Technology that protects protesters

Author: 
Coverage Type: 

[Commentary] Call it Internet Freedom 2.0. When human rights activists first began thinking about how the Internet could aid democracy movements around the world, their focus was initially on access: how to help users in China or Iran connect to the Web and receive information free of censorship. So the first wave of spending from the U.S. government and independent groups went mostly to "circumvention," which allows Internet users to see things their governments would like to hide. But the 2009 protests in Iran and the upheavals of this year's Arab Spring made it clear that democratic activists don't want technology merely to read the news; they want to use technology to make news of their own.


Technology that protects protesters