Oppose censorship: break down the firewalls
The protests in Iran over the election results have once again highlighted the increasingly significant role digital technologies are playing in exposing the outrages of oppressive regimes. The Iranian regime has gone to great lengths to stifle electronic communication including shutting down cellphone networks – particularly texting services – and denying access to a number of websites where ordinary Iranians would be able to access news of what’s happening in their country.
The mark of an oppressive regime is that it prefers to operate in an information vacuum where its carefully controlled messages can be fed to its oppressed citizenry. The PC and the Internet have challenged that model allowing ordinary citizens to publicise their plight to the outside world. And it has accelerated enormously with the ubiquitous camera/video-enabled cellphones. Almost every individual now walks around with a camera, ready to take images that compliant state media wouldn’t touch. Take a look at this video from Iran – notice how when the shooting starts the electronic shooting takes off. Virtually everyone records the events on cellphones.
Social networking has provided the distribution medium. Twitter in particular has been the main platform used to organise the protest within Iran and report the turmoil to the outside world. Following its use in the recent anti-Communist protests in Moldova, Twitter has now become an incredibly powerful tool for the citizen reporter. Even a few months ago people were scratching their heads over Twitter, saying they “just don’t get it”. Now it’s likely to become the number one target of despotic regimes.
To preserve this channel of freedom it is important that individuals and groups around the world do what they can to continuously attack the firewalls and service removals used by oppressive governments to keep their populace in ignorance. Censorship requires a total blockage of the information being suppressed. Anything less is a blow against censorship.
This is not something to ever delegate to government. No government can ever be relied on to break down the information walls that surround the dictatorships, theocracies and police states. Even some liberal democracies, like Australia, yearn to block information that it deems unfit for its child-like citizens to consume. Politicians, given the opportunity, will tend to block information rather than open it up. They should never be given the opportunity. No matter what excuse, what great benefits they espouse, censorship should always be opposed and freedom vigorously defended.
Global Internet Freedom Consortium is one such group that is working hard to crack the censorship walls. Members of this group of “hacktivists” produce a range of anti-censorship technologies. They have had considerable success in cracking the Great Chinese Firewall and devoting much energy to punching holes in the Iranian and Burmese barriers.
However things turn out in Iran, these protests will cause two things: Governments will redouble their efforts to censor digital information, and private citizens will exponentially increase the amount of information for dispersal. In the end, with all our support, the ordinary citizens will prevail.
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