavailable or slow. This information appears in Herdict's "herdometer"--a kind of annotated map of the world that reveals online censorship as it unfolds. Incoming reports pop up in windows across the map.

When China (once again) began blocking YouTube back in March over video of Tibetan protests, Herdict was among the first to know as reports came flooding in from the field. Another test came in March, when the popular muckraking Web site Wikileaks landed on Australia's list of censored sites. Wikileaks became suspiciously inaccessible for a few hours that same week. Users from across the world barraged Herdict with hundreds of reports. As it turned out, Wikileaks was down for maintenance--but the false alarm served as proof of the integrity of Herdict's reporting system.

Herdict's creator, Jonathan Zittrain, believes that the Web site will help uncover subtle forms of censorship in the West--not by governments, but by commercial firms. Internet service ...