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Over the past few months, we’ve highlighted a number of Tor users abroad, many of whom use the program to circumvent national censorship.
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From Tunisia to Japan: Anonymity Everywhere
Jillian C. York writes about Rafik Dammak and circumvension in Tunisia and Japan
When someone moves from a country classified as an Internet enemy (Tunisia) to one with a relatively free Internet (Japan), does the need for anonymity cease to exist?
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As the Internet becomes more available globally, unfortunately Internet censorship becomes more prevalent. Over the past few years, organizations such as the OpenNet Initiative and Reporters Without Borders have documented such censorship as being on the rise. (More)
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that's why it is important to advocate for making internet free of any kind censorship or Internet filtering. because circumvention tool are not used or known by all internet users. and yes there are some which present harms (especially those largely used in china). I can advice tor or psiphon.
The fear is censorship maybe be setup soon by democratic country like Australia arguing children online protection like other countries using the argument of order and morality. in other side, there are country who are using the piracy fighting and p2p to filter and to threat anonymity like french. and the most dangerous threat is the work ongoing in ITU to build IPtracking which will mean the end of anonymity on InternetI am posting this using Tor, Firefox and Torbutton.
First, thank you Jillian for this blog posts, I've subscribed to the feed and look forward to reading more Tor advocacy.
Second, Tor users won't see the embedded Flash video used in this site. I myself see an greyed-out area on the top of the post
Third, fortunately it seems that the video is just an introduction message from Heidi Miller the local community manager. Quite useless, IMHO, but everybody is master in her own house. -
Human Rights Organizations in Argentina welcome anonymous browsing
Jillian C. York writes about teaching HROs to protect their online histories -
Federico Heinz advocates anonymous browsing in Argentina
Jilllian C. York writes about anonymous browsing in ArgentinaArgentina made headlines last month when it was revealed that world-cup soccer star and national team head coach Diego Maradona had secured a court order to have search results for his name scrubbed, and that Yahoo! was complicit in the actions. (rest of article)
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Australia Addresses Internet Circumvention
Jillian C. York writes about Internet filtering in AustraliaWhat do you think about Australia's proposed Internet filtering?
Internet filtering is a fast-growing global phenomenon; yet, in the United States, it’s often viewed as a problem of “the other,” the kind of issue associated with theocracies and dictatorships, not Western countries. And while it’s true that few Western countries filter the Internet much at all (Canada, Finland, Denmark and a few others filter nominally, mostly child pornography), Australia is on the road to wide-scale censorship. Read more
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Begins and ends, in the home. Once filtering starts, it can easily get out of hand. Who chooses what is appropriate? Not only that, but the government getting in on filtering puts pressure on those companies, like Net Nanny, that make a business model out of providing that service.
I can understand blocking illegal content, but since the technology behind the filters tends to be still so unsophisticated, it can often block perfectly legitimate sites that it mistakes for being involved in something illegal. The other option is having human moniters surf the millions of websites out there looking for law-breakers, but how much tax dollars is that really going to cost, and will it be worth it?
It is surprising that Australia is doing this. I had always thought of them as rather progressive.
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Syria: Using Tor for Censorship Resistance
Jilllian C. York writes about Syria's "Internet black hole" status.
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Hi, this is Anas.. the blogger quoted in the article.
I followed the video conversation and tried to post a reply, but seemic for some reason denied my registration and kept facing me with an error message, so much for free speech.
What really struck me while watching the video replies was one person saying that "syrians do like oppression, otherwise they would've done something about it!" of course, that's just common sense, how can you argue with such firm reasoning? I personally can't.
The same person stated their love of Israel and it's right to independence.. that doesn't give it the right to occupy the syrian Golan height since 1967, a fact somehow our commenter seemed unaware of. and I might add that Israel cutting all food supplies off gaza is an attempt to help the palestinians adopt a healty diet, denying them from all food supplies is an effort to support the palestinians natural immune systems.
