Uncovering Censorship in Our Own Backyard: Herdict

This article is about a new website called Herdict, which was produced by The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. The website was launched in March of 2009, and its goal is to provide real-time information of subtle Internet censorship and filtering by governments and commercial firms. It is reliant on "crowd-sourcing," which means Internet users to report sites that are blocked or running slow. Heredict then plots this information using a map, thereby showing online censorship in real-time.

The website's creator, Jonathan Zittrain, believes Herdict can show subtle censorship occuring in the West. It is not only government censorship, but commercial, as well, that Herdict can spot. Zittrain points out that Internet service providers and websites make decisions about what appears on the Internet and what does not, with and without public knowledge. Many worry this type of monitoring could lead to abuse, and they hope Herdict can help.

Herdict may also be able to pinpoint when service providers are violating "Net neutrality" by restricting or slowing down access to sites the providers are not doing business with. Herdict can also show cases of service providers using geolocational filtering, which means they block content relevant to a specific government or country, for whatever reason. It is hoped that Herdict will allow people to see how subtle Internet censorship may be happening right now.

I think this a great, creative idea! To be able to track this sort of thing in real-time is amazing. And it allows researchers to go back over the data and look into instances to see if there may be a tie to censorship or something else. The article points out that it is not always censorship that Herdict detects. In once instance, a website was down for maintenance, but the site had been on a list of censored sites, and the user information allowed people to investigate it to determine if it was censorship. Censorship can be subtle, and hopefully this type of thing will open peoples' eyes to it.

Article:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/197907