God, what would we do without Facebook?! Well now you can ask the people of Iran.

The Committee to Protect Bloggers recently reported an “unofficial” ban of Facebook in Iran, one of the latest social media sites to fall along with Flickr and YouTube. (CPB also points out the irony of the Facebook group “Against Internet Censorship and Filtering in Iran“) It’s just one of the ten million Web sites the Iranian government has banned according to the Open Net Initiative (you can see Iran’s ONI profile here)

A recent Reporters Without Borders ad campaign silhouettes countries that actively filter their Internet. They’re not technically “black holes” (today an estimated 7.2 million people are online in Iran, and there are approximately 400,000 blogs in Farsi).  But from YouTube bans to e-mail screening, there’s no doubt that with the Web 2.0 boom, there’s been a reactionary echo by governments around the world and that, according to ONI, internet censorship is a growing problem. The answer could be hacking.

Hacking for Humanity got a big boost during the initial wave of Internet censorship in 2001.  But with the web becoming more powerful and governments cracking down, it might be time for new anti-censorship developments too.

A recent Wired Magazine article provides tips on “Buzzing Past China’s Electronic Sentinels” such as using proxy programs, and tools like TOR, a heavily used internet anonymity program (which is actually okay since it works better when more people use it and/or set up volunteer servers). Software like Psiphon had also been talked up as one way to help users in censored countries access banned sites through direct links to users with access (help someone in Iran poke a friend for Christ’s sake!). Boing Boing even put out a whole guide to defeating censorware upon hearing that proprietary software and whole governments had blocked their site.  But there’s been little development to be seen as of late, and with the US literally invested in growing surveillance in China and around the world, it’s time to get hackin’.