From: Arun Mehta <amehta@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in>
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 23:19:43 +0800
To: "Deranged Mutant" <EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU>
Subject: Re: Another bad idea
Message-ID: <1.5.4.32.19960712093348.002dc774@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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At 05:06 10/07/96 +0000, Deranged Mutant wrote:
>On  9 Jul 96 at 18:26, E. ALLEN SMITH wrote:
>[..]
>> 	Like China, various other countries are trying to get the Internet's
>> benefits (such as technical information) without its other consequences
>> (extension of civil liberties into countries that want to deny them). One
idea
>> that I've had for preventing such problems is to look for addresses from such
>> countries that are posting to technical newsgroups, to technical mailing
lists,
>> or that are attempting to get access to web pages on technical subjects
(which
>> access they will hopefully be denied, although an alternate possibility).
Then
>> mail information to those addresses that those countries don't want getting
>> into their countries, such as on human rights abuses (or well-written
>> pornography...).
>
>Great idea. Get some (possibly) innocent techie in an oppressive 
>country thrown in jail or executed.
>[..]
>Damn aggrevating for that user, and it could get him/her in trouble.
>
>On a wide-scale it could provoke responses from those countries.  

Damned right, and it should. Your religion teaches to "DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU
WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU." Good advice for anyone on the Internet, and
the last thing you want to teach newbies is to spam.

Imagine if you were to send the cypherpunks list unsolicited porn, info
about some prisoner in Texas who is getting the death penalty... you get the
picture. If I were at the receiving end, I'd send back a polite but firm
note asking you to desist, and if you didn't, complain to your sysop, or
remailer operator. Which is what you would do in my shoes.

But if you want to do something, I have a better idea (thanks for the
willingness to help):

As  I see it, the Chinese communist government will not live to see more
than a few years (if any) of the 21st Century. We are all aware of the
devastating impact of telecommunications, TV and computers on  authoritarian
regimes.  E.g. in the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Easterners watching West
German TV was a significant contributory factor.

Satellite TV is available all over China.The government may, for a while, be
able to ban satellite dishes, but soon their size will reduce to that of a
wok (might even double as one). The Internet will soon be widespread. The
real crunch will come when Hongkong becomes part of China. Inevitably, other
parts of the country will want to know why the special status of Hongkong
cannot be extended to them. There is a chance that instead of China taking
over Hongkong, the reverse might happen.

In cyberspace, the students have the more powerful tanks. Can you imagine
how different a massacre a la Tiananmen Square would look in a couple of
years? Images captured on camcorders would be beamed back to the Chinese via
satellite, all the information would flow both ways on the net, the Hongkong
stock market would take a dive, ... I would suggest that tacitly or at least
implicitly, the Chinese goverment has conceded that it will never try a
major violent suppression of political unrest again. That, or it will decide
that the Internet is a bad influence, and should be abolished.

What that does is give us a window of opportunity. Hongkong has one
remaining  year of guaranteed unfettered flow of information. China still
has the Internet. What can we do?

1) Collect the e-mail addresses as Allen suggested (including those in
Hongkong), and send them a single, short message offering to teach them free
of cost how to use pgp and all the goodies at
http://www.eskimo.com/~joelm/cbsw.html

2) Encourage the production of simple, cheap devices such as a PGP phone
that they can manufacture in Hongkong and other parts of China, which will
allow secure communications. Basically, people without a computer, Internet
connection or sufficient literacy should be able to use effective
encryption. Cheap.

3) Find people who beam radio transmissions into China (Rupert Murdoch via
his Star TV satellite is one ;-) and ask them to devote an "Internet hour"
in which people can mail or phone in messages (via remailers and encryption
too) to be broadcast. The whole thing can be automated, and  *everybody* has
access to radio. More on this subject later.

Thoughts?

Arun Mehta, B-69 Lajpat Nagar-I, New Delhi-24, India. Phone 6841172,6849103
amehta@doe.ernet.in amehta@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in amehta@cerfnet.com
http://mahavir.doe.ernet.in/~pinaward/arun.htm
"I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be 
stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house 
as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any."--Gandhi