If the world of non-profit technology had its own stock exchange, I'd recommend buying lots of stock in Haystack, a censorship-circumvention software put together by California-based Censorship Research Center in order to help Iranians evade their government's control of the Internet.
Haystack's story makes for great Hollywood material: Bay Area technologists who serendipitiously discover that there is a bloody and violent world beyond Silicon Valley -- the one where people rebel, fight, and die for real and not just as part of some new Facebook game -- decide to dedicate themselves to the fight against authoritarian evil with the help of -- you guessed it! -- the Internet. They are the ones putting "Twitter" into the "Twitter Revolution"! And you too can abet their fight: they've got a whole two Donate buttons on their website!
Not surprisingly, Haystack has been all over the media in the last few months -- most recently in Newsweek -- with its founder Austin Heap getting quite a bit of attention from journalists and policymakers alike. This is, for example, what the ever-modest Heap told Newsweek: "Tomorrow I meet with [Sens. John] McCain, [Bob] Casey, maybe [Carl] Levin, but I don’t know if I will have enough time." (Apparently, the senators have become much more tech-savvy since I left town; perhaps, this comes with age.) And it's not just American media: The Guardian pronounced Heap to be "The Innovator of the Year" -- though personally I would have gone with "The Publicist of the Year," just check this photo -- but then who am I to judge? (Moi -- I am only invited to opine on the Snark of the Year Awards.)
I like Hollywood as much as the next guy -- and yet something just doesn't feel right about Haystack. What really bothers me is that one cannot download and examine their software; as far as the Internet is concerned, Haystack doesn't exist. In fact, Heap says that it is only distributed to trusted contacts inside Iran; putting it online would create a situation where the government could easily get hold of it as well and then reverse-engineer it or ban it or find a way to track its users.
COMMENTS (4)
Read More
