This month, amid record profligacy on Capitol Hill, Sens. Sam Brownback (R., Kan.) and Arlen Specter (D., Pa.) pushed for spending that all Americans can celebrate: $30 million of the Senate’s State Department appropriations bill will go to support digital tools for undermining Internet censorship. If the initiative is properly implemented, the politically repressed from Havana to Rangoon will have cause for celebration.
Authoritarian regimes spend fortunes censoring the Internet because they fear the subversive potential of digital communications. China and Iran are world leaders in this regard—models for other rogues such as Syria and Saudi Arabia.
In countering the Green Revolution this summer, Iran unveiled a new high-tech apparatus for blocking some Internet communications outright, while monitoring others in order to intimidate dissenters. China uses more than 40,000 censors in a dozen government agencies to limit Web content via the so-called Great Firewall. As Chinese President Hu Jintao said in 2007: “Whether we can cope with the Internet is a matter that affects the development of socialist culture, the security of information and the stability of the state.”
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