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Internet censorship is on the rise in America and across the world…
Schools, business, libraries and governments block thousands of sites in the name of security and safety. Did you know that US House Resolution 5319 was passed which poses the potential to make it law for American schools and libraries to block social networking sites like myspace? It vaguely includes any site that allows users to interact! Read about it here. Many private colleges and most large companies already block everything from hotmail to bebo. No matter what you call it, or the reasons behind blocking websites, these are institutional restrictions placed on free speech. I personally believe in educating people as to how to be safe and civil online instead. The real world equivalent would be your government, school or business telling you what books you can and can’t read or whom you can and can not talk to! It’s ridiculous and creepy.
For the information age, Ray Bradbury’s book “Fahrenheit 451″ should be rewritten as “Firewalling 80″ to describe the typical Apache Web Server port number of websites to which millions of people have been denied access. Blocking websites is simply another way to burn a book, silence music or remove art. It’s an unnecessary, anti democratic shortcut to false security. It’s a debate that’s already been won and put in our constitution, but somehow the Internet doesn’t apply. Why?
China, Iran, Myanmar, Syria, Tunisia and Vietnam Iran, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen are among 25 countries that block thousands of websites. This is age-old political censorship meant to keep people ignorant and isolated in order to prevent them from posing a threat to the current government. Details of world-wide Internet filtering can be read at the OpenNet Initiative blog. There are also interesting details of the specific case of Turkey blocking Wordpress blogs here and here.
Why shouldn’t an American college student person be able to check email or surf myspace on a school computer? Would a school block the phone numbers of certain people and places? No way. Even the majority of British businesses have blocked facebook. There are dozens of excuses I’m sure, but the real reason is that administrations are ignorant and scared of the power of the Internet. The same exact mechanisms are at work in foreign governments that don’t allow their citizens to read certain books, or to meet in public places. It’s all about fear and control. It’s not about education, cooperation and trust which are the foundations of a civil democratic society.
The good news is that there is a very simple, and for now, legal way to get around all of these “big brother” organizations that want to put up blocks to online freedom. It’s called a “web proxy”. You just go to a proxy site, enter the web address of the site you want to visit and click go. It’s that simple. A proxy site even makes you anonymous, since anyone on the Web can only see that your surfing from the proxy computer. The only real obstacle is that most filtering software like WebSense also blocks browsing of proxy sites. One way to get around this is to use the Google translator service as a proxy, and this site will tell you how to do it. Another way is to find an updated proxy list like this one.
I think I have discovered the very best way to always find a working, new proxy site that has not been blocked itself. This is a tool I found at proxy.org which randomly chooses from over 4,000 proxies to get into a site. Just go to the top of this page, enter the site to get into and keep clicking “Bypass Censor” until you get a proxy that has not been blocked by your school, work or government. To go with the topic, I’ve named it the Danogo FreeSpeechinator.
If you’re the technical type, here are some books about working with proxies:
