China’s Great Firewall shows signs of cracking

It what seems to have been a temporary fissure in the Great Firewall of China, users of the heavily-censored Chinese internet were able to access usually barren Google+ yesterday, spamming US President Barack Obama’s official page with messages of freedom, dissent and requests for green cards.

Exactly how Chinese users were able to breach the great firewall is unknown. According to Reuters, Google took no action as to make the social networking site available to Chinese users while others speculate that the site became available through mobile phone networks that may have been overlooked by censors.

Time magazine has reported that an internal glitch in China’s incredibly robust censorship system was to blame for the breach. 

Some of the commenters took the security breach as a rare opportunity to address the West, pleading for Obama to “free us." Such comments seemed to irk China's Foreign Ministry spokesmen Hong Lei, according to Voice of America, the US government’s foreign news agency. After stating that Chinese citizens should express themselves according to Chinese law, the spokesman was then asked if he be believed that the Chinese government considers citizens who criticize it on the internet as violating the law.

He refused to answer.