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Censorship and control of the Internet

2009-06-18 13:31:27
From time to time, people in this forum make statements of the form
'we cannot do X because it would enable censorship' and go on to
describe a use case that really has no connection to how the Internet
is used against repressive regimes.

I would just observe that we currently have a vast experiment going on
that is showing exactly how the Internet is used against repressive
regimes. At this point the visible hero is Twitter and the unsung hero
is Tor. There are also ISPs around the globe who are helpfully
blocking DDoS bots which are being run by well intentioned idiots who
think that taking out the Iranian ministry of information is worth
trashing the bandwidth for the resistance.

This is not the first revolution to be driven by a new media, the
Leipzig demonstrations were driven by fax and photocopier. The '79
Iranian revolution by compact cassette tape. It is however, the first
time that mass communication technologies explicitly intended for
revolutionary purposes have been critical.

The basic information cycle is that information is collected inside
Iran, funneled to the outside through the Internet and then
re-injected into Iran via satellite TV. While satellite TV is of
course illegal, the further people are from centers of population, the
easier it is to hide a dish. In the population centers people can see
the demonstrations first hand.

In the short term what people are asking for is more Tor entry nodes
and for help against the DDoS attacks trashing the bandwidth.


But it is also clear that we should be thinking about improved tools
for use in the longer term, possibly not even Internet connected tools
at all. The Cuban resistance uses USB sticks heavily. Lots of people
have been thinking about long latency Internet, this is an
application.

But here we have a perfect laboratory for looking at the real
requirements and use cases. Twitter channels are overloaded with
retweets of irrelevant material, there is no contextual memory like
there is in wikipedia. There is a huge problem with Iranian government
agents, supporters and spammers injecting noise into the channel.

We need better means of protecting the identity of the Iranian tweeters.

And whatever comes out of those observations may be useful in other
contexts. Imagine if we could use the same type of social media
effectively in a situation like Katrina. There were plenty of people
who knew about army and airforce resources that were not being used
because the President was incompetent and had not given the order to
override Rumsfeld.

-- 
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