I am amazed at the difference a decade at CES can make. More than a third of the world’s population currently has access to the internet and we’ve seen both the good and bad of this - and I’m not just talking about bandwidth issues. 2011 began with the Arab Spring and ended with Occupy Everything.

Through connected tablets, ultrabooks, laptops and phones people took to the web to express their discontent and took to the streets to enact change. There were demonstrations in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Algeria, Spain, Greece, India, Manhattan and even Oakland. Through blogs, file streaming, file sharing and status updates, regular people were mass distributing their frustrations. While there is far more diversity as new voices speak out, oppressive authority groups have also taken the decade to learn how to quell and track some of the best and the brightest.

ENSURING YOUR ONLINE FREEDOM OF SPEECH
This post isn’t about CES, there’s already plenty of that coverage here. This post is about protecting online freedom of speech and privacy in an age where technology launches have preceded best practices and acknowledged consequences. In this 3 part post, I want to talk about three stop gap measures to ensuring freedom of speech including:
1. Protecting Against Site Bans;
2. Circumventing Service Outages; and,
3. Maintaining your Online Privacy.

SITE BANS: A CAT AND MOUSE GAME
So let’s talk about site bans. While countries like Egypt and Syria have certainly had their fair share of site bans in the last year, the Chinese government is the most notorious for site bans to the point that many refer to its online environment as the Great Firewall of China. In 2008 I had the pleasure of working behind the scenes on an interview with Chinese activist and often banned artist Ai WeiWei.

It was a great experience, but we as Americans made one critical error. We’d taken site bans for granted and chosen to offer embed codes to our interview instead of taking the time to upload source files. This makes it easy for the Chinese government to ban a single URL and stop others from watching the stream. Many audience members were afraid to embed us knowing that they might find their links dead by morning. Our faith in YouTube-style technology had screwed us.

If we’d provided downloadable files to viewers, we would have decentralized the message source and the government would have scrambled to identify multiple distribution nodes rather than just the one. The lesson here is to offer your content in its entirety to as many people as you can before others can attempt to suppress it.

Rather than making it a cat and mouse game, it’s best to make it one cat to many mice. Next Post: SERVICE OUTAGES - PART 2/3