Electronic Frontier Foundation

The threats to our freedom of speech and privacy are growing all the time, even in the so called developed world there are thousands of examples of how our privacy is being invaded and our freedom compromised all the time.

One of the main problems is many of these threats are technologically based and so if you don’t understand the technology it’s difficult to comprehend the threat to our freedom of expression. The world needs organisations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation who were founded in 1990 – Electronic Frontier Foundation

There’s lots of interesting stuff there and the EFF genuinely seek to protect our Freedom of Speech specifically in the digital world.

There’s a lot of work to do for the EFF, censorship is becoming standard practice in many countries who routinely decide on what you can read about on the internet. How about this story from earlier this year –

Latest Web Site banned in Turkey

Amazingly there are lots of web sites being banned in Turkey mainly due to pressure from religious extremists. This particular story refers to Richard Dawkins criticizing a book about creationism , as such a court blocked access to Mr Dawkins website from Turkey. Now whatever your religious views on the subject, is it right that one man can decide what is appropriate for a whole country to view ….it’s a slippery slope read the whole story and see what you think.

Mr Oktar has also managed to get access to WordPress and Google Groups banned from Turkey which I find extremely worrying. By the way this form of censorship is easily bypassed just bounce your web connection out through a proxy server but be very careful which ones you use (see my other post on proxies here)

Remember Turkey is quite an enlightened country with strong secular ideals, if they are allowing one man to manipulate what the population can see online – what about the many, many undemocratic nations of the world! When you start on this slippery slope freedom of speech becomes almost impossible !