Citizens living in countries where certain news sites are banned can now see the content. Reporters Without Borders has set up mirrors of nine websites that are banned in eleven countries, including the China-banned Tibet Post and the Russia-blocked Grani.ru. The move is part of what the group are calling Operation Collateral Freedom.
It said that it has set up the mirrored sites to provide citizens with access to impartial information and news from balanced sources. The mirrors have been set up on Amazon Web Services. AWS is owned by Amazon and sells cloud computing services to third parties. Mirror copies have also been set up on Google and Microsoft cloud services.
Citizens can now access the news websites via the cloud computing providers IP addresses instead of their own, in the hope that authorities will decide not to block the new links at source. Reporters Without Borders said: “Blocking Amazon, Microsoft or any major cloud computing service provider would cripple the thousands of tech companies that use them every day. The economic and political cost of blocking the mirror sites would therefore be too high.”
The data transmissions will be encrypted, with the mirror sites only being accessible through the secure https protocol. This also means that authorities shouldn’t be able to use keyword searches to find and block content. Some experts are sceptical that the mirror sites would remain effective for the duration of the campaign, which is set to last for a number of months.
