The French Did Good (again)

You may remember our rare pro-Gallic sentiment from such posts as The French Did Good and…uh…well, I can’t think of any other ones. That post was about the Milau bridge, and while it lacked any reference to anything Jewish, the thread has become a magnet for mouthbreathing Internet anti-Semites.

Anyway, a French group called Reporters Without Borders released a booklet at the Paris Apple Expo called “Handbook for Blogger and Cyber-Dissidents,” which is a go-to guide for bloggers in shining utopias of free speech like Iran and China. The guide describes how to mask one’s identity and how to overcome Internet filters. It’s available for free in Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, French and English, and the French government helped to pay for printing costs.

Cool, huh? But what’s the Jewlicious angle?

The advice is for “a government whistleblower in a country with a less-than-transparent government,” Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, writes in the section on “How to Blog Anonymously.”

“Ethan, you can spend so much time helping people to communicate in countries with censorship, but in a country with no censorship you can’t even communicate with your own mother sometimes?!”

Of course, this all leaves one big question in my mind: since, theoretically, powerful oppressive regimes have greater access to this sort of thing than the suffering masses, what’s going to prevent, say, the Iranian government reading the booklet and quickly coming up with countermeasures to everything suggested in the book before Mohammed Q. Dissident Iranian even gets a chance to read it?