Firewalls to Freedom
As contemporary authoritarian regimes learn how to manage and engineer information flows, promoting and protecting free speech in places like China and Russia is no longer a simple matter of circumventing formal censorship. As often as not, Big Brother takes the form of a shadowy cyber-attack or a government-paid Web commentator steering the discussion in a chat room.
NEW YORK – Even the most cold-hearted realists would agree that the failure of Communist censorship played a role in the collapse of the Iron Curtain: Voice of America, the fax machine, rock ‘n’ roll, and the lure of Western capitalism helped to win over the people of the Soviet Bloc.