Reporters sans frontières – Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents
RSF has published a handbook for bloggers – eg. indivduals that publish to the web – like yours truly. In many countries with totalitarian regimes, bloggers are the only real journalists.
This is a very useful guide…Including detailed instructions on how to publish to the Internet annonymously – e.g. using proxies. Big thumbs up to RSF.
Now if we could only smuggle PCs into the countries with totalitarian regimes – much like Christian organisations smuggled bibles to Eastern Europe behind the ironcurtain – and equip these PCs with some means of distribution of content that can’t possibly be controlled by ANY country – like encrypted messages sent over dial-up connections or by establishing a world wide “cyber-dissident” network . If we do this,some of these regimes might actually fall.
Below is a quote from the RSF website:
Blogs get people excited. Or else they disturb and worry them. Some people distrust them. Others see them as the vanguard of a new information revolution. Because they allow and encourage ordinary people to speak up, they’re tremendous tools of freedom of expression.
Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest.
Reporters Without Borders has produced this handbook to help them, with handy tips and technical advice on how to to remain anonymous and to get round censorship, by choosing the most suitable method for each situation. It also explains how to set up and make the most of a blog, to publicise it (getting it picked up efficiently by search-engines) and to establish its credibility through observing basic ethical and journalistic principles.