“I strongly believe that we need strong, anonymized and useable censorship circumvention tools. But I also believe that we need lots more than censorship circumvention tools, and I fear that both funders and technologists may overfocus on this one particular aspect of internet freedom at the expense of other avenues. I wonder whether we’re looking closely enough at the fundamental limitations of circumvention as a strategy and asking ourselves what we’re hoping internet freedom will do for users in closed societies.”

Do read Ethan Zuckerman’s excellent piece on beating internet censorship at Worldchanging.org. He makes an excellent point that while routing around government attempts to block people from information is helpful, it is also side-stepping the problem.

“In promoting internet freedom,” writes Zuckerman, “we need to consider strategies to overcome censorship inside closed societies. We also need to address “soft censorship”, the co-opting of online public spaces by authoritarian regimes, who sponsor pro-government bloggers, seed sympathetic message board threads, and pay for sympathetic comments. (Evgeny Morozov offers a thoroughly dark view of authoritarian use of social media in How Dictators Watch Us On The Web.)”

The committee believes in wider distribution of circumvention tools (and some of its members are actively working on them), but these will never address the core problem. People inside repressive nations don’t just want access to content from the outside, and we need to stop seeing this as the gold standard. People want to share their own content with the rest of the world, but even more so, they want to share it with one another in their own socieites. Circumvention tools allow openings to the outside, but the real cracks that will topple repressive governments is when the tools allow for the free flow of information safely and efficiently inside as well, amongst people organizing and advocating for social change.

There is a popular myth about the web “shrinking” the world. It’s a comfortable one for those of us enjoying the benefits far from the truncheons and secret police. We share, trade and celebrate people who manage to get “the word out” from inside places we know people are being silenced, and we should continue to do so. But for those people, the world is not exactly shrinking in the same way, and let’s remember that. After they’ve put their message out, the world is not small enough for them to quickly sidestep the repercussions for having done so. Many face travel bans, house arrest, imprisonment, torture and worse. For these people, the rest of the world is still very far off, and all the diggs, reddit upvotes, retweeting and facebook sharing of what they put out there isn’t going to keep them out of prison or shield them from being beaten.

There’s a lot people on the outside can do. Realizing that by supporting internal communication ultimately helps the rest of us is a start.