Fergie's Tech Blog

Internet Censorship Tools: A gift of Western technology?

A New York Times article by Tom Zeller Jr., via The International Herald Tribune, reports that:

It should come as no surprise that the Internet in Myanmar, which has been in the iron grip of a military cabal for decades, is heavily filtered and carefully monitored.

But a new report from the OpenNet Initiative, a human rights project linking researchers from the University of Toronto, Harvard Law School and Cambridge University, once again raises tough questions about the use of filtering technologies - often developed by Western companies - by autocratic governments seeking to control what their citizens see on the Web.

Myanmar "employs one of the most restrictive regimes of Internet filtering worldwide that we have studied," said Ronald Deibert, a principal investigator for the OpenNet Initiative and director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto.

Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, now joins a group of nations, including China, Iran and Singapore, that rely on Western software and hardware to accomplish their goals, Deibert said.

Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Yahoo, for example, have all come under fire recently for providing technology to, or otherwise cooperating with, the Chinese government to enable it to monitor and censor Internet use.

posted by Fergie @ 10/12/2005 08:27:00 AM