“Internet Defense League” to be Launched in 5 Cities Around the World

Fight for the Future, a nonprofit organization known for organizing online campaigns, will launch the Internet Defense League on July 19th. The league will provide, to paraphrase its website statement, the Internet’s emergency broadcast system. The Internet Defense League tries to create an easy mechanism to start an online campaign whenever the internet is in danger.

For their launch, the Internet Defense League will hold parties in five cities in the world, including Ulaar Bataar in Mongolia! In these parties, they plan to launch real-life cat signals (pictured above). When I asked about the choice of cities to hold the party, Tiffiniy Cheng, co-director of Fight for the Future, answered,

Members volunteer to host a party. We have volunteers in four cities planning to host a party. One of our earliest members and donors is in Mongolia at an orphanage and will be hosting a party there.

Furthermore, I asked her about their concern regarding the open internet issue in Asia. Tiffiniy answered,

We’re concerned about the censorship and tracking that happens in Asia — how the internet is controlled and censored in Asia is exactly what we don’t want to happen in the US, and want rolled back around the world. I am especially concerned about the lack of media sources in countries like Singapore and China.

Many Asia’s nations have been in the news recently for internet censorship. Most notable of course is China, where recently there has been no shortage of examples. Sina Weibo has previously censored photo sharing and searches in Hong Kong, blocked the official page of the US Consulate in Shanghai, and censored searches for “truth”, all in July alone. And Chinese authorities in general have been harsh in blocking Slideshare recently on top of the many, many other services that are blocked there.

Although, the problem does not stop here. India and Indonesia, two other nations with a significant number of internet users, often seem to follow China’s path. We have reported on India’s efforts to ban offensive content where it asked popular sites like Facebook, Google, and Yahoo to control content distributed on their platforms. The Indonesia’s government for its part passed the Law of Information and Electronic Transaction (ITE Law) in 2008 in which the government is allowed to censor certain material. A recent incident saw a citizen jailed for posting an atheist-sounding status on Facebook.

I’m curious to see how this movement will take shape after it launches. Currently it already has the likes of Mozilla (makers of Firefox), WordPress, and Reddit as members. Will many Asians and Asia-based tech companies follow the movement and fight internet regulation and censorship in Asia? Will we see a lot of cat signals emerging in cities’ sky in the continent? Lets wait and see.