By Caylan Ford, Via Washington Post, Wednesday, January 20, 2010-

Google announced last week that it is no longer willing to censor its Chinese searches and may soon be closing its offices in China, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be rolling out a new policy initiative concerning internet freedom on Thursday.

But if the State Department and internet giants really want to promote free access to the Internet worldwide, the most effective thing they could do is to support the Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIF).

GIF is a small outlet run by a group of Chinese-American computer scientists. Over the last ten years, they have developed a suite of censorship-circumvention software that allows users to safely evade internet firewalls and surveillance. They have no offices or funding. Their scientists work day jobs and pay for their operations out of their own pockets. Yet in spite of their obvious limitation, they are responsible for approximately 90 percent of all anti-censorship internet traffic in China and Iran.

When protests erupted in Burma in 2007 and its military junta moved to violently suppress demonstrations, it was GIF software that activists used to relay images, video and information to the rest of the world. When riots erupted in Tibet in 2008, GIF’s traffic from the region rose by 300 percent. And when Iranians took to the streets to demonstrate against suspected election fraud in 2009, over 1 million Iranians per day were using GIF software to communicate with the outside world. Without GIF, there could have been no “Twitter revolution.

But GIF servers, which can currently support only 1.5 million unique users per day, nearly crashed in the aftermath of the Iranian election. With a small amount of funding or with private donations of server bandwidth, GIF could increase its capacity to support 50 million users. …… (more details)

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