June 1, 2007 | Sex & Society

Web liberators have second thoughts

Steve Hunter was one of a growing number of the technologically gifted who created a safe space online for people around the world by "lending out" his computer's hard drive and bandwidth. In places like China and Iran, where the government actively controls what citizens can access via the Internet, be it porn or open political discourse, users can now connect to a censor-free Internet relying on such "psiphonodes," backdoors that allow users to slip past government censors and onto the World Wide Web.

However, even liberators have limits. Although freedom to access all pages on the Internet is something Hunter enjoys, he decided that he could not afford others the same luxury. When one of the people using his server decided to skip the news and head straight for the hardcore porn, Hunter banned him.

“I was pretty pissed off,” says Hunter. “I trusted that, as a person in certain vulnerable circumstances, he would act accordingly and behave himself. He didn’t.”

Hunter was quickly blasted for his decision. “If you have these rights why should others not,” one person wrote. “If they want to search for porn, who are you to say they can not?”

But the issue is not as cut and dry as it may appear. Creators of psiphonodes give up a part of their bandwidth, and identity, for others to use. Using the server, the surfer takes on the identity of the person who created it. 

This is normally not a problem, until issues of child porn or terrorist activity come up, and the server owner is tagged as the perpetrator. No one wants either associated with their name.

Maybe it is true that no good deed goes unpunished.

• Porn-surfing by proxy [Forbes]