On Sunday, The Observer and Amnesty International launched the campaign to highlight repression of internet users around the world and to push for the release of those jailed for speaking out online. People like Shi Tao, for example, who is currently serving a ten year jail sentence for sending an email from his Yahoo! account.

45 years ago two students were arrested in Portugal for raising a toast to freedom. Recently, three young Vietnamese people were arrested after taking part in an online chatroom debate about democracy.

In her article launching the campaign, UK director of Amnesty International, Kate Allen points out:

Governments still fear dissenting opinion and try to shut it down. While the internet has brought freedom of information to millions, for some it has led to imprisonment by a government seeking to curtail that freedom. They have closed or censored websites and blogs; created firewalls to prevent access to information; and restricted and filtered search engines to keep information from their citizens.

China is perhaps the clearest example. Its internet censorship and clampdown on dissent online is sophisticated and widespread. But Amnesty has documented internet repression in countries as diverse as Iran, Turkmenistan, Tunisia, Israel, the Maldives and Vietnam.

Another massive change since 1961 has been the rising power of multinationals, but some companies have been complicit in these abuses. So Amnesty is increasingly lobbying not just governments but powerful firms to respect the rights of ordinary people.

The internet is big business, but in the search for profits some companies have encroached on their own principles and those on which the internet was founded: free access to information. The results of searches using China-based search engines run by Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and local firms are censored, limiting the information users can access. Microsoft pulled down the work of one of China’s most popular bloggers who had made politically sensitive comments. Yahoo gave information to the authorities that led to people being jailed for sending emails with political content. We do not accept these firms’ arguments that it is better to have a censored Google, Yahoo or Microsoft in China than none at all.

Now is a good time to take a stand, and there are three things you can do:

• Sign the pledge calling for Internet freedom
• Take action to free Shi Tao.
• Undermine censorship by publishing irrepressible fragments of censored material on your own site.

Be Irrepressible.

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