Refuge for ‘netizens’

“Anonymity is becoming more and more important for those who handle sensitive data”.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is making high-speed anonymity services like encrypted email and web access available to journalists, bloggers and dissidents free of charge through the world’s first online shelter. Why? Because never before have so many people been imprisoned for expressing their views online as today. Internet users, known as ‘netizens’ in 21st century speak, everywhere in the world are subject to some form of online censorship. Sixty countries have made it on to RSF’s black list including China, Vietnam, Iran, Egypt and, most recently, Italy where a new law aimed at curbing phone tapping has placed boundaries on press freedom.

“At a time when online filtering and surveillance is becoming more and more widespread, we are making an active commitment to an Internet that is unrestricted and accessible to all by providing the victims of censorship with the means of protecting their online information,” said RSF in a press release.

The organization, founded in 1985 to fight for press freedom, has partnered with communications security firm XeroxBank to provide the anti-censorship shelter. The shelter connects users to a Virtual Private Network (VPN) which routes traffic across a gigabit backbone network from country to country and mixes it with tens of thousands of other users, ultimately creating an untraceable web of netizens. The network will be available to users of the Shelter in Paris, where the organization is based, as well as to anyone RSF considers at risk from internet censorship including journalists, human rights activists, refugees and political dissidents. The XeroxBank service will be accessible to them from anywhere in the world via access codes and USB flash drives and the company also provides manuals and wikis giving advice on how to maintain internet privacy.

In the future the Shelter will have a website where banned content, including multimedia content will be published. Interested in using it? The Shelter opens 10.00 to 16.00 Monday to Friday and reservations can be made by contacting shelter@rsf.org.