Censuring the censorers

But it turns out, it’s not just the huge companies that have no trouble making a buck off the miseries of entire peoples. As Xeni Jardin, one of the editors at uber blog Boing Boing, points out in an editorial at The New York Times:

The initiative found that SmartFilter has been used by government-controlled monopoly providers in Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates. It has also been used by state-controlled providers in Iran, even though American companies are banned from selling technology products there. (Secure Computing denies selling products or updates to Iran, which is probably using pirated versions.)

According to OpenNet, filtering products from another American company, Websense, have also been used by a state-controlled service provider in Iran, ParsOnline. Yemen uses Websense products to filter content on its two government-owned service providers. Websense software, the initiative says, filters out "sex education and provocative clothing sites, gay- and lesbian-related materials, gambling sites, dating sites, drug-related sites, sites enabling anonymous Web surfing, proxy servers that circumvent filtering, and sites with content related to converting Muslims to other religions."

The initiative also found that Myanmar, arguably the most repressive regime in the world, uses censorware from the American company Fortinet. And Singapore's government-controlled Singnet server uses filtering technology from SurfControl, a company formed from the merger of several censorware companies that is now technically British but has its filtering operations headquarters in California.

One of our most laudable national goals is the export of free speech and free information, yet American companies are selling censorship.

What’s the solution?

While some advocates of technology rights have proposed consumer boycotts and Congressional action to pressure these firms into responsible conduct, a good first step would be adding filtering technologies to the United States Munitions List, an index of products for which exporters have to file papers with the State Department. While this won't end such sales, it will bring them to light and give the public and lawmakers a better basis on which to consider stronger steps.

Interesting. And yet, a more practical solution -- and a lucrative one, for the first entrepreneur with a few million to throw into it -- might be found at Boing Boing’s Guide to Defeating Censorware:

For BoingBoing readers in the UAE or Qatar, or other countries where BoingBoing is blocked, one anonymous reader tells us: "There is an internet via satellite called OPENSKY sold through www.broadsat.com which goes around these problems. Using VPN with normal dialup, the signal gets sent back from Europe, so, uncensored. Works really well and is cheap!"

I don’t know anything about the technical details of such a scheme, but it sounds like you can just throw a satellite up and offer Internet access through it to anyone anywhere? The first company to offer uncensored Net access to those billion-plus Chinese is gonna make Goggle look like a corner lemonade stand.