Tuesday 12 May 2015 > français
Collateral Freedom, foiling censorship in 11 anti-Internet countries.
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.
Collateral Freedom: how we thwart censorship.
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.
The mirror sites created by Reporters Without Borders.
- 1 - Grani.ru blocked in Russia.
- 2 - Fergananews.com blocked in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
- 3 - The Tibet Post blocked in China.
- 4 - Dan Lam Bao blocked in Vietnam.
- 5 - Mingjing News blocked in China.
- 6 - Hablemos Press blocked in Cuba.
- 7 - Gooya News blocked in Iran.
- 8 - Gulf Center for Human Rights blocked in United Arab Emirates.
- 9 - Bahrain Mirror blocked in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
- 10 - IJAVN blocked in Vietnam.
- 11 - Chrono-TM blocked in Turkmenistan.
To help make freely-reported news and information available in these countries, all Internet users are invited to join in this operation by posting this list on social networks with the #CollateralFreedom hashtag.
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.
Reporters Without Borders Operation Collateral Freedom.
Github - Download Greatfire - Website-mirror-by-proxy.
