Starts at 8:20.
NCAC on internet censorship on the “Listening Post” on Al-Jazeera. From Al-Jazeera:
The segment focuses on the role and responsibility of the Western companies who provide the technology to police the Internet, as well as how to get around the controls to access material that many governments do not want their citizens to see.
NCAC’s Svetlana Mintcheva’s answer:
It would be a much more interesting approach to encourage technology companies, perhaps the same companies that produce filters to also produce technologies that go around censorship, that could avoid blocks, that could access information, that could mask the origin of a dissident post. And of course, there should also be diplomatic approaches, international efforts on authoritarian regimes to allow an opening up of the internet.
What do you think?
The problem is that restricting access to information is a money-making proposition; defeating such restrictions, not so much.
The fat cats, who stand to profit by making information impossible to get at without their permission, finance censorship technology companies but not anti-censorship technology companies. And these fat cats own the politicians and legislators who make censorship laws. And the state has all sorts of nasty secrets it wants to keep from the people. So they have more than one reason to pass censorship laws and make it illegal to defeat the censorship technologies. Finally, “encouraging” companies to do things is pointless: companies are in business to make money. Period.
So activists and hackers who do it for the principle of the thing are all we can count on. Everybody else has a vested interest in censorship, or has been bought.