French Government Supports Blogosphere

This is an interesting development.

"Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure," Julien Pain, head of the watchdog's Internet Freedom desk, writes in the introduction.

If you're a reader of many blogs, you may know that from Yemen to Iraq, China and beyond, blogs are among the best sources, if not the only sources for credible information regarding both developments on the ground and in government, as well.

"We can write freely in blogs," writes Arash Sigarchi, an Iranian journalist who was nonetheless sentenced to 14 years in prison for posting messages online that criticized the Iranian regime.

As you can see, prison is not out of the question for many of these bloggers, nor is death, by the way. In that respect, a long prison term may actually be the most hoped for result if they're caught.

The growth of democracy demands the freedom of information, and it's good to see a government support that effort world-wide. A hat tip for the French is in order here. As for America, an independant group has undertaken a similar initiative.

The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation also published an online guide this year to help Web diarists keep their blogs anonymous. That includes pointers on anonymizing technologies, including the EFF's own Tor, and tips on keeping postings out of search engines. The guide, though, was mostly aimed at preventing firings rather than bypassing censorship.

Read the rest here.

Comments

[splashtc]

Won't this make it harder to track down terrorists and child pornographers?

[TheAlamo]

The French? Outstanding. Possibly they are getting some sense over there?
Nah....must be an accident.

Hopefully Americans will realize the threat to their right to privacy is a thousand times greater than the threat of terrorism, and they will demand we return to innocent until proven guilty, and totally obliterate the abominations falsely called the "patriot" acts.

[GrannyToad]

The last I knew, France would only support blogging if written in French.