The NSA "filters" a majority of the traffic that traverses the USA? What site can't I get to because of those filters?

A massive wall with a gate in it that allows everyone through is still a wall.

Everyone going through that gate can be monitored, recorded, held for questioning, etc.

And jumping out of the metaphor, every packet passing through the gate can be copied and stored for later.

I guess my criticism is that stopping communication (GFW) and monitoring communication (NSA) are very similar, therefore we do have our own GFW.

What the US does is not even remotely similar to what the GFW does.

And, by the way, the idea that you can trivially evade the GFW using a VPN? That's an extremely dangerous assumption.

I see monitoring and blocking to be part of the same machine. We apparently disagree. :)

>And, by the way, the idea that you can trivially evade the GFW using a VPN? That's an extremely dangerous assumption.

I think that part of your reply was meant for someone else. (I agree with the part I quoted.)

I think a big problem with your argument is your assumption that the US government does, or even can, monitor to the same degree that China does. The amount of interconnections and peering between networks makes this near impossible in practice in the US. If they could, there would have been no need for them to try to tap directly into Google's datacenter-to-datacenter lines. The internet is a mesh, not a star. Monitoring can get far by picking the largest entities and trying to insert themselves at those points, but there's plenty of traffic that goes directly between entities that isn't monitored. This works for monitoring, because it's passive, but once we're talking about a firewall and something is blocked, traffic will just shift to routes that aren't blocked if they exist. The GFW is a firewall because they actually have control of all the routes.