Collateral Freedom: how we thwart censorship

Tuesday 12 May 2015

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Foiling censorship in 11 anti-Internet countries.

Reporters Without Borders is launching “Operation Collateral Freedom”.

To combat online censorship, Reporters Without Borders is unblocking access to news websites in order to make them available in the 11 countries where they are currently banned.

In an original initiative designed to circumvent website blocking by governments that violate human rights, Reporters Without Borders is using the technique known as mirroring to duplicate the censored sites and place the copies on the servers of Internet giants such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

In these 11 countries that are “Enemies of the Internet,” blocking the servers of these Internet giants in order to make the mirror sites inaccessible would deprive thousands of companies of essential services. The economic and political cost would be too high.

Reporters Without Borders is renting bandwidth for this operation that will gradually be used up as more and more people visit the mirror sites. We are therefore asking Internet users to help pay for additional bandwidth so that the mirror sites will be available for as long as possible.

Operation Collateral Freedom is the brainchild of GreatFire, an NGO operated by Chinese activists that has already created unblockable mirror sites of Deutsche Welle, Google and China Digital Times.

GreatFire’s tools and technology are freely available online for anyone to use to combat online censorship.

Create your own mirror.

You can create your mirror of one (or more) of the 10 Operation Collateral Freedom websites. The required tools and tutorial for creating a mirror site are freely available on github. The more mirrors the better – they will make it easier to access the censored information.

Censorship