I spent several minutes resisting a followup, but if people are going to discuss, I have to cave... Forwarded message:
At 05:54 PM 11/17/95 -0500, "James M. Cobb" <jcobb@ahcbsd1.ovnet.com> wrote:
Activists in Indonesia who use the Internet say it is a power- ful tool for distributing information in a society where self- censorship abounds, newspapers are tightly controlled, jour- nalists are jailed and unlicensed magazines banned.
The primary difference between Indonesian and Singaporean censorship is that the Singaporeans are a lot more urbane about it, and generally don't have crowds of protestors to shoot at. Reporting on the East Timor activity is an especially good way to get kicked out of the country; I know people it's happened to. Uncensorable communications can be a substantial help, though rubber-hose cryptanalysis is still fairly effective, and it's the type of place that would use it.
A certain amount of US activism on the East Timor problems is Internet-based; I don't know how connected it is to Indonesia or East Timor, which is too underdeveloped to be very active on the net, and has the added problem that activists are heavily watched.
I'll try to keep this as short as possible... Almost anything on the Internet about East Timor is just crap. Get that out of the way first. I've put the entire Portugal domain in my kill file. It's like reading the lowest grade of anti-abortion rant from an AOLer. The issue under all the others is "what happens when Suharto dies". Lots of people, both in and out of power, are biding their time until Suharto leaves power. My hunch is that practically nobody in Indonesia has a PC at home like most US Internet users do. They're getting access through a company or university, or through a government office. A distributed network can resist censorship--but Indonesia isn't very distributed yet, and almost everyone is dependent on some sort of institutional access. Most people in Indonesia--including a lot of middle-class people--don't have a phone. You run down the street to a government Telkom office or a private Wartel office to make a phone call. Putting Web terminals in Wartels-- now *that would be a concept. If you dig into the UUCP maps for Java, you'll see a surprising number of sites listed in all sorts of little places. How many of those are up and operating, I have no idea. You are routinely warned that people at those sites are generally charged for receiving foreign e-mail, and that that can be expensive for them at current exchange rates. Private Internet providers (RadNet, IDOLA, IndoNet) have popped up only in the last year or so. I have links to some from my home page (http://www.skypoint.com/members/gimonca) As for the rubber hose...Indonesia is a fairly inscrutable country to try to figure out. They are quite capable of simply killing people if necessary; at other times, the wheels of justice turn agonizingly slow, and people are left free for the moment not knowing what might end up happening (a la Phil Zimmerman). My at-a-distance impression is that you see more of the Alabama-Sheriff's-Deputy kind of oppression than the Nazi-jackboot kind. Either way, it's millions of light years from the Libertarian Home World. Technology is a hot issue in Indonesia, partly because one of Suharto's favorite ministers, Mr. Habibie, is kind of a techno-nut, and has been pushing a variety of medium- and high-tech projects for Indonesia. Some people feel that he's being allowed to do whatever he wants, regardless as to whether his projects make any economic sense or not. After Suharto is gone, it will be interesting to see how high-tech stuff fares. In short, will Habibie end up giving it a bad name? Or will the technological middle class come to power and do it right the second time around? I'm going to stop rambling, and add something of more crypto-relevance. I've got an old article of mine about remailers in my web pages. (http://www.skypoint.com/members/gimonca/anonmail.html) I've talked it up in soc.culture.indonesia and soc.culture.malaysia. Later, sameer asked me to put a link to c2.org in there. Now, I'm getting a low but respectable number of hits on that page (30-40 per day)...so it's not out of the question that some of those Indonesian users might be finding their way to sameer's site for a badly-needed nym.