Here’s a well-done opinion piece from the Guardian on government information gathering and censorship. It’s about China, though. But Monica Tan is the kind of writer a good newspaper should have, supporting her case with links, sticking to her argument, and not getting hyperbolic or shrill. This obviously not the sort of piece Glenn Greenwald would write, but it is what proper journalism looks like to me,

Chinese censorship’s dangerous subtlety

Earlier this year, while in the southern Chinese city of Kunming, I had the fortune to witness first-hand two sides of the nation’s internet revolution. In August I attended a thousand-person protest against plans to build a petrochemical refinery and by-product paraxylene (PX) plant just 30km away. The protest had no central organisers; it was the organic escalation of an online discussion thread in which a small group of concerned citizens gathered to share information about the plant’s possible environmental and health hazards.

Many of the participants I talked to that day said that it was their first time taking part in a protest, and I was surprised at how well informed they seemed to be. Be they office workers, middle-aged mothers or young students, they could rattle off facts about air pollution and talk fervently about the importance of environmental impact assessment reports. In the days preceding the protest I had witnessed the stream of messages and posts being shared on the Chinese phone app WeChat, full of data, stats, pleas, declarations and poetry, designed both to inform and incite.

And in response came the heavy hand of the provincial government. There had been a mainstream media blackout on the protests, and posts on the microblog Weibo were being censored. I watched the frenzied posting of participants cease as one by one they were invited by the police to “drink tea” - a euphemism for being brought in for questioning. One woman who had participated in the original online discussions was interrogated for hours and warned me that “the police know everything”, before abruptly breaking off communication.

Yet incidents like this, in which the push and pull between Chinese “netizens” and the government’s control over public discourse erupt in such a confrontational manner, are rare. Mostly the hand of the government remains hidden. With close to 600 million users, the internet has become too integral to Chinese for the government ever to consider hitting the kill switch. Instead their manipulation of the online dialogue has grown subtler, and thus more dangerous.