[dasil003]

Yes, I think they would need to block those as well in order to be effective.

Frankly I don't see how they could possibly get away with it. Businesses of any size can't run without encrypted channels. Proceeding with this seems sure way to smother any economic development and relegate the country to third-world backwater status for the foreseeable future. And is any world leader crazy enough to do that besides Kim Jong-il?

[anamax]

> Businesses of any size can't run without encrypted channels.

Sure they can - they did before the internet. (No, the postal mail is not secure.)

> Proceeding with this seems sure way to smother any economic development and relegate the country to third-world backwater status for the foreseeable future. And is any world leader crazy enough to do that besides Kim Jong-il?

Pretty much every "world leader" in the last 100 years (if not longer) has shown that s\he is willing to give up some economic development in return for control and other benefits. (They arguably give up more than they think that they're giving up, but that's a separate issue.) Disagree? Name three exceptions.

Besides, the effect on economic development in the short term will be almost unnoticable.

[dasil003]

My wording was ambiguous, I should have said of any significant size.

Anyway, "some economic benefit" is the understatement of the year. A multinational simply can not do business without secure communications. History is irrelevant; Wells Fargo wrote out every transaction on a slip of paper and manually reconciled it every night 50 years ago, but to do so today would be utterly impossible. In todays global economy, countries need to be able to do business with foreign companies or they will be a backwater plain and simple. China certainly makes some of the tradeoffs you are talking about, but do they outright ban secure communications? Of course not, because that would be suicidal.

[lukeschlather]

>Sure they can - they did before the internet. (No, the postal mail is not secure.)

It's several orders of magnitude more secure than plain http.

>Besides, the effect on economic development in the short term will be almost unnoticable.

India has to be chock full of nationalistic script kiddies and legitimate hackers who will have a field day wrecking Pakistan's online economy if they actually try to implement this plan.

[noonespecial]

As well they should. It's one thing to use your leet skillz on some bigco with the vague self-important notion that the man is oppressing the peepz, but how often do they get to go up against real, genuine Bad with a big b.

Anonymous has got some work to do.