This week, an open letter appeared on Chinese blogs and online bulletin boards. “Hello, internet censorship institutions of the Chinese government,” it said. “We are the anonymous netizens. We hereby decide that from July 1 2009, we will start a full-scale global attack on all censorship systems you control.”
Beijing’s attempts to manipulate the internet would, the message predicted, “soon be swept on to the rubbish pile of history”.
Chinese internet users, although skilled at dodging the censors, are angrier than they have ever been. The anonymous declaration of war is just one sign of the strains emerging as the global spread of internet access, and its embrace by activists of all stripes, triggers an unprecedented crackdown by national governments that threatens to transform the way hundreds of millions of people communicate.
China is trying to force censorship software on to every new personal computer, while Iran succeeded this week in virtually eliminating the spread over the internet of first-hand accounts from protests in the streets at the handling of its presidential election.
That stifling of web freedoms that many people around the world take for granted are being accompanied by more novel means of combating cyber opponents. Those methods range from directing stealthy technological attacks that shut down dissident websites to unleashing swarms of paid commentators to argue the government position on supposedly independent blogs.
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I wonder if future generations will note that the Internet was the greatest instrument of freedom… Will they worship it’s inventor, algore?