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U.S.-funded programs to beat back online censorship are increasingly finding a ready audience in repressive countries, with more than 1 million people a day using online tools to get past extensive blocking programs and government surveillance.

But the popularity of those initiatives has become a liability.

Activists and nonprofit groups say that their online circumvention tools, funded by the U.S. government, are being overwhelmed by demand and that there is not enough money to expand capacity. The result: online bottlenecks that have made the tools slow and often inaccessible to users in China, Iran and elsewhere, threatening to derail the Internet freedom agenda championed by the Obama administration.

Every time we provide them with additional funding, those bottlenecks are alleviated for a time but again fill to capacity in a short period of time, said Andr Mendes, director of the Office of Technology, Services and Innovation at the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which funds some of the initiatives. One could reasonably state that more funding would translate into more traffic and, therefore, more accessibility from behind these firewalls.

The United States spends about $30 million a year on Internet freedom, in effect funding an asymmetric proxy war against governments that spend billions to regulate the flow of information. The programs have been backed by President Obama, who promoted the initiatives at a town-hall-style meeting in Shanghai three years ago.

During his debate last week with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Obama briefly raised the topic of government surveillance in China, accusing the former Bain Capital chief executive of investing in firms that provide surveillance technology to Chinas government.

For his part, Romney has repeatedly criticized the Obama administration for what he calls its failure to stand up to the authoritarian governments in China, Iran and other countries where Internet freedom is curtailed. The two candidates meet Monday for the third and final debate, this one focusing on foreign policy.

The U.S. government funds nonprofit groups and others to develop software that can be downloaded by users in other countries with pervasive censorship. The most widely used tools route Internet traffic through other countries, allowing users to bypass Internet firewalls as well as surveillance.

The task of keeping the Internet free, however, is becoming harder.

Chinas Great Firewall has grown more sophisticated in recent years, with the Communist government employing tens of thousands of monitors to filter content and watch users. Iran, meanwhile, has stepped up its already-substantial censorship efforts amid a mounting economic crisis, instituting new bans on overseas audio and video content and advancing plans for an Iran-only intranet.

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Internet anti-censorship tools are being overwhelmed by demand

London, Nov 1 (ANI)

A new law in Russia that aims to protect children from harmful internet content by allowing the government to remove such websites has finally taken effect in the country.

The law was approved by both houses of parliament and signed by President Vladimir Putin in July.

According to the BBC, the authorities are now able to blacklist and force offline certain websites without a trial.

The authorities have claimed that the goal is to protect minors from websites featuring sexual abuse of children, offering details about how to commit suicide, encouraging users to take drugs and sites that solicit children for pornography.

Human rights groups have, however, said the legislation might increase censorship in the country.

According to the report, they call it another attempt by Putin to exercise control over the population.

"Of course there are websites that should not be accessible to children, but I don't think it will be limited to that," Yuri Vdovin, vice-president of Citizens' Watch, a human rights organisation based in Saint-Petersburg, said..

"The government will start closing other sites - any democracy-oriented sites are at risk of being taken offline. It will be [an attack on] the freedom of speech on the internet," Vdovin added.

--ANI

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Censorship fears loom as Russian law allowing 'Internet blacklisting' takes effect

Wednesday, the Russian parliament unanimously adopted a controversial bill that would give them a tremendous amount of control over the Internet. Not so ironically, Wednesday was also October 31stHalloweenthe day of the year that the horrors, specters, and ghouls walk the land (in costume) and in this fashion, Russia managed to costume up SOPA and bring it to their people.

A multitude of open-interest websites banded together to warn against this bill and its potential for becoming a tool of censorshipamid those sites included Yandex, LiveJournal, Mail.ru, and the Russian-language Wikipedia.

Not just echoes of censorshipactual blatant secret censorship

According to the BBC, the bill would create an Internet blacklist, which would not be made public (meaning that the Russian public wouldnt even know what was being banned or why.)

If the websites themselves cannot be shut down, internet service providers (ISPs) and web hosting companies can be forced to block access to the offending material.

The list of banned website will be managed by Roskomnadzor (Russias Federal Service for Supervision in Telecommunications, Information Technology and Mass Communications). It is meant to be updated daily, but its contents are not available to the general public.

Of course, this has drawn the attention of critics who dont like the idea of web censorship, and are even less enthusiastic about the bills portion that keeps the lists hidden from the public. Not only have numerous websites come out against it, but so have human rights organizations who see the obvious gateway to abuse.

