Rupture Internet Censorship in China and Iran

Twitter this

The means exist to rupture Internet censorship in China and Iran -- if the State Department will cooperate.

THE MOST interesting question President Obama fielded in China came over the Internet... from a Chinese citizen who asked, "Do you know of the firewall? Should we be able to use Twitter freely?" In response, Mr. Obama...said, "I'm a big supporter of not restricting Internet use, Internet access, other information technologies like Twitter."

... Mr. Obama is not aware that his State Department not only is doing next to nothing to support Internet freedom in countries such as China, but that it also has been slow-walking congressional initiatives to do so.

For two years Congress has appropriated funds to support groups that are developing ways to circumvent the Chinese firewall and those erected in Iran, Burma, Cuba and other repressive countries. The most prominent of the groups, the Global Internet Freedom Consortium... Shiyu Zhou, the deputy director of the consortium, testified to the U.S. Helsinki Commission last month that at the height of opposition protests on June 20, more than 1 million Iranians used the system. He said that with $30 million of additional funding, capacity could be increased to 50 million users a day, making it "prohibitively expensive for any repressive government to counter our efforts."

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... no money is going to the one organization with a proven record of overcoming firewalls. The group's advocates suspect that that's because the Global Internet Freedom Consortium is identified with China's banned Falun Gong movement -- and State is fearful of Beijing's reaction to any U.S. support for it. The Obama administration has already done plenty to appease the Chinese regime. The least it can do is act on the president's own words about the value of free information -- and help give Chinese their chance to Twitter.

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Original report from 
“Twitter this: The means exist to rupture Internet censorship in China and Iran -- if the State Department will cooperate.”,The Washington Post , November 21, 2009,
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/20/AR200911...).