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Senate Bill to Subsidize Anti-Censorware Research
Senators Wyden (D-Ore.) and Kyl (R-Ariz.) introduced the
Global Internet Freedom Act
earlier this month, setting aside $60 million over two years "to develop and deploy technologies to defeat Internet jamming and censorship." Of course they don't mean libraries and schools in this country -- they're talking about countries like China, as Kyl et al. explain in a
National Review article
a few days ago. I guess it wasn't confusing enough to
(1) subsidize censorware
and
(2) criminalize researching it
-- we also need to (3) subsidize researching it. How about forbidding American corporations from trading censorware goods or services to these "repressive governments," wouldn't that be a good start?
Update: 10/30 03:37 GMT by J : Here's the
Wired story
from early this month on the version that was introduced in the House.
(Sen. Wyden also teamed up last month with Sen. Cox (R-Calif.) on a little bitty resolution standing up for your fair use rights before the tank parade of the DMCA.)
... that the US government tries to censor the Net at home, if they're funding research like this. The fruits of this research will spread around the world at the speed of electrons. I can easily see a situation in, say, 2006 where a) the US has developed compact, easily distributed anti-censorware tools and got them into China, b) China has realized the futility of trying to control people's Net usage when such tools are available and given up, and c) US Net usage suffers from increasing restrictions that do nothing to slow down the h4x0rz but makes everyone else's life more difficult than it has to be. And then what? Why, then, the friendly folks in China start e-mailing innocuously named files ("vacation_pics_from_Beijing.zip") to their friends and relatives in the US, and ...
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
In the release statement of Freenet 0.5 on Slashdot yesterday it was noted that the project needs money. Am I the only one wondering about this coincedence? Since Filesharing is possible over Freenet (among many other anti-censorship uses) it will probabely get nothing.