Amnesty International together with The Observer and Soda Creative launched a campaign called irrepressible.info against the increasing governmental censorship of the internet. The campaign asks governments to stop censoring websites, blocking emails or shutting down blogs and make an appeal to the big corporations to stop supporting these actions.

The Irrepressible.info website set up for the campaign includes a badge with parts of censored information and people are urged to send emails including this badge. Thus the censored information can be transmitted all around the globe. The website includes also a pledge that will be presented at the Internet Governance Forum meeting in Athens in November 2006 where governments and companies from all over the world will discuss the future of the Internet. The pledge that has been signed by more than 20 000 individuals says: "I believe the Internet should be a force for political freedom, not repression. People have the right to seek and receive information and to express their peaceful beliefs online without fear or interference."

Amnesty is urging people to petition governments to cease censoring the web. It also urged technology companies not to facilitate such activities. Information technology companies "have helped build the systems that enable surveillance and censorship to take place", Amnesty claims.

In the campaign-launching article Kate Allen, UK director of Amnesty International, criticised technology companies that allow censorship and provide information to governments convicting political dissidents. Irrepressible.info gives Yahoo, Microsoft and even Google as examples of companies having provided confidential user information to the Chinese authorities resulting in suppression of freedom of expression, and even imprisonments.

The big companies defend their position and consider that entering restricted countries such as China is for the good of the local population because some information is better than none.

Amnesty - Irrepressible.info campaign
http://irrepressible.info/

Amnesty: we must free the internet (28.05.2006)
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1784625,00.html

Today, our chance to fight a new hi-tech tyranny (28.05.2006)
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1784643,00.html

Amnesty takes a strike against web censorship (30.05.2006)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/30/amnesty_anti_web_censorship/