Surveillance and Censorship

I've been thinking about surveillance and censorship on the Internet, and I just read magoo's post on privacy, and it's crazy because I'm realizing I just don't know anything about all of this. I keep stumbling across articles related to these things, one of them from Wired that talks about the results of a world-wide survey that is looking at government censorship in different nations. One government claims to censor "sexually explicit" (whatever that means) materials, but what it actually censors are political and religious sites that don't quite agree with the ideas/policies of their regime. Governments use all kinds of tricks, making you think you're trying to reach a page that doesn't exist (when it actually does), and then there's the DoS attacks, which I definitely knew nothing about (and now only kinda understand). But, there are of course new browsers and products that allow individuals to get around all this censorship, and some individuals find other ways of fighting it-- this quote from the Wired article is crazy to me:

One Syrian website used to "go after government members by name and was really fearless," said Zarwan. "It was quickly blocked. So they started sending (the site's content) out by e-mail. Then the government started blocking that e-mail address, and so he started a new e-mail address ... to the point where he was changing e-mail addresses three times a week."

Censorship on the Internet is supposedly spreading (globally). I don't really know anything much about this issue in relation to the U.S. government, and I've never really thought about what pages I'm getting blocked from seeing. I recently also learned what Network Neutrality means (looked it up on Wikipedia) and learned that certain network providers can favor or disfavor certain sites. So companies can also have an influence of what pages I can see? I'm probably way behind on all this, but I've just never really been aware of how much what I'm seeing is controlled by someone/something else.