Tear Down This Cyberwall! (The New York Times)
Today, it is these Chinese supporters of Falun Gong who are the best hope for Iranians trying to reach blocked sites.
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“We know the pain of people in closed societies, and we do want to accommodate them,”
“We don’t have the heart to cut off the Iranians,” said Shiyu Zhou, a computer scientist and leader in the Chinese effort, called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium. “But if our servers overload too much, we may have to cut down the traffic.”
Mr. Zhou said that usage of the consortium’s software has tripled in the last week. It set a record on Wednesday of more than 200 million hits from Iran, representing more than 400,000 people.
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Human-rights activists from Cuba, North Korea, Syria and elsewhere have appealed to Congress to approve the $50 million Internet freedom initiative, and Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch says he supports it as well.
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Original report from
Nicholas D. Kristof, “Tear Down This Cyberwall!” The New York Times, June 18, 2009
(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/opinion/18kristof.html).
Our Mission
Inform, connect, and empower the people in closed societies with information on a free Internet.
Our Vision
The Great Firewall will be taken down as the Berlin Wall.
We Stand Together
To fight the Goliath of repressive Internet censorship, we, a few leading companies and grassroots organizations on the front line, formed an alliance, the Global Internet Freedom Consortium.
Background
There is no freedom without freedom of information. There is no freedom of information without Internet freedom.
