Spreading Democracy Without War

From TomPaine.com:

It is not a crazy assertion that the gigantic difference between this campaign season and all others was not just the Iraq War, but the existence of the progressive blogosphere. The Internet acted as meeting place, news source, advertising medium and organizing metaphor for Democratic campaigns around the country and at a national level. So before you sign off the tubes today, take a moment to protect that tool for activists, opposition leaders and ordinary citizens all around the world.

Reporters Without Borders (a k a Reporters Sans Frontiers) published their list of 13 countries that are "enemies of the Internet" yesterday. From Belarus to Vietnam, they are countries that monitor their citizen's Web traffic, if not actively imprison bloggers and 'Net activists (there are at least 61 bloggers and cyber-dissidents imprisoned around the world today).

They have also launched a 24-hour web campaign to educate people about countries that impose cyber-censorship and vote for the worst offender, as well as to send a voice message to Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!, which was the first company to agree to censor its search engine in China and, according to RSF, has been collaborating for years with the Chinese police so they can arrest and sentence dissidents and independent reporters.