Sri Lanka It's Happening

March 12, 2004

Censorship.

A few years ago we had censorship in Sri Lanka. That was when the war was raging and lots of brave soldiers were losing their lives due to ill planned campaigns. Thankfully the war is taking a breather but looks like fighting may resume in the not to distant future.
Judging by the behaviour of certain politians in the alliance it looks like we are in for censorship again.

The last time the censors went to town only a few thousand people had access to the internet but now nearly everyone in Colombo can browse the web, at least from their place of work if not from home. So what will the censor do will he force the ISPs to filter out certain websites using proxy servers?

How will that prevent people outside the country with complete access to the information emailing their friends in Sri Lanka with the truth? will the government then insist that all ISPs filter all incoming email? What about hotmail and yahoo mail will they be completely blocked as well?

Finally as a last resort I am sure a lot of techies will make use of SSH tunnelling to get at the truth. Since SSH cannot be decrypted does the government plan to stop that by blocking SSH altogether?

Might as well pull the plug on the whole internet, force all the ISPs to close their operations.

The monks have promised to take the country back to 1505. Looks like the other party might have to take the country back to at least 1995.