“… the internet’s potential for change is being undermined — by governments unwilling to tolerate this free media outlet, and by companies willing to help them repress free speech.”
Sun Microsystems, Nortel Networks, Cisco Systems, Yahoo! and Google are among those companies implicated in helping governments censor the internet or track down individual users.
The campaign, Irrepressible.info, calls on users to take action, including:
Undermine censorship by publishing irrepressible fragments of censored material on your own site. The more people take part, the more we can defeat unwarranted censorship and create an unstoppable network of protest.
That links to a page that invites users to:
Add irrepressible content to your site
If you have a website or blog, help us spread the word and undermine unwarranted censorship by publishing censored material from our database directly onto your site.
The more people take part the more we show that freedom of expression cannot be repressed.
The site provides html code that allows random snippets of censored material to be posted to a supporter’s website, with the thought that this will make it difficult for countries to detect and respond to the volume of sites with inappropriate content.
It is an interesting approach – in effect adopting hackers’ methodology to try to overwhelm the servers doing the censorship analysis.
Here is the problem. There is another global campaign underway to protect the rights of children being exploited. There are service providers in the UK and elsewhere that block sites with illegal images of child abuse. We strongly support such initiatives.
Amnesty International itself advocates that countries ratify the optional protocol on child pornography, that includes:
its conclusion calling for the worldwide criminalization of the production, distribution, exportation, transmission, importation, intentional possession and advertising of child pornography, and stressing the importance of closer cooperation and partnership between Governments and the Internet industry
So, on one hand, Amnesty International believes that there should be ‘closer cooperation and partnership between Governments and the Internet industry’ and on the other hand, today’s press release coincides with the release of a report about Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google as companies ‘particularly willing to cooperate with the Chinese government’.