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Introduction
Increasingly nation states act to restrict information flows, including restricting access to potentially subversive online information, filtering messages of dissent or preventing the spread of independent information. While the Chinese government has a well-known and enduring program of Internet censorship, governments also engage in sporadic or just-in-time censorship as was observed in the 2011 Arab uprisings (Zittrain and Edelman, 2003; Deibert et al. , 2008, Deibert et al. , 2010). These efforts target not only information dissemination by individuals but organizations as well, including the websites of Google and Wikipedia, world news media and human rights organizations.
International human rights organizations are particularly vulnerable to Internet censorship as their information flows include collecting difficult-to-access information about abuses as well as disseminating it to policymakers and residents of censoring countries (Rubenstein, 2004, Hopgood, 2006). This control, censorship, and regulation challenge the Internet's use as a medium for protecting human rights (Brophy and Halpin, 1999), and differentiate human rights organizations from other voluntary sector organizations, which in general successfully use the Internet to carry out certain aspects of their work (Burt and Taylor, 2003).
In response, human rights organizations may find that low-cost Internet censorship circumvention technologies can secure both external information dissemination strategies and internal communications infrastructure. While estimates are difficult to make, the adoption of circumvention technologies by the general public appears to be growing. For example, Tor, a publicly available, free application that anonymizes information flows, now claims millions of users, including journalists, law enforcement, government officials, and human rights workers worldwide.1 On the other hand, it is likely human rights organizations, as with all non-profits, face financial and other constraints to IT use (Corder, 2001; Saidel and Cour, 2003; Suparamaniam and Dekker, 2003), and therefore may be forced to accept censorship or use less advanced communications infrastructure.
Given these conflicting expectations, this research is a first effort to investigate the factors influencing human rights organizations' use of censorship circumvention technologies and consequences for their information flows and strategies. In particular, we examine:
How do the characteristics of international human rights organizations influence circumvention technology adoption and use?
How do the technical characteristics of censorship circumvention technologies influence their adoption and use? and,
How does the use (or lack thereof) of censorship...