We can’t circumvent our way around internet censorship. I don’t mean that internet censorship circumvention systems don’t work. They do – our research tested several popular circumvention tools in censored nations and discovered that most can retrieve blocked content from behind the Chinese firewall or a similar system. (There are problems with privacy, data leakage, the rendering of certain types of content, and particularly with usability and performance, but the systems can circumvent censorship.) What I mean is this – we couldn’t afford to scale today’s existing circumvention tools to “liberate” all of China’s internet users even if they all wanted to be liberated.

The above is a quote from an article by Ethan Zuckerman, entitled: Internet Freedom: Beyond Circumvention

In the article, Ethan argues that it is not enough to provide anti-censorship tools to a handful of activists:

“In promoting internet freedom, we need to consider strategies to overcome censorship inside closed societies. We also need to address “soft censorship”, the co-opting of online public spaces by authoritarian regimes, who sponsor pro-government bloggers, seed sympathetic message board threads, and pay for sympathetic comments.”

Sepp Hasslberger offered the following comment:

“I find his discussion spurious because it is all about how to neutralize the internet censorship efforts of countries that are on the West’s blacklist. He calls them “closed societies”, and the idea is to provide proxies so the people in those countries can access content that their governments think they should not have, but that “we” think they should be able to access.

To me, the whole starting point of the article isn’t right. There is not a word about that perhaps our own governments could be censoring stuff (which I am sure they are) and how to prevent THAT from happening. The viewpoint of the article is that of the US State Department, which has very specific desires to destabilize countries they consider “closed” by use of the internet for propaganda efforts. As a matter of fact, Ethan has State Department funding for his studies.

For me, this whole thing misses the point, which is the desire of people to have free information, not the desire of (Western) governments to make sure the people of some other countries can benefit from certain kinds of information that we think is best for them.”