China on Monday reinforced its Great Firewall by declaring virtual private networks, or VPNs, illegal unless they are authorized by the government.
In China, popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia or YouTube are blocked by the country’s Great Firewall. Search terms deemed sensitive by the government are also censored.
To have normal access the web, Chinese users have resorted VPNs, which bypass the censorship firewall. But now these services are the target of a new 14-month “cleanup” campaign that cracks down on “unauthorized internet connections.
