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U.S. Funds Anonymizer for Iranians
SiliconEntity writes "British online rag The Register is reporting that the U.S. Government is funding anonymizer.com to provide anonymous browsing services to Iranians. Using U.S. funding, the company created a special version of its anonymizing proxy which has instructions in Farsi and only accepts connections from Iranian IP addresses. The service defaults to the Voice of America web site, but users can input any address and browse free of (Iranian) government censorship."
Propaganda both prevents and wins wars. Propaganda can serve as a tool of persuasion in trying political struggles between two or more nations. In the case of Iran, it is imperative that we win a large portion of mindshare to use as security in the future. For it would seem that the possibility of armed conflict with Iran is a reality, and we should do what we can to avoid it, considering the implications of such a thing.
Why does our government work for the freedom of others, while chipping away at ours daily? Has freedom been reduced to a tool to pry open restrictive regimes to the point where our system can rush in and clamp things down in the "correctly" restrictive ways?
sigh.
-sarcasm-
And now that our tax dollars are being used to allow members of a radical Islamic regime (one that harbors terrorists and has WMDs) to anonymously look at all the bomb plans burried in steganographied images on eBay, aren't we opening ourselves up for more terror?
-/sarcasm-
Makes you wonder if anyone believes that Axis of Evil crap.
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
IAALS.
If a country decides to abolish copyright, we'll be forced to block all traffic, right? So we'll be the ones needing anti-censorship proxies then.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Could some Iranian please set up a proxy so that we can bounce back and use anonymizer for free. Thanks :-)
The US is going to institute a national health care program for Iraq, a nationalized educational system for iraq, govt controlled water and power monopolies for Iraq, anonymous surfing for the Iranians.
How come these things are not good enough for US
War is necrophilia.
It amuses me that, while anonymizers would likely be condemned as a tool of terrorism by the National Security State in the US, the same spooks use anonymizers as a weapon against their counterparts of old Iraq.
On second thought, it depresses me.
Some interesting observances about Iran:
/. post, probably very little... Just wanted to throw in my two cents about Iran.
In the late 70's, students were protesting the overthrow of the Shah because he was corrupt, pro-West, etc.
Now, in Iran, the children of the students who were protesting in the 70's, are the same people who are protesting against the corrupt Ayatollah and his cronies. The students as well as the majority middle class is aching for Western reforms. They overthrew the shah because he was corrupt, but only a handful of the government owns the majority of the wealth in the country. Essentially, they have turned into a socialist nation and the people are fed up.
It is only a matter of time they will be a more moderate nation again, sharing with the world the beauty of the nation. The US's persistent feeding of western ideas is only fueling a fire of revolution that the Iranian people (sidenote: being of Persian-Armenian descent, we hate referring to ourselves as Iranians, sounds so 1980...) will take part in.
What does this have to do with the
100% Insightful
RTFA.
You tell me how "whilst" differs from "while," and I'll stop calling you a pretentious jackass.
Thanks to the U.S. government, Iranians can now view material blocked in U.S. libraries after being categorized by a private company as violence/profanity, alcohol/tobacco/drug related, satanic, sexual, or otherwise containing information which may be considered harmful or offensive?
Why are Iranians entitled to view more of the web then Americans?
Bzzt. Wrong.
If anything the Chinese were pulling for us in Vietnam. Who was the next country to declare war on the Chinese after the US? That's right, it was the PRC.
People have this illusion that the various Marxist nations were lovey-dovey as part of the quest for International Socialism. The reality is that, while most were Soviet satellites, the Chinese were displeased with the USSR for a long time. There are dozens of recorded instances of territorial infractions, shots fired, and planes shot down between the PRC and the USSR. The Chinese basically took a neutral position on the issue of a NATO vs. Warsaw Pact war; their hope was that both sides would nuke each other into cinders.
Last week a Dutch guy was caught who bribed a producer of yoghurt products. He threatened to poison products that were placed in the super market and as a demonstration placed a few poisoned products in a supermarket.
He used a US based anonymiser service to cover up his contacts with the police. He was caught because the anonymizer sevice in question happily cooperated with the legal forces, after some pressure from the dutch police and their US counterparts.
I don't approve of this guy's actions. He actually poisoned someone (who survived) with his actions. Apparently he actually tried out the poison on his goat to make sure the stuff wouldn't kill anyone. However it's a clear demonstration that anonymizers are just as anonymous as the FBI/CIA wants them to be. Anyone using the anonymizer.com services can be sure someone is watching what they do.
Jilles
Let me get this straight -- if I go to a public library, my browsing is censored by mandate of the U.S. government (unless the librarians are rebels, of course).
But an Iranian can browse the web free of government-imposed censorship?
Aarrrgggghhhhhh!
Actually, the dichotomy makes sense: the U.S. government wants to control its own populace while mucking about in the politics of other countries. The U.S. government doesn't care about the freedoms of the Iranian people; it just wants to undermine the Iranian government.
Well, I hope those Iranians enjoy their freedom now; as soon as the U.S. trumps up enough false data to "liberate" Iran, they'll be in the same boat we are in terms of censorship and spying.
"May you live in interesting times", indeed.
All about me
As much as I think Iranians deserve privacy and personal freedom, I think it is incredibly hypocrit that the USA is doing this, against the will of another government, while at the same time it is bullying around individuals denying them other freedoms and privacy.
When it comes to so called economic self interests, nothing goes too far, such as procesuting russians for violating absurd laws such as the DMCA, allowing industry lobby groups such as the RIAA to deny people the right to share files and make personal copies, removing the right to reverse engineer, removing the right to invent because of software patents (which it is trying to push through worldwide).
In short: the USA government also is restricting a lot of people (their own and elsewhere), not representing the people (as should be in a democracy) but instead representing those who have the money to bribe the politicians and to buy laws.
After U.S. goverment approved so-called "Patriot Act" which allows it to spy what you write in your e-mails, what you read in a library, ...
I'm waiting for Iranian goverment to fund Anonymiser for U.S. citisens so they can browse the Web anonymously without fear of being spied by U.S. goverment.
MSDOS: 20+ years without remote hole in the default install