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RE: Kyrgyzstan under cyberattack

Don_Quixote 29th Jan 2009

"Moscow is hundreds of kilometers away and yet it's as close as a TV set," said my history professor once. She was damn right!..

Now if the developed nations truly want to spread democracy and freedom around the world, why not indeed help third world countries maintain access to free and democratic information space? With time such investments will pay off as the younger generation grows and learns the new information technology along with freedom of self-expression and constructive debates online.

Concrete proposals are simple and rather inexpensive: it would really help to send Peace Corps (or other) volunteers or scholars with IT Teaching background. The local population, especially the younger generation, does possess decent fluency in English, some German, and some French. However, advanced levels of technical proficiency such as building social networking websites, network security, wiki-pages, etc. are lacking. So, training local students (both at high school and college level) such technical skills would really boost the country's potential to defend its information freedom.

That would be a truly grassroots program with long-lasting impact instead of an unknown number of non-transparent NGOs and foreign credits that have nothing to do with the ordinary people.

Don_Quixote