Its less about thinking of the children and more about shaming critics

As The Guardian UK explains, the bill was pushed through on the back of one of the modern day political hot-button issues that are so often used to divest people of safety and privacy: the protection of children. Much like how terrorism is used to bypass thoughtful and rational discourse on cybersecurity bills. To this extent the phrase think of the children, is often used to disparage politicians forwarding controversial or flawed bills to control speech. Apparently, Russia is no stranger to this effect.

The need to fight child pornography and illegal content are as important for civil society as the support of constitutional principles like freedom of speech and access [to] information, Yelena Kolmanovskaya, the chief editor of Yandex, wrote in a statement posted on the website on Wednesday. However, she added: The proposed methods provide a means for possible abuse and raise numerous questions from the side of users and representatives of internet companies.

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Forget SOPA, Russia Activates Web Censorship Blacklist Law

From left: Owen Bonnici, Mario de Marco and Adrian Buckle.

Teodor Reljic

With film and stage classification as we know it set to disappear from the local scene in the coming weeks, Labour spokesperson for culture Owen Bonnici has said that this development would most likely have not come into effect had the outcome of the divorce referendum been different.

"I am sure that had the divorce referendum not come about, or worse still, had the Nationalist Party won the referendum, today the two sides of the House would be still locking horns on the issue," Bonnici said.

In a move perceived by many to be a response to controversy arising in the wake of several instances of State-condoned censorship, Culture Minister Mario de Marco submitted a draft proposal in January which called for all matters related to film and stage to be moved away from the jurisdiction of the police and into the hands of the Ministry for Culture.

READ MORE: Censored no more what is the future of Maltese theatre?

It was the landmark 'Stitching' case that brought the issue to public attention, after local theatre company Unifaun Theatre attempted to stage the hard-hitting UK relationship drama - penned by Anthony Nielson, and staged in Edinburgh with a '14' rating - in 2009, only to be banned by the Film and Classification Board at the time.

A parallel case involved author Alex Vella Gera and student editor Mark Camilleri, who were taken to court on obscenity charges after Vella Gera's short story 'Li Tkisser Sewwi' was published on the University and Junior College-distributed magazine Ir-Realta'.

De Marco also proposed that the Film and Stage Classification Board be dissolved, to give way to a more relaxed system of self-regulation which would leave it up to theatre directors, producers and sometimes venue owners to age-rate their productions.

The proposal was discussed in parliament last Tuesday, and was approved in its second reading.

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‘Censorship would still be around were it not for divorce’ – Owen Bonnici

Approach 1: The Internet is a revolutionary leap forward for the exchange of ideas and free markets. Direct or indirect censorship could stifle this great resource. No single creation has revolutionized the human existence the way the Internet has.

For the first time in human history, we live in an era of true knowledge. In this modern-day Library of Alexandria , there exists instant access to a vast wealth of knowledge on virtually any subject, available to any individual who seeks it.

We have the opportunity to be informed in a variety of mediums previously unavailable. From text to video, laypeople to experts, this revolutionary presence of information is the essential foundation for the presence of an informed global population.

We are now a single civilization, no longer separated by geographic concerns, united on a digital plane in a manner unprecedented in human history. The Internet allows for a truly flat world; individuals in China may be communicated with just as easily as texting a next-door neighbor.

And this age of immediacy demands more from every participant of this global civilization. The Internet calls for information to be more thorough, more accurate, more eloquent and easily understood. It demands that the information of tomorrow be available today and hails those who deliver our needs.

Most importantly, however, the Internet is the first truly interactive medium of information. Just as our knowledge may be instantly updated, we have the opportunity to immediately respond to its authors and to our peers. The knowledge we keep on the Internet has the opportunity not only to be published, but to be consistently and persistently responded to, altered and viewed in new lights.

The global economy may be built on a free exchange of goods, but global knowledge the Internet is built on the free exchange of ideas, where any mind may come and freely discuss any number of subjects.

To allow a governing force to mandate what may and may not be present on the Internet is to inherently quiet the uncensored exchange of ideas it allows.

Any form of censorship, whether from special-interest groups, concerned citizens or an appointed group, destroys the most valuable characteristic of the Internet.

Without censorship, any voice, any thought, any mind has an equal opportunity to be recognized, to be heard, to be understood. To place restrictions on what may be published on the Internet is for us to decide that some minds are less valuable than others, that some voices do not deserve to be so loud.

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Censorship would hinder the Internet revolution