Iran Online: Secretive Group Gets Past Web Censors
Volunteer Engineers Get Dissidents onto Blocked Internet Sites
"For many of Iran's dissidents trying to ... contact with the outside world depends on a little flash drive in Shiyu Zhou's pocke."
"Zhou is a Chinese-born computer scientist. He is deputy director of the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, ... a loose network of about 50 engineers like him, working in their free time to break down the electronic walls put up by repressive governments."
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"...Zhou and his comrades have, among other things, devised a small computer application they call FreeGate, and that's what is stored on Zhou's flash drive. It has also been shared by hundreds of thousands of dissidents in Iran, China, Burma (also called Myanmar) and other countries that try to limit people's access to Web sites ..."
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"FreeGate gives its users a route around government censorship, taking them to so-called proxy websites that censors do not know to block. "
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"...The Hudson Institute's Horowitz says it is essential to get public attention for FreeGate and similar programs, so that Washington will support the online insurgents and help them get more technical resources..."
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Original report from
NED POTTER, "Iran Online: Secretive Group Gets Past Web Censors", ABC News, June 22, 2009.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Story?id=7894399&page=2
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.
