Yesterday Ron Deibert was interviewed by Amber Macintosh here at Citizenlab. In the video Ron explains very clearly why internet censorship is wrong. A must see! (If you look carefully you can even see a lot of govcommies).

We have made some beautiful illustrations of internet censorship, on display at the protect-the.net event. You can find the pdfs here:

Leaky Content: An Approach to Show Unblocked Content on Blocked Sites in Pakistan – The Baloch Case (November 2006) [method pdf]

Leaky Content: An Approach to Show Unblocked Content on Blocked Sites in Pakistan – The Baloch Case (November 2006) [story pdf]

Two Providers, Two Internets. – The Case of the United Arab Emirates (November 2006) [pdf]

The Internet Treats Censorship as a Malfunction and Routes around it? A Semi-manual Approach to Internet Censorship
Circumnavigation (June 2005) [updated pdf]

A Censor’s Network: Iranian Social, Political and Religious Sites. A Hyperlink Analysis Method for Censored Website Discovery (June 2006) [updated pdf]

For A0 versions of the maps please send a mail to Richard Rogers.

Here are some stories about the protect-the.net event and Psiphon:

- Webcast protect-the.net
- Documentary
- News: City news (short / long), macleans, Toronto Star, slashdot, cnn, bbc, NYT, cbc.

Next week we‘ll be presenting a couple of beautiful maps on internet censorship at the protect-the.net event in Toronto. I’ll make sure we put the maps online once the event has gone by, you can already see one here: Iran.

Announcement:

Once an unfettered forum for global communications, the Inernet is today under seige.

Upwards of forty countries now censor Internet traffic. Most of the censorship takes place in secret, without any public accountability or civilian oversight.

Protect the Net is a worldwide campaign to help restore the hope and promise that the original notion of the internet once held out as a frontier-less form of free expression, democratic communications, and access to information. It is about preserving and enlarging the global commons of information, shedding light on unlawful censorship and surveillance practices where they exist, and holding states and corporations accountable for the limitations they impose on free speech and access to information online.

Protect the Net Toronto is the first stop in the worldwide campaign. This event will be highlighted by presentations on Internet censorship, surveillance and infowar as well as the worldwide public release and demonstration of the psiphon censorship circumvention tool.

Psiphon is a human rights software project developed by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies that allows citizens in uncensored countries to provide unfettered access to the net through their home computers to friends and family members who live behind firewalls of states that censor.

Protect the Net will educate and empower citizens worldwide about the perilous state of human rights online and what they can do to help rescue and restore those rights.