Section 14

Reporters Without Borders’ cyber-freedom prize for 2006 has gone to Cuba’s Guillermo Fariñas Hernández, head of the independent news agency Cubanacán Press. Hernández went on hunger strike from February to August this year to campaign for the right of all Cubans to have unrestricted Internet access.

In Cuba, private Internet connections are effectively banned and all computers in Internet cafes have software installed to track “subversive” activity. Penalties are so severe - 5 years prison for unauthorised Internet access, 20 years for “counter-revolutionary” activity - that there’s a large measure of self-censorship in effect.

Hernández is one of Cuba’s leading opposition journalists. None of Cubanacán’s journalists are allowed to use the Internet or fax machines.

Censorship of the Internet by oppressive governments sprang another leak this weekend with the release of Psiphon, a “censorship circumvention solution” created by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.

Psiphon works by turning any regular personal computer outside a censorship firewall into an encrypted proxy web server that can then be used to connect to forbidden sites. People subject to censorship then connect to the proxy server instead of the blocked site, supply a username and password, and then read whatever it is that their government doesn’t want them to see. Presumably, you can also use it to connect to Trade Me from work.

If you have friends or family in China, Iran or some other communist or Islamic slave-pen, you can provide them with access to the outside world. Just tell them not to get caught.

Hat tip: Boing Boing.

UPDATE 6/12/06: Far Eastern Economic Review has an essay in their December 2006 edition, The Geopolitics of Asian Cyberspace, by Ronald Diebert of the Open Network Initiative - one of the organisations behind Psiphon.

The BBC has reported (Hat tip: Boing Boing) Microsoft’s senior policy counsel Fred Tipson as saying that Microsoft might have to consider pulling out of repressive countries like China.

“Things are getting bad… and perhaps we have to look again at our presence there,” he told a conference in Athens.

“We have to decide if the persecuting of bloggers reaches a point that it’s unacceptable to do business there.”

Google was recently criticised because they were seen to be helping the Chinese government censor search results. (Compare the searches for “Tiananmen Square massacre” on google.co.nz and google.cn.) Google argued that having any presence in China was better than having none if freedom of information was the goal. Critics suggested that helping China censor the web didn’t sit very well with Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto.

Microsoft may be responding to criticism from Amnesty International, which last week highlighted the circumstances of several jailed bloggers (Hat tip: NZ Herald). Along with Yahoo, Microsoft has been attacked for shutting down blogs run by people the Chinese government wants silenced.

The Internet has tremendous potential to bring information from the outside world to people living under repressive regimes and it’s very encouraging to see companies with muscle, like Microsoft, using their position to encourage change in places like China. Meanwhile, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft need to decide how much persecution makes it unacceptable to do business there. Is the goal of free speech in China better served by providing a censored service, in the hopes that people demand more of their own government, or by refusing to provide any service at all?

The Sydney Morning Herald reported yesterday that Google is refusing to remove racist blogs from its Blogger site. (Hat Tip: David Farrar, who’s pictured on one of these sites, wearing a National Party shirt, labelled as a “red”. The days when the web was just for rocket scientists are long gone.)

Google, as a private organisation, has every right to set the terms on which they will host sites but they have chosen to do their bit to uphold freedom of speech and not censor anything.

“We allow our users to create blogs, but we don’t make any claims about the content of these pages. In cases where contact information for the author is listed on the page, we recommend working directly with this person to have this information removed or changed. We would only remove content from this blog if ordered to do so by a court order,” the [Google] spokesman said.

The ‘marketplace of ideas‘ theory of free speech, first given form by Oliver Wendell Holmes in Abrams v. United States, says “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” Another Supreme Court judge, Louis Brandeis, put it “the best disinfectant is sunshine.”

John Locke cautioned against using force to quash unpleasant or incorrect ideas, saying “truth is not taught by laws, nor has she any need of force to procure her entrance into the minds of men. If truth makes not her way into the understanding by her own light, she will be the weaker for any borrowed force violence can add to her.”

Defending people like neo-nazis can leave a nasty taste in one’s mouth but it is worthwhile remembering the words of H.L. Mencken: “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”