Before anyone starts talking about Hamas or terrorism, claiming to fight terrorism doesn't give you the right to practice state terrorism. Also Hamas is a democratically elected movement.. it didn't seize power nor did it take the entirety of Gaza hostage like Israel is doing now. The American administration prefers it's America-friendly dictators to the democratic choice of the people. examples to that are too obvious for me to mention here.
Sorry for the long and off topic reply,
cheers,I've tried to add comments via Seesmic, but it seems to either tell me there was a problem with my recording, or there is no sound. So, giving up on that, here's what I'd say in a seesmic comment:
1) I'm impressed at the quantity and quality of comments on this topic. I look forward to a continued discussion.
2) To the former Amnesty International person; I think the more diversity in the approach and solution to the problems of censorship, the better off we are. If your task is to stop all access to a certain topic, and everyone only has one way to do it, then that's easy to defend. If you're subjected to death by a thousand paper cuts, so to speak, that's far harder to do and meet your goals. The more people involved and with diverse creative solutions, the more likely we can be successful.
3) Finding others with thoughts like you is the problem of the ages. I believe the terms were "birds of a feather" in the seesmic comments. If you are in a closed society, whether state sponsored or not, it's a big risk to start talking about your beliefs that are different than the community norm. Finding others like yourself is fraught with peril for many people; and turning to the Internet is a possibility, provided it's not heavily filtered. One way this has been attacked in recent history is the US Army Psychological Warfare during World War II. They'd take planes of pamphlets and drop the pamphlets over enemy territory. As a citizen, picking one of these up may just be enough to plant the seed of doubt in your mind. Or, if you agreed with the pamphlet, you have an introduction to start finding out if others thought you like, "hey, did you see that pamphlet?" is a fine conversation starter. 50 out of 51 people may tell you it's junk, but meeting that one other person could open the door to a whole set of other people. I thought about this in relation to the Irrespressible.info campaign from Amnesty International and the seesmic comment of the same.
Keep the comments coming, they're great.
And to Abby (spelling?) thanks for sharing everything you've shared. It's fantastic.
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Why browse the internet anonymously?
Andrew Lewman tell us why and how to protect our identity while browsingWhat are the best strategies for protecting your online identity?
And, Pulse is partnering with Tor on a series of posts about people protecting their online identity; the first post on Mauritania is below--look for more posts in coming weeks from writer Jillian C. York.
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Even in a so-called democratic, christian, ocidental and european 1st world country you can find many reason to use Tor and anonymity.
We have here, in Portugal, a case were a blogger, who writes with his real identity, that put some documentation about our Prime Minister education certificates online and the government tried to shut in down and take him to court. They dropped the complaint because the documents were real... of course, nothing happened to the Prime Minister too. But that's not the only case.
Although censorship is not so declared and clear to the common people, the "war" on anyone the publishes some critical documents on the web is very visible.
Needless to say that most of those authors are anonymous and some do use TOR, Privoxy, Anonymouse, Anonymizer and open proxy lists hence I saw that mentioned in a couple of blogs.
Also , many public services have filtering on their servers -- which is good if you want to avoid gaming and/or pornography -- that are used to disallow people from reading a lot of websites and even constraint the usage of search engines. I had information that some places have filters so badly tuned or biased that they allow porno to be seen by employees but not online newspapers and blogs.
Well! They don't arrest people nor drag them from home without some kind of proof... yet.
Thanks for your comment, there are many areas that we hope to highlight in the Tor pieces.
The specific concerns of areas like Portugal are of interest; look for more articles on anonymity concerns soon--
I wasn't aware that Portugal was of concern. If you have more resources to read up on the state of censorship or monitoring in Portugal, I'm interested.
... the censorship is more subtle hence we are a "democracy".
Examples are in portuguese, sorry. You'll have to use Altavista's Babelfish or Google's Translate to try to read it.
