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Information wants to be free, but it's got to fight for its rights
Rob Borland
From Rowing Upstream: Snapshots of Pioneers of the Information Age in Africa
ISBN 0-620-28913-9
2002

Read more about "Rowing Upstream: snapshots of pioneers of the information age in Africa" at http://www.piac.org/rowing_upstream/about.html

When HealthNet and ESAnet were started some ten years ago in Zimbabwe, it very quickly became clear that wide-area networking was a subversive activity. In many respects it still is today.

Then, it was illegal just to connect a modem to the telephone network without approval from the state telecommunications authority, a monopoly operator. Obtaining approval was tedious and uncertain, so we just connected the modems up regardless. Users became accustomed to concealing their modems whenever official telecommunications technicians were called to attend to line faults. One unfortunate doctor in a small town actually spent a very uncomfortable night in the local jail after neglecting this precaution.

Connected users also subverted the bureaucracy of their own workplaces. Some CEOs forbade this altogether (so modems had to be concealed from them as well). Others allowed their subordinates to join the system, but insisted on vetting all their e-mail. Even more obstructive were those CEOs who appropriated the precious computers allocated for e-mailing and placed them on their own desks, from which no e-mail would ever be sent.

All that has changed, of course. Now government ministers and CEOs proclaim the wonders of the Internet and the ways that ICT is going to leverage economic development and ensure success in the global marketplace—especially when the official meetings are held in attractive venues in distant countries which qualify for large per diems, and the delegates have never actually accessed the Net themselves.

But if things change very quickly in the world of ICT, it means, of course, that they stay the same the more resolutely.

Official suspicion of the medium remains high. Recently approved legislation privatizing the state telecommunications authority and providing for rival services includes deliberately prohibitive fee structures that run to billions of dollars. This legislation also prescribes stringent regulations for registering ISPs, with conditions that include the interception of users’ communications at the President’s pleasure, and with Draconian penalties for systems administrators who refuse to implement such directives or even reveal that they have received them.

A member of the regulatory authority created to enforce these regulations, whom one would assume was appointed more for his technical competence than his political correctness, blandly stated at a public meeting that ordinary users had nothing to fear from these regulations since they would only ever be exercised in the pursuit of criminals and human rights activists!

Information wants to be free, but it’s got to fight for its rights.

Rob Borland teaches Computer Science at the University of Zimbabwe and operates HealthNet Zimbabwe, a non-profit dial-up e-mail network supporting the public health sector.

Information on HealthNet
HealthNet Zimbabwe has had a significant impact on institutional and national development in the health sector of its country. Approximately 100 local health centers and hospitals are connected to HealthNet Zimbabwe, enabling the collection, distribution and sharing of weekly surveillance reports on epidemiology and disease control. Raw data is analyzed and compiled, and then forwarded to the Health Ministry for evaluation. In addition, hundreds of other health professionals, including users in all major city health departments, blood transfusion services and several laboratories, use HealthNet on a regular basis. For many health workers in the rural areas, HealthNet is the only source of viable e-mail connectivity. Thanks to HealthNet, all of the district hospitals in the Midlands province of Zimbabwe can now share important data. Furthermore, disease reports are distributed on a regular basis, and health professionals can offer timely solutions to health problems that affect their communities.

With the advent of new Internet Service Providers (ISP), the HealthNet node in Harare now offers its low-cost e-mail through a local ISP. SATELLIFE provided the network with new operating software and continues to furnish content and enable access to important repositories of health and medical information.

Contact Information:
HealthNet Zimbabwe
Computer Science Department
University of Zimbabwe
PO Box MP 167
Harare, Zimbabwe
Phone: 263-4-303211 ext 1492
Fax: 263-4-333407
Email:borland@healthnet.zw

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