An interesting editorial in yesterday's Washington Post argues that a $30m investment could mean that fifty million extra people in repressive regimes could have access to Twitter. Apparently the US State Department has the money within its budgets for this very purpose but has not yet disbursed it.
The Global Internet Freedom Consortium and similar groups have developed the capacity to give citizens of China, Burma, Iran, Cuba and other totalitarian regimes free access to internet services like Twitter. The Consortium declares its mission with these powerful words:
Writing in June, Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times described the power of these "censorship-evasion technologies".
