I could only think of one reason: China must have had technical difficulties to exclud certain Internet connections from their filtering regime. Otherwise why not just open up the pipes connecting the MPC and continue filtering the rest of China? Admittedly I don’t quite see what the technical difficulties could be. After all, could they not just route the whole traffic through a proxy if they would not want to adapt their system? However, it might be that the amount of bandwidth and channels needed to serve the whole journalistic community at the Beijing Olympics is simply too hard to control otherwise. However, my suspicions seem to be confirmed by a recent report of the OpenNet Initiative about filtering during the Beijing Olympic Games which found:

“The filtering was nearly identical between the MPC and home access in Beijing, indicating that the incrementally increased openness achieved by reminding China of its Olympic promises benefit all Beijingers.”

Here is how I would interpret this finding: In order to mute the protest China finally decided to give journalists less restricted Internet access but because a fine-grained control of the Internet connections to the Main Press Center is not possible they had to alter filtering rules for the whole sub-network that is Beijing. So the conclusions for me are

1. The Chinese Internet filtering system might not be as sophisticated after all and
2. I doubt Beijingers will enjoy those sites for much longer (remember, the Games will be over tomorrow).

The real sad story is not that foreign journalists cannot access websites of human rights organisations (as if sports reporters would be interested in this anyway) but that there appears to be clear old fashioned censorship happening on the ground. Apparently all reporting about the Beijing Games has to be transmitted through the network of the MPC first before it can be uploaded to the news networks themselves. Ever wondered what happens there? This is the real shame and this is where all the foreign media should have taken a stance and threaten a boycott – clear censorship of their own reporting. A China that has been rightly proud of its achievement to set up these olympic games should be shamed for censorship of journalists much more than for blocking websites.