Intellectual Property Law

Companies Enabling Censorship

By Tim Armstrong, Derek Bambauer, and William McGeveran.

Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing writes a great op-ed in the New York Times on the use of American technology, from companies such as Secure Computing and Websense, in helping authoritarian countries censor the Internet. (Presumably space was too short for her to mention Cisco in China, or Fortinet, which both helps Burma and misled ONI about its role with that country’s filtering system.) Having American tech censor what Burmese or Saudi or Iranian citizens can read - or write - online is deeply problematic. I’m working on a paper on the topic that I’ll post a (short!) version of soon.

Full post as published by Info/Law on March 12, 2008 (boomark / email).