Google’s self-censorship in China has been the topic of considerable controversy; the official Google response reasonably explains their choice as the least evil among a set of undesirable alternatives.

I can sympathize with Google’s moral tradeoff– living in the real world means making such choices– but am immediately compelled to think of as ways to evade this censorship. I believe censorship-resistance can be baked into the fabric of the blogosphere, such that information is freely discoverable using public search engines like Google despite attempts to censor it.

Let’s assume that Google will not apply too much brilliance and engineering effort to the probem of defeating censorship beaters; that would definitely cross the line into colluding with evil.

Today, it’s easy enough to accidentally evade the filter. As Paul Boutin notes, the Chinese Google filter only works if you can spell. Searching for Tiananmen (spelled correctly) on google.cn gets the censored images, whereas any of a number of common misspellings produces uncesored images of tanks.

What if the process of misspelling censored words could be automated in blogging and searching services? For example, a Wordpress or Movable Type plugin could download a list of censored words for a central server and systematically generate alternate spellings would could be appended as censorship avoidance “tags” at the end of the post. Whenever the page was rerendered, these tags could be dynamically updated to adapt with any new words censored by the search engine.

Similarly, a Google toolbar add-in could be used to automatically augment users queries with alternate spellings of censored words.

How do we know which words are being censored? The easiest course be to ask Google to provide a feed of censored words, in secret if necessary.

If they are unwilling/unable to do that, community effort plus automated comparison between google.cn and google.com could be used to detect words that have been censored.

Would bloggers and web page authors be willing to change their behavior in this fashion to evade censorship? Those who write on sensitive topics certainly would be. Would searchers? Evidence suggests that there are many in China who are apolitical, so not everyone would be willing to take the chance of being detected. But there are certainly some who appreciate and benefit from unfettered access to a diversity of information.