The Internet is less free than last year. Thanks a bunch, Snowden

Looking at the the numbers I don't really understand why especially UK and US rank so high.

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net-2014/freedom-net...

For UK: They seem to censor the biggest and most recognized association of hackers of the world. They are somewhat politically active, educating people about new technologies and their dangers.

https://twitter.com/afpc/status/540863877601587200/photo/1

As for the US: Censorship isn't really a thing there as far as I know. However traffic interception for business reasons certainly is. From all I know it is really hard to get "normal" internet access (without DPI, companies even modifying packages for whatever reason, QOS, ...).

But again, I understand the rating for the US rating is okay, just for UK it seems strange to have a much better rating than Russia, which seems way too far off in that least. Things might have changed drastically there, but so far.. at least for the people I know they can visit various websites that for example are being censored for copyright infringement, which in many cases actually is debatable, especially when it is communities with less such data than tumblr or Facebook for example.

Again, just my perspective from what I hear from people I tend to talk to. It's really subjective, but maybe someone here, maybe someone living in the mentioned countries can add something.

Where I live (a country without data on the list) there has also been a lot of new censorship coming up, but all those cases are completely unrelated to Snowden, but mainly based on lobbyists by the content industry. Sometimes there are weird situations where companies have different opinions than the actual authors or videos get removed from YouTube by request of a company, even though the original author uploaded it based on their rights of it.

Okay, that is one "reason" for censorship and while I am still not happy with that I worry more about all kinds of associations, news websites or NGOs or political opposition being blocked even when some government somewhere in the world calls them terrorists or radical. The same was true when pro-democratic movements first appeared in most countries.

Snowden did the citizens of the US a huge favor by bringing to light pervasive government snooping. In the long run, it will be good for freedom* !

* That is, unless the citizens get too distracted by Honey Boo Boo, the Kardashians and so on...