Special legislation that will force telecommunication service suppliers to save communication data over an year, i.e. all internet traffic, emails, voice and sms from citizens, in case judiciary could need it. Notice that there is in Portugal a person that supervise all polices (public security, judiciary, secret services, etc) and that person depends directly from the Prime Minister alone.
http://exameinformatica.clix.pt/foco/especial/194735.htmlNote that Europol wants to keep those data for as much as three years.
Other cases where many alleged documents appeared connected with local politicians:
http://a-sul.blogspot.com
http://oplano.blogsome.com
http://alhosvedrosaopoder.blogspot.com
http://umportodostodosporum.blogspot.com/All above are anonymous but the innuendos and low level comments against the authors any time something surfaces seemed to be clear indicators of what could happen if they know who they are. Some blogs where sabotaged several times to try to shut them off.
A sample of a confidential document that shouldn't have being made public:
http://umportodostodosporum.blogspot.com/2008/07/polticos-muito-vivos-du...The links inserted in the post above point to several posts with documentation related with less than clear deals between the local municipality and some urban promoters.
This author's blog was threatened with law suits because he propeled the last huge teatchers' marchs against the government education politics.
http://educar.wordpress.com/This author was sued and is with a court order restriction just because he complaint against a big finance group that owns an hospital. Notice that he shoed off private documents that did belong to him so no unlawful document disclosure can be pulled here.
http://dissidentex.wordpress.com/2008/11/25/hospital-amadora-sintra-este...
And, curious enough, the prosecutor keeps an eye on him :)
http://dissidentex.wordpress.com/2008/12/10/hospital-amadora-sintra-serv...Blogging and anonymous blogging is huge here in Portugal but people vote less and less and you don't see a public civil society movement alive. This should mean something, I think.
So, you see. Due to the "securitization" of our western world more and more means to preserve our movements and privacy are needed... even if we are doing nothing wrong... like just writing this text ;)
I do understand that, due to terrorism, big crime and pedophilia this may be necessary but... we would supposed that criminals are intelligent and that they know how to protect themselves. If they don't then they don't deserve to be criminals, eh eh.
But Who Guard the Guardians?
This article about the "Concepts of Liberty" is very interesting (you must translate it):
http://dissidentex.wordpress.com/2008/12/01/como-a-liberdade-negativa-le...
And read this one too: The supremacy of the single thought (in Googlese).Hope this helps.
Another very interesting case was a published local newspaper that had its sponsors menaced by persons connected to the local ruling political parties coalition so they stopped financing it and it had to suspend the printed version of the newspaper.
Neither a legal action was made against the alleged menacers neither against the newspaper director whom made an editorial about it.
Rest to say that the newspaper editor was a former mayor for the same political force and that his daughter, and also a partner in the newspaper, is one of our national deputies for the other party belonging to the same coalition and she is influencial in it...
Maybe, and I say maybe, the final result would be other if these "relations" did not exist.Ah! The original "complaint" is no longer available online and the digital newspaper is again sponsored even by the municipality, although still gently criticizing the ruling coalition.
If you'd like to respond via video, join our Seesmic conversation here:
http://seesmic.com/images/seesmichtml.gif) left top repeat-x">
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Freedom of expression, a different way to look at it
This mashup, created at Knight Foundation, shows the importance of world press freedom in connection with world population.
The green countries are “free” according to the 2007 world press freedom report done by Freedom House. The yellow countries are “partly free.” The blue ones are “not free.”
The shapes of countries in this map (from WorldMapper) are distorted because in this graphic the geographic size of the country is redrawn to reflect its population size.
So ... when you mash world press freedom into the world population map, you see the relative importance of India and China, which "take over" much of what was Russia.
What’s interesting here is this:
If the colors of just five countries turned green -- India, Indonesia, Nigera, Brazil and Mexico – and, if China also improved, the dominant color of the entire world would change.
So while it certainly is important for world press freedom work to go on wherever there is opportunity, this map seems to show that the biggest change for the people of the world would come about if freedom grew in China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil and Mexico.
The map comes from www.worldmapper.org. WorldMapper is released under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial License. Attribution: © Copyright 2006 SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).