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To Regulate (Or Preferably Not): On Mueller’s claim of misdirected resistance to surveillance technology

A pair of blog posts this week from Milton Mueller have sparked multiple conversations filling my inbox (as well as an unprecedented amount of passive aggression, of which I do not approve, but the sheer number of people practicing it makes me reticent to name names). The posts take on the emerging cottage industry of […]

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Journalistic Verification, Amina Arraf, and Haystack

How did a Syrian blogger, who told beautiful and heartwrenching stories of life as a lesbian in Damascus, manage to trick so many people? How did an American software engineer, whose passion for the Iranian cause led him to build what he dubbed the safest of circumvention tools, do the same? The stories of Amina […]

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West Censoring East: Or Why Websense Thinks My Blog is Pornography

Today, the OpenNet Initiative has released a paper, authored by Helmi Noman and myself, enumerating the widespread use of American- and Canadian-built filtering technologies in the Middle East and North Africa.  The paper, entitled “West Censoring East: The Use of Western Technologies by Middle East Censors 2010-2011“, looks closely at Websense, McAfee’s SmartFilter, and Netsweeper […]