[Moogs]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6724531.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6685253.stm

Whether it's people living in countries with governments prone to blocking sites or arresting bloggers, or in countries where companies do some of the dirty work (like the Google's apathy in China or the Yahoo-Flickr incident mentioned in the second story), there is only one way to combat this type of behavior.

Bury them. Forget about your congressmen and elected officials; they won't help until it becomes a true cause of the populace. Politicians never do anything until large groups of people are making a big fuss somewhere. We need to force (not request) their help, by making the problem as visible in everyday conversation as possible. The more this is a topic in the front of everyone's mind, the more pressure there will be on a politician to speak up about it. Everyone needs to post about and discussion it in as many forums, blogs, news page feedback forums, etc as possible. Post a lot of comments and post a lot of links from week to week.

That means people in suspect countries, too. If 500 people do it, they're somewhat easily tracked and arrested. If 5,000 people stand up for themselves in a given country or region today, the governments will have a very difficult time of it. If 50,000 people make some racket on a weekly basis, it would be impossible to track or stop in any reasonable amount of time. If 500,000 people in China, Iran, Egypt commit an arrest-worthy internet offense today by sending a story about censorship via email, blog or chat (to someone in another country or their own), how could any government possibly deal with that?

They can't, short of something ridiculous that would hurt their own government or economy, by shutting down access completely to the outside world. But whatever the case, maybe we need to force the internet version of Tianamen Square. Everyone needs to step in front of a tank at the same time. That's when the will of governments will crumble, and if they try to do the unthinkable, well... that's when revolution starts and their influence effectively ends. In short, we have to call their bluff. We have to say "are you going to arrest all of us and shut down every site and pay money for the technology to monitor everyone?". The answer to that is no, even though they'd like us to believe otherwise. No country is going to put itself into isolation or bankruptcy in order to quell public opinion.

Now, consider the fact that 10 forums like this one (nearly invisible in the whole-world picture), making an effort to educate people, embarrass governments and companies, is 100,000 people. Now think of how many forums there are similar in scope and popularity to this one. If you look at the larger picture, we are millions of people. The only way governments and companies can shut us up, is if we sit around and quietly go about our business saying "ah, that's too bad that happened way over there; won't happen to me."

There aren't enough monitors, cops and internet experts in any country or any international lawmaking body, to deal with millions of people united against them for a single cause (freedom of expression on the internet). And by freedom of expression I'm not talking about prOn or P2P music sharing sites. Those two things are about money (either scamming it out of people or avoiding paying for a particular service), and quite frankly they're way OT when it comes to this subject. We first need to tackle the important problems of everyone being able to contribute to the web in whatever verbal ways they need, and of protecting privacy of the individual. Wherever we know of a wrong being committed we need to right it by plastering it all over the place and getting the larger picture / story in front of as many people as we can.

Doesn't mean you have to be a PITA and dump tons of email stories in your family and friends' laps; be selective about it when sending p-2-p. But in bb forums where such discussion is not OT, it needs to happen. And if it is OT, then place links in your signature to some place where it isn't.

*steps off soap box*

Thank you. That is all.

[joveblue]

I'm not sure how you're going to get half a million Chinese, Burmese, Iranian, Egyptian or Tunisian people to stand up to their government in the face of imprisonment all at once, but good luck.

Nor do I see how Western companies are the criminals here. If Google, Yahoo, etc, refused to provide services to countries with censorship, I really can't see those governments folding in on censorship because a search engine or photo sharing service refused to co-operate. It would be more like "a big who cares" and they'd get on with things.

I don't know how you see this going down but as I said, good luck

[Moogs]

No the point was not to literally organize a specific event, but rather to encourage everyone to speak up all the frickin time and just make a big ruckus out of the whole thing until it starts getting carried on more news outlets and more companies and gub'mints start to "get it".

And I don't propose that Google and Yahoo are criminals so much as sitting idly by and taking advantage of the system, respectively. Their code of ethics, if they truly care about the medium they've helped to build, should dictate that they are standing up for the little guy MORE than anyone else, not doing nothing and doing harm, respectively.

[joveblue]

Google's stance (which I agree with) is outlined here:
- Google In China
- Testimony: The Internet In China

[Luca]

I didn't read the whole thing, just skimmed it, but from what I gather they're basically saying that it's better to get their foot in the door than to just refuse. I know a lot of people disagree with this, saying that Google is being greedy and that they should send the Chinese government a message by not providing any services to the people. I think the idea behind that is that people will be so pissed to not have Google access that they might actually do something about it.

But I doubt that's really the case. Things are broken here all the time, and if Google is another thing that's broken, people will just make do with something else. Sure, Google is popular in China, but there are always alternatives. China is an old country with an old history, and the people just don't have the "fight for your rights!" attitude that prevails in the United States (a young country that won its independence through war and perseverance). China has been slowly improving over time, and they'll continue to do so. In the meantime, there will be a lot more human rights violations of course, and I doubt they'll ever get to where America and Europe are before I'm an old man. But that's just how things go and there's little even a huge company like Google can do about it.

So like I said, it's better they get their foot in the door. I think a lot of people would be surprised at what you actually can access here in China. Sure, they have censorship, but it's a bureaucratic and disorganized country, remember? They can't react quickly enough to take down all the websites that are critical of their government. As far as I can tell, the Chinese government mainly focuses on the big offenders and lets the little ones go (with some exceptions of course). The most annoying thing is that there's no Wikipedia, no BBC, and no Google Video. Those are more annoying because people link to them, not because I can't get the information. Nearly all the information from Wikipedia is available through either Answers.com or Reference.com, both of which are simply mirrors. The BBC thing is annoying because so many people here at AN link to BBC rather than other news sites, but I can usually find a similar article elsewhere. Finally, Google Video is kind of crap next to YouTube anyway, so I've never had trouble with that.

Other than those three I can't remember the last time I ran into a roadblock. Then again, I'm not constantly looking up anti-CCP websites.