Listening to Global Voices: Day one highlights

Daddy can be more intimidating than a dictator, it turns out.

Societal censorship - pressure from family members, employers or social groups to avoid voicing or listening to controversial ideas - is rampant around the world. In many cases, is a more difficult barrier to the creation of truly diverse online content than technological censorship.

Self, societal and technical censorship were the primary concerns during seven hours of presentations at the first day of the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008 on Friday.

The two-day conference, which continues Saturday, has brought bloggers, programmers, academics, traditional journalists and business people to Budapest to further Global Voices’ 4-year-old effort to connect the dots of the non-Western blogosphere.

In Friday’s second session, Singaporean activist Au Waipang introduced the problem of self-censorship.

The past 40 years of economic growth - peace, prosperity and high rises - have facilitated that government’s efforts to paint dissidence in a dangerous light, Waipang said during a panel discussion.

“When they have a good life, a lot of people will say, ‘Hey, what do I need freedom for? Who needs a free press when life is good,” he said.

Waipang, who is a gay activist, said the Singaporean government does not need to resort to technical censorship. Instead, he said, there is a constant campaign to disparage and attack the credibility of anyone who uses the Internet.

“The government regularly labels digital speech as irresponsible and unrepresentative,” he said.

Therefore, he said, more traditional techniques are needed to advance activist causes. In particular, activists can benefit from being visible role models - online and on the ground. Kenyan blogger Ory Okolloh said she has greatly benefited from being a visible, non- anonymous blogger.

During the post-election violence there in December, 2007, her well-established blog went offline for a few hours. She did not know if the government had blocked it or if there was a technical glitch.
Within an hour she had friends and readers contacting her and offering to help her get content online.

“I had been blogging for a long time, so people were able to gravitate to me pretty easily,” she said. It goes to show the importance of not being anonymous.

Bloggers, primarily those who are activists using weblogs to advance a political cause, from places like Singapore, Iran, Pakistan, Taiwan, Japan, China and Ethiopia, discussed the ways they have experienced and tired to combat societal and technical censorship Friday.

In the afternoon, some technological experts took the stage to discuss ways to maintain anonymity and privacy.

But like many activists, all five panelists said it will take more then technical solutions enabling anonymity and privacy.

Roger Dingledein, who helped start up Tor - described by moderator Ethan Zuckerman as “an extremely sophisticated, powerful anti-censorship tool” - said he often fields questions about the challenges of trying to penetrate the so-called “Great Firewall of China.”

“I’m not working against China,” he said. Rather, against American corporations closely monitoring Internet behaviors. 

Tor, he explained, is an open-source program you can run locally on your computer. It fetches information via different servers or relays and builds paths with the relays. No single relay knows where you are or where you’re going. No single place along the network knows who the users are and what the users are doing.

Programs like Tor are used by corporations who might want to visit sites of competitors without those competitors knowing. It might be used by law enforcement officers running sting operations. Digital activists and dissidents around the world also benefit from programs like Tor - an anonymity solution whose relays are being run by around 15,000 people around the world. Dingledein estimated that about 200,000 people are Tor users.

Posted on June 28, 2008 by .
Filed under blogging.