Whilst researching the Belarusian regime, I stumbled upon a fascinating report published back in November 2006 by Reporters Without Borders detailing the "13 enemies of the internet". The thirteen countries who are said to "systematically violate online free expression" are Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
Each of these sworn enemies of democracy, human rights and freedom of expression view the internet as a dangerous tool through which "subversives" are able to spread anti-government propaganda to the masses with relative ease. China, for example, can easily and brutally disperse an opposition rally of 100,000 in Tiananmen Square but it is considerably more difficult to control what's accessed by 150,000,000 internet users, regardless of the sophisticated filtering technologies they employ.
The fears of repressive states at the power of the internet to propagate anti-government sentiment are, from their point of view, entirely rational. For this reason, we should be doing more to help "subversive" democracy movements around the world make the very best use of the internet.
Is it now time for an alliance of liberal democratic governments to come together to establish a fully-funded 'Global Internet Freedom Council' with the expressed goal of working to subvert and corrupt the mechanisms by which repressive states control the internet content accessed by their citizens?
I do not in any way claim to be a expert in the way the internet works - some filtering techniques may be easy to conquer whilst others may be virtually impossible to damage.
We owe it to the "subversives" to at least try.
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