Fighting internet censorship
As I’ve written previously, fighting web and other internet censorship is getting urgent. Amnesty International* has started a project at irrepressible.info, to take censored web content and spread it around as many different web sites as possible. In principle, this is a great idea, and I’m participating, which is why you will shortly be able to see ugly yellow/green boxes with random article snippets on most of my blog pages.
What does worry me is the technology. Simply put, it would be very easy for the Chinese to filter out any web pages with that content, both the “framing content” (e.g., the Amnesty International and irrepressible.info links) and the news content itself. Thus, I see the program in its current form as just a transition measure, to buy time until a more sophisticated approach is devloped.
Ultimately, this becomes a battle of spammers vs. spamfighters, only in this case the spammers are the good guys and many of the recipients want to be spammed. That should put the odds on the side of getting information through the Great Firewall of China (and similar abominations in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, etc.). I’ve previously outlined some of the technical issues that need to be addressed, and I’d be very interested in your thoughts on these.
*By the way, Amnesty International’s involvement shouldn’t scare anybody. True, when you look at their whole range of activities, it includes a lot of questionable anti-Americanism. (Guantanamo Bay is bad, but how can it be compared to the Soviet Gulag, where many Soviets and foreigners met their deaths?) But in the specific areas of press freedom, freedom of speech, censorship, etc., it’s very hard to make a similar criticism.
Technorati Tags: censorship, Amnesty International, irrepressible, spam
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[...] Four days ago, I posted advocating putting code from irrepressible.info onto your site. The goal is to fight censorship by spreading censored text across as many web pages as follows. And as you can see from the green/yellow box in the upper left of this page, I followed my own advice. [...]
[...] 2. I proposed two modes of hands-on involvement in fighting authoritarian-government censorship and repression. One is to immediately adopt the quick-and-dirty tactics of http://www.irrepressible.info, by adding a little code to your websites. (I’ve done that already on four sites.) The other is to help me theorize about a badly needed next-generation improvement on those. [...]