Fiji: shutting down the blogs

Since the December 5 coup, the Fijian blogosphere has exploded, with a network of "Fijian Freedom Bloggers" established to distribute information critical of the military regime. These blogs have broken several important stories deeply embarassing to those in power, and now the regime is trying to close them down. On Friday they detained a businessman on suspicion of being a blogger, and now they are pressuring FINTEL (Fiji's international telecommunications gateway) to block access to sites critical of the regime. So we may see a "little firewall of Fiji" to "protect" Fijians from harmful concepts like democracy, accountability, and human rights.

Of course, such firewalls may be circumvented. There's an escalating series of circumvention and privacy methods in the Reporters Without Borders Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents [PDF]. The easiest method is to use a service like Anonymouse, Proxify or The Cloak to disguise the destination of your traffic. Such sites may also be blocked, but you can DIY by using a proxy server (lists here; IE configuration tutorial here). There are stronger and more secure methods as well for the seriously paranoid, but the basic ones ought to be enough to begin with.