Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Q & A: AccessNow Takes on Democracy, The Internet, and The Middle East

The role of technology in recent Middle Eastern revolutions has been made pretty clear. Despite being thousands of miles away, Brett Solomon, Executive Director co-founder of Access Now, is at the epicenter of it this week. Access Now is an NGO committed to "the realization of human rights and democracy…[as] predicated on access to the internet," and this week, released and is attempting to 'digitally smuggle' a bombshell document into countries whose communication lines have been corrupted, as they're either severed with the rest of the Western World by their governments, or even worse, monitored backed by the threat of civic punishment and worse. And you think Twitter going down is a problem.

Entitled Protecting Your Security Online, the paper being released in both English and Arabic, could be one of the most vital pieces of information to the organic spread of democracy in the world. Why? It's a simple user's guide to circumventing surveillance and hindrance of digital communications by anti-democracy governments. This is why it could also find itself on the precipice of becoming the most banned, dangerous unclassified public document to posess in that region right now, let alone the world, today. Solomon, a young Australian-by-way-of-New-York, who spoke with us on Friday over a bad cell phone connection, would argue differently.

Source: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/brett-solomon-interview-access-now-5456069?src=rss

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