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Twitter Developing Technology To Thwart Censorship
SHMG writes "Micro-blogging site Twitter is developing technology that will prevent government censorship, after Iran and China moved to censor its users. Speaking at the World Economic Forum, Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams said the company was working on 'hacks' to stop any blocking by foreign governments. 'We are partially blocked in China and other places and we were in Iran as well,' he said. 'The most productive way to fight that is not by trying to engage China and other governments whose very being is against what we are about.'"
Whenever there was a coup attempt going on in the USSR, the first place to get invaded by supporters of the coup the was the broadcasters, and then they had to get to the newspaper before it published the next issue. If they win over the media, they were effectively in power. If the media reports there's a coup in progress, then that would scramble the defenders of the existing rulers and it would fail. If the media reports the coup was successful, then whoever was reported to be the leader effectively had power.
This is why governments like Iran and China want to control all forms of communications. If people can organize in a way the government can't easily listen in on or censor, then the government is going to fail. As we have seen, a government doesn't need to be good at helping its people as long as its good at controlling them. Squash your opposing people, and you've got an easy time governing the rest.
How can one censor censorship? Prevent something from happening before you know what said 'something' will be? This will not work.
That Google / Apple / Microsoft / etc. would ever make such a statement...
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In Iran, moreso than China from what I understand, the Internet and telephones go thru central choke points that are controlled by the gov't. They can effectively just turn the whole damn Internet off in their country, if they like. Ditto for cell phones and text messaging.
My first question would be is peer-to-peer traffic regulated, and if so, how? While the gov't might be able to cut off the main Internet egress points, all it would take is one person with a covert satellite link and a good p2p network. Or, maybe, a covert side channel on a bank leased line that runs to Switzerland, for example? How about packet radio? Twitter isn't exactly super bandwidth intensive.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I think we can all agree that censorship is a bad thing, but how far should such social responsibility reach? Should companies be concerned about social responsibility in countries which are not their own? Should they help criminals violate the laws of their own countries? Is aiding and abetting in the name of freedom something that companies should really be doing?
Take for example Bob Barker, a major donor to the Sea Shepherds. The Sea Shepherds practice terrorism on the high seas in an effort to eliminate practices which they see as abhorrent, namely whaling and drag net trawling. Barker, with his name and money, support these actions which are in violation of international law. Likewise, New Zealand and Australia also provide shelter for the group by refusing to prosecute them for illegal actions taken in their waters. These supporters and harborers of the terrorist organization are just as responsible as the terrorist organization itself.
However, it would be somewhat odd if a completely unrelated country like, say, Armenia got involved and tried to sink the Sea Shepherd's ships or arrested Bob Barker for international terrorism. It's just not their problem.
There are many users of Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal that use Tor and other anonymizing proxies to get around constricting and censoring firewalls. If Twitter thinks they can do it better, by all means, but have they even reached out to some of the existing communities working on this problem before diving headlong into it themselves?
I know for a fact that LiveJournal has a cordial relationship with the Tor project, and, when abuse from Tor spikes, has always worked with the project to ensure access from Tor users is quickly restored. I would be surprised if Twitter didn't have similar issues and that they wouldn't know about Tor, what with the Iran dissidents and Chinese users.
It's called "Not having anything to say worth censoring". It's foolproof!
The enemies of Democracy are
"'The most productive way to fight that is not by trying to engage China and other governments whose very being is against what we are about.'"
Making money?
There's no such thing as censorship. After all, everybody who was able to say he/she got censored, didn't get censored saying that; how else would such person say such thing? ;)
Srsly; brave effort from Twitter.
Someone standing up against censorship? I just might sign up.
I seriously doubt it's the Twitter users who will start revolution, at least in China. The revolution is still alive in the masses of countryside, like before. Just look at the incidents which have sparked there recently. For example, in one province a slight rise of bus ticket prices resulted in violent demonstrations. I'm 100% sure none of them had ever heard about Twitter. Twitter has maybe ~0.3% reach in China compared to population, that's about less people than Beijing pisses off routinely at once by moving a whole city because of one more dam or railroad every few months. Still, I have to give credit to Beijing as well. China's growth and drive has been nothing but unbelievable. It would not have been possible without making strong and fast decisions without asking much from the people. It's very easy to build a railroad if you just relocate the people by sending them a letter with two weeks notice time. China is run more like a company than western countries, and western companies generally love it. At least as long as it doesn't cross their interests.
