This week I was in Kampala and had the opportunity to meet a friend-of-a-friend, John Gattorn, a super-cool dude who does human rights and democracy work. As I’m obsessed with finding practical ways to use technology for social change, I told him about Global Voices Advocacy and their guide to blogging anonymously. Two days later, my friend Zach Everson sent me this Economist article: Blog standard: Authoritarian governments can lock up bloggers. It is harder to outwit them. (Zach has the best habit of occasionally sending me Economist articles that might interest me. I love him for that.)
The article gives a great overview, but it does not provide any practical links. So here they are:
- Anonymous Blogging Guide: A step-by-step way to protecting your privacy and your safety
- Blog for a Cause: How to use blogs as advocacy tools for political and social change (in English, Spanish, Arabic)
Beyond using blogs, people are also using cell phones (see FrontlineSMS and Mobile Active) and Twitter for similar types of work (see Andy Carvin’s Can Twitter Save Lives?, Ethan Zuckerman’s Never thought of using it that way…, and the KM4Dev’s community’s Twitter knowledgebase).
Let me know if you come across any other ideas or resources. These technologies can also be used in other sectors. Environmental activists, for example, can use them to alert authorities and mobilize people to combat illegal logging or poaching.
PS. You can also use Twitter to take care of your plants while you’re away saving the world. Check out Botanicalls.com.
July 23rd, 2008 at 5:11 am
More resources:
Psiphon, developed by Toronto-based civic activists at The Citizen Lab, is an open-source secure Web browsing tool designed to let people in repressive countries tunnel through government Internet filters. The program allows users with unfiltered Internet access to provide a private, SSL-encrypted Web proxy for use by individuals in firewalled countries.
Psiphon takes a substantially different approach than secure browsing tools like The Onion Router (Tor — the system used in the Anonymous Blogging Guide, listed above). Unlike Tor, it requires zero setup on the part of the user behind the firewall — but at the cost of dispensing with Tor’s absolute anonymity. Read more at http://www.linux.com/articles/59468.
July 23rd, 2008 at 5:16 am
And for more on internet filtering see the OpenNet Initiative’s book, Access Denied, at http://opennet.net/accessdenied.
September 24th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
Check out Dmitri Vitaliev’s book: Digital Security and Privacy for Human Rights Defenders, produced by Frontline, an Irish nonprofit that works to protect human rights defenders.
March 29th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
According to the folks at Berkman, the Anonymous Blogging Guide was updated on March 10, 2009. Make sure your using the current version. An check out their tips here: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/idblog/2009/03/25/how-to-blog-anonymously/
June 15th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Update: See Patrick Meier’s post on how to communicate securely in repressive environments: http://irevolution.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/digital-security/
June 25th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Another resource: FreeGate. The Global Internet Freedom Consortium. http://www.internetfreedom.org/