Certain politicians in the US government have been trying to put pressure on American companies such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and others to not help the Chinese government censor the content of the internet.
The politicians will grandstand and debate this issue, but some technology experts think they can help in a different way.
It is possible to get software that will allow internet surfers to hide their identity, and some of those politicians have been trying to promote this kind of solution.
Hiding your identity on the internet may well seem to be a good thing, particularly if you are in a country where there is a lot of control. Before downloading such a piece of software and blithely installing it, all users should be extremely careful about what they are doing.
The technical issues are not quite as simple as they may appear to be, and anybody wanting to hide should be extremely careful. For example, it must be remembered that while you are downloading a browser that may give you anonymity, you are not anonymous. You will presumably be using Internet Explorer, Netscape or one of the other browsers. Your internet service provider (ISP) may have a record of that. Once you start browsing, you will be getting cookies, making bookmarks, and creating history files and caches of what you do.
Most of the browsers that give you anonymity either do so in a partial way or ask you to pay for the 'complete' package. Such a package usually will encrypt the bookmarks, the history files and may even erase the cookies. It is highly unlikely that the average user is going to know enough about the technology not to leave some trace on the hard disk.
What this means is that naive users thinking they are being safe may download a browser that will give them anonymity, but that fact will be logged by the ISP. The police could ask for the records of the ISP and they would then know the identity of that person.