Raging against rising internet repression

My following article appears in the US magazine The Nation on the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit and the issue of web repression: During the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008 –sponsored by Harvard University and Google in Budapest, Hungary, in late June, and attended by over 200 bloggers, human rights activists, writers, journalists, hackers and IT experts from every corner of the globe–one participant joked that it was worthwhile buying domain names for dissidents likely to be imprisoned. “Just get them with ‘Free (insert name here).com,’ ” he said. A recent University of Washington report found that 64 people have been arrested for blogging their political views since 2003. Three times as many people were arrested for blogging about political issues in 2007 than in 2006. More than half of the arrests since 2003 were made in Iran, China and Egypt. Internet censorship has become a cause with global relevance. I was...