Conceived last October and released to the public in the wake of the Tsunami disaster out of an urgent sense of duty, Bloggers Without Borders is more than just a catchy turn of phrase. It is a powerful set of tools that enable anyone, around the world, with a minimum of techie know-how, to bypass private and public internet censorship using cutting-edge technology.

SFist found Bloggers Without Borders through the Tsunami Help blog. Later we ran into Dinah Sanders, AKA Metagrrrl, who explained the mission behind the site in detail, and we offered to help in any way we could. She arranged a get together with spokesman and techspert Jonas M. Luster over 'puters to chat. The conversation ranged from floating IP's that can be used to route around IP blacklists and protect a blogger's anonymity and location, through the sociology of C.W. Mills, the legendary 1985 documentary Shoah to Warren Ellis classic sci-fi graphic novel series Transmetropolitan.

Bloggers Without Borders provides the technical support and tools for people who are restricted from publishing publicly on the internet by other technology, especially state-sponsored technology. They do not espouse a political ideology (although as Jonas mentioned, "free speech efforts rarely come from the right"), and are implementing an open feedback system for readers to help timely, well-written or compelling stories bubble out to a broader readership. The example of the couriers who braved the Berlin Wall, whose work passing messages accross that wall brought it down, was mentioned.

Besides using floating IP's generated from a server in Europe that could be swapped out with a mirror at any moment (plans are to add redundancy through a sister-server in Tokyo and eventually around the world), the system uses the EFF's Tor encryption and obfuscation system to keep the messages private and messengers anonymous. The Tor key can be regenerated at any time and distributed via email, phone, SMS and word-of-mouth. When we said cutting-edge we weren't just falling into our corpspeak habits, we really meant some military-grade s**t. Jonas Luster is humble enough to have asked us to drop the "Doctor" title, and can be found at jonas at b19s.org.

We were concerned that in such an open system, Bloggers Without Borders would be vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous interests. SFist is not alone in our struggles with SPAM, all sorts of potential liabilities and attack or appropriation. But the technology behind b19s.org has hopefully been designed to remove incentives for appropriation through the content ratings, the open and public nature of the discussion (the site has already logged over two million individual sessions) and the rigorous testing and adaptive development will keep the site open and usable twenty-four, seven.

Their biggest hurdles right now are scoring their 501(c)3 status, raising further funding so that they can support more tech and hire full-time staff, getting the word out among international aid workers and bloggers on the ground in places like Myanmar, Iran and China. There is an urgent need immediately for translatons in many languages of public statements, FAQs, instructions and other static documentation which will be shortly updated accross-the-board in English. But we're sure that they'll take any kind of help you might be willing to offer.

It's times like these that we remember that one of the reasons we came here and we stay here is because of both the progressive politics and the culture of technologists (the food and public art are a sweet, sweet bonus). In the long term, Bloggers Without Borders is going to change the world like Philo T. Farnsworth's television did. SFist thinks it will be for the better, though!