The American State Department is reporting an increase in human rights violations. A portion of the report deals with the censoring and control of the internet by oppressive regimes:
"... Highlighting the situation regarding control of the web in China, the report pointed out that the government "increased its efforts to monitor internet use, control content, restrict information, block access to foreign and domestic websites, encourage self-censorship, and punish those who violated regulations"."
This is only part of the story. The unspoken part of the covert battle is the courage of the people using the internet to distribute information and to seek contact beyond geo-political borders. It can be an exceedingly dangerous and deadly activity.
It may surprise some that this dangerous 'cat and mouse' drama draws some techniques from hackers, spammers and cyber-criminals. One of the fundamental skills of the dark side of the internet is to avoid detection. Not being caught by a controlling government is, without exaggeration, a matter of life or death.
The stealth and cunning of hackers who want to steal our personal information, plant a piece of malware on our computers and/or turn our online connection into a bot-net are just some of the techniques used to avoid government control.
In 2004, Bill Gates promised that spam would be "a thing of the past in two years' time". Undoubtedly, Mr Gates was sincere in wanting to remove the inconvenience and danger of spam. And obviously, it has not happened. There is more spam now than in 2006, the year that Mr Gates predicted would be the time it would take to control spam.
Bill Gates could not harness the considerable clout of Microsoft to control spam. Other technological giants would have helped, as would government and the business sector. Spam is simply costly and dangerous. It also illustrates how difficult it is to control the packets of information on the internet. Governments will find that censoring the internet is not an easy undertaking. There is only one surefire method and that is to have no internet whatsoever. That country would need to take a step back into the last century.
The underlying tenet of the internet was to maintain communication in the event of a disaster. A disruption in the network would be handled by routing around the disaster. Add to that people's remarkable courage and creativity in using the internet and tyrannical governments have a daunting task.
As every internet user knows, hackers are being more creative and being more elegant with each passing day. It is just ironic that, for some people, those treacherous hacker methods are helping and saving lives in ways that criminals could never have imagined.
Catherine Forsythe
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rugrat
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Erica K
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Comments
Rated.
Rated.
rated. very good post.
IMUA
As for this self-serving crap -- "Bill Gates promised that spam would be "a thing of the past in two years' time". Microsoft has become more and more like virus with each iteration, taking over users' machines with automatic "security" downloads that only the most sophisticated and dedicated users can prevent.
Furthermore, MS's "gray-listing and black-listing" practices have become just another scheme to extract cash. Rather than protect users from spammers, it requires spammers to pay MS an annual fee to get off their lists.
How do I know this? I had to investigate when my emails to my sister's Hotmail account were blocked -- without informing her, of course -- because MS decided I was a spammer. But if I wanted to pay $1500 a year, they would remove me from their list. In a pig's ass, Bill, and I'm getting damned sick and tired of that man's sanctimony.
I think most of us just take the internet freedoms for granted. For so many others, posting a comment, visiting a site or some other internet activities are huge personal risks. The government surveillance of some nations means being online is an extremely high risk activity.