While noone in China uses twitter enough to care even if Twitter found a way to "uncensor itself", if they could succesfully find a technical workaround that required no effort from end-users, it might be worth talking about (if my reading of TFA is right, any site could use such hacks to unblock itself, even google or dissident websites). However, if it forces end-users to install software to route around firewalls (a la Freedomgate and other already available software), the sites will remain unaccessible to the majority of users, who just don't care enough to bother.
I'm honestly very curious as to what technical methods are out there for opening access through government firewalls that would not involve illegal and nearly impossible invasions into foreign computer networks. The Chinese and Iranian governments control the "pipes"; what software solutions could twitter possible be thinking of? Nice goal, but technically possible, beyond current "hacks/proxies"?
Oh yes, I do and If the USA and other countries started to be more compassionate. We can quit this nonsense regarding Iran being part of an axis of Evil. That fucking money Oil grabber Bourne again Christian "George W Bush". Moron monkey.
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Hypothetically speaking, if there is a way to freely share copyrighted content on twitter, will the US government tries to censor this information? Or more likely, will the US government pressure Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams to censor these postings and would Evan give in? Just to point out that hypocrisy works both ways.
What about Australian censorship? Will it work around that too?
#iTampon
Oh, sorry, wrong story.
Finally someone calls this what it is.
At least somebody's picking up Google's old motto. There's only one teeensy problem: they have no income.
Because US (and of course many other) developers can work on anti-censor tools in stealth mode!
If for not such a noble reason, such technologies would never be allowed to be even talked about.... But I doubt if noble reason is protection enough - secret orders for implementing backdoors are normal thing to expect.
Probably some people in Iran and China are making tools to counter censorship in US as we speak. :)
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
That's something new for them. Up to now they've only been developing new ways to milk the gullible VCs.
Really. People like you are why there are so negative stereotypes about americans. You are so nationalistic. "We have [insert a thing everyone else takes for granted]. I have no knowledge of the subject but I assume no other countries have that. Wohoo!" As I am from northern Europe, it took me a moment to process your statement. The whole idea that goverment would not allow such media freedom sounded so unnatural.
Sure, you can find anecdotes about european media. It is not perfect. In italy a lot of the media is owned by a big politician (kinda as if Murdoch would run for president). In North Europe there are pretty strong law concerning slander and they have been abused occasionally. After news being served to hundreds of millions of people, over many decades... Of course you can find occasional imperfection. But the press is extremely free. I really can't imagine our government "disallowing" reporting about some subject. They simply have no power to do such, at least in my country. With the media just looking for scandals, several major newspapers owned and read by supporters of many different political parties, no politcian or party has a method of control over a significant amount of the press.
Then, let's look at USA, shall we? Your example isn't exactly fresh. Things have changed since Nixon. Haven't you heard about ISPs banning newsgroups because "If we won't do it first, the government will draft a law forcing us to"? Haven't you heard of DMCA takedown notices abused to silence bloggers?
So... don't find a LAN war in Asia?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Decentralizing Twitter is very viable.
Third party sites that you can use to indirectly access Twitter content should easily thwart censorship.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
William Randolph Hearst - "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war." ("Remember the Maine" and the beginning of the Spanish American war)
http://www.smplanet.com/imperialism/remember.html - bottom of page
139, just under the limit, oh he is GOOOOD!
While most of the communication between protesters after the Iran Election was done other ways - word of mouth, cell phones etc - the biggest impact of twittering was getting unfiltered reports out of the country to the rest of the world. The reaction of other governments to this news was relatively muted. But at least in the US I think that younger people are much more aware and concerned about what is going on in Iran than they would have been otherwise. A country with citizens that are more informed about what is going on in the world, will eventually effect the foreign affairs of the government.
So even if the only people that install the software in country are the ones spreading info, not the ones receiving it, it can still be useful.
Can we change the outdated cliche of, "The pen is mightier than the sword," to a more modern version along the lines of, "The twits are mightier than the twats."
The 'twits,' of course, being the tweeters, whilst the 'twats' refers to the governments. =)
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Much as I have no use for twitter, I applaud any entity willing to stand up for the freedoms we claimed to have defended...until it came down to appeasing a police state. Since the only use the Chinese gov seems to have for the internet is attacking everybody else's networks and spreading their propaganda, why not just cut them off entirely from the rest of the internet until they agree to change...and since it's cyberwar they're waging, make it verifiable, like any other arms treaty. Let Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and all the rest who sold out pay the cost of the effort.