Toward Freedom - Blocking the Net

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First, let’s look at some of the usual dictatorships, or as RWB has labeled them, "the habitual human rights violators." They include small fry like Cuba, Burma, the Ukraine, and Belarus, but the biggest offenders in this category are China and Iran.
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U.S.-based companies are also supplying commercial software to help countries "filter" — that is, censor information. Last June, the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) released a report titled "Internet Filtering in Iran," which documents how the Iranian government has used the commercial filtering software SmartFilter to control every aspect of its citizens’ cyber experience, from websites and e-mail to blogs and online discussion forums. Made by the U.S. based company Secure Computing, the software is helping the Iranian government block internationally hosted sites in English, as well as other sites hosted in local languages.

In its report, ONI accused Secure Computing of complicity in helping Iran violate the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Ronald Deibert, one of the report’s authors and directors of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, charged that the "thriving Internet censorship market — spread like a virus from China to Iran to an increasing number of countries worldwide — calls into question not only the trumpeted slogans of high tech firms that the Internet represents ‘freedom’ and ‘connectivity’ but simplistic divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ as well."
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