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US Tests System To Evade Foreign Web Censorship
D1gital_Prob3 excerpts from a Reuters story that says "The US government is covertly testing technology in China and Iran that lets residents break through screens set up by their governments to limit access to news on the Internet. The 'feed over email' (FOE) system delivers news, podcasts and data via technology that evades web-screening protocols of restrictive regimes, said Ken Berman, head of IT at the US government's Broadcasting Board of Governors, which is testing the system. The news feeds are sent through email accounts including those operated by Google, Microsoft's Hotmail, and Yahoo. 'We have people testing it in China and Iran,' said Berman, whose agency runs Voice of America. He provided few details on the new system, which is in the early stages of testing. He said some secrecy was important to avoid detection by the two governments."
(That's foreign to them)
All this will achieve is even greater restrictions, until ultimately countries' censors will be operating entirely autonomous, independent, local versions of what was once referred to as The World Wide Web and just so that they can put their version of the facts in front of a small minority of people in other countries who might just care.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Disclaimer: I'm not a US citizen (and my English is terrible).
So the US govt is providing ways for foreign citizens to access content that is considered illegal in their countries...
What would be the US govt reaction if some other country provides a way for US citizens to access content that is illegal in the US ?
Well, they presented it just a couple weeks ago at DefCon, so apparently their right hand isn't quite on speaking terms with their left hand. There were some...pointed questions from the DefCon crowd, though, which they didn't have good answers for. One big concern for me, which I didn't see them address well: how do you bootstrap this? (Ie, why not just block downloads of the application itself, or arrest everyone who does download it?)
Why is it important to spend taxpayer money adding a porn filter to such a scheme, when most US taxpayers undoubtedly don't care whether or not people abroad watch porn, and when it will, as has been shown in the past, block access to legitimate sites that are highly relevant to people being denied Internet access across the world?
Because if you let people use it as a proxy to surf porn they will consume all of the available resources/bandwidth and it will become as useless as TOR currently is?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.