Censorship Is Damage
I just heard this on Twitter from @jimmcslim and had to write about it. I’ve been struggling to find a succinct way to express this thought; "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Beautiful. This is what I have been clumsily trying to explain to anyone who would listen for the last 10 years.
The Net is a system designed to withstand a nuclear attack. That is what it was originally for. If Washington got taken out, the computer network would continue to run. The packets would find an alternate route to their destination. This concept has evolved to the people that use the net. They develop tools that take advantage of this digital egalitarian network and further aid the delivery of packets to their destination.
This was the case with one of the most important tools developed for communication behind oppressive regimes. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) developed by Phil Zimmermann, is a Public Key, Private Key encryption system that allows you to encrypt an email with the recipient’s Public Key which can then only be decrypted by their Private Key.
The US Government was so scared of this sort of encryption that they banned its export and placed it in the same category as a nuclear weapon export. They forbade the export electronically of this technology. In protest Tshirts were proudly worn by international travelers with the source code printed on them. Books of the source code were mailed around the world and re-digitized. The human network first found a way around governments reading our emails (Google "echelon") then they found a way around distributing the source code.
Censorship is damage and it will be routed around. The Internet continually evolves, just ask the music industry.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
