You said “Freedom of speech”?



Here we are, twenty first century, we saw communication technologies exploded and going in less than twenty years from a single telephone attached to the wall to the most advanced smartphones able to make a phone call from anywhere but also text, take pictures, shoot video, play video-games, book a table at the restaurant and communicate with any possible mean.

Of course the revolution took place in parallel with the expansion of the internet and the services available on it.

One of the most used tools for millions of people around the world is Voice Over Internet Protocol, commonly known as VoIP and the most well know software using this technology is Skype (owned my Microsoft).

Now Skype is not the only tool out there and users can also use Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger and plenty of others to communicate for free with friends and family all around the world.

Organisations have also understood the benefits of such technologies to cut costs associated with phone bills and video/teleconferencing so tools like MS Lync 2010 or Cisco Unified Communications are flourishing.



But there is a country, where if you use any of these tools you will be considered a criminal and face 15 years of jail time! This wonderful country is Ethiopia. Of course the country is not famously known for its capacity to respect human rights and according to Reporters Without Borders, Ethio Teleco has recently installed a system blocking access to the Tor network so users could not browse anonymously and/or access restricted websites.

Of course, authorities claim that those new laws are intended to protect against “security threats” and have nothing to do with wanting to control communications and listen everything its 84 million population have to say about its democratic government, it has also nothing to do with wanting to recover all the money not spent by using VoIP tools. Finally, it has nothing to do with the encryption those tools use and that the Ethiopian government probably have no capacity to break in order to investigate those “potential dangerous criminals”, of course.

When politics and technology meet, unfortunately it hardly gives anything good. Politics being made by dinosaurs people who don’t understand anything about technology, who reached a stage in life where everything simply goes too fast for them and where you are more interested by your personal interests than the one of the people you are supposed to represent.

Feel free to share your opinion before you can not anymore… and sorry for the censorship restrictions in this post, I had to be politically correct…

http://www.osimood.com/2012/07/you-said ... of-speech/