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Although the Internet has democratised today's media so that anyone can - in theory - say anything and have their voice heard around the world, dictators and repressive regimes have moved quickly to suppress any dissent.

Authoritarian regimes have woken up to the fact that dissidents and others who oppose the workings of the state are very likely to be using modern communications tools such as blogs, email and websites to distribute their messages.

The biggest state censorship takes place in the People's Republic of China. By moving quickly and pouring money and resources into tracking 'subversive' web sites and emails, the Reporters Without Borders report says that the Communist authorities have been quick to crack down on any dissidents who have shown their identity. In fact, it has been able to recruit many Western companies such as Yahoo! in order to discover the identities of the regime's

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critics.

RSF also accuses Cisco Systems, which created China's Internet infrastructure, of selling the Chinese authorities special surveillance equipment for the police to use.

According to the RSF report, the Chinese model has been eagerly copied by other authoritarian regimes around the world. These include Belarus, Burma, Cuba, Iran, Libya, the Maldives, Nepal, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam, all of whom now censor the Internet within their borders.

Increasingly the technology of surveillance is becoming more sophisticated. China can now automatically censor blog messages and blank out words and phrases such as 'democracy' and 'human rights'. Burma can even monitor the country's cybercafés by automatically recording what is on customer's screens every five minutes.

China is now passing on its cyber-snooping expertise to other repressive regimes including Zimbabwe, Cuba and Belarus. Soon, the report suggests, these regimes will have no need to buy in Western technology at all.

The report notes that the situation in the Middle East and North Africa has deteriorated in the past year. Reporters Without Borders says that Morocco now censors all political websites advocating Western Sahara's independence. Also, Iran now bans all publications mentioning women's rights.

The full report is at The Reporters Without Borders web site.