Yorick Wilks

Today’s papers report a new method being trialed from the US to get news into countries with heavily censored Internet access such as China and Iran. (see:

http://venturebeat.com/2009/08/01/using-email-tricks-to-get-news-into-countries-that-censor-it/)

The method is called FOE (Feed Over Email) and is essentially a method for sending encrypted email as an RSS feed to any email address that requests it from an external mail provider such as hotmail or gmail. There are many such providers and it is hard for any state system to block all of them.

When decrypted the news appears in mail as HTML rather than text, rather like the adverts you get now from Amazon and British Airways. It all looks interesting and the wonder is why you need to request it at all: it could be sent as government-originated spam to any address they can find in a target country, just lie real spam! This would lower the likelihood of Government agencies at the target end later finding ways of locating those who had requested the feed. Companies in Western countries have not been slow to sell relevant software to the Iranian Government for Internet censorship, so why would they not take the next step and sell what is needed to find the FOE requestors? (see: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124562668777335653.html)

As with all good ideas there are down sides: there are now HTML mailers available to anyone that send you not text but an image you cannot copy/paste or save; these give the sender the ability to delete email received by you from them, or alter it later as they wish; they own their own email, not you the receiver. Worse, it lets the sender know exactly when you read their email and where, and you can avoid it only by turning off the receipt of all HTML emails.

This tool, in the hands of the “target” Government’s, would be a powerful antidote to Western Government-backed “spam” emails. It’s all a question of who is moving quicker, the cat or the mouse. The hidden paradox is the use by Western Governments for virtuous purposes of all kinds of tools, from anonymizers to spam, that they deplore when used on them!