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Salon is running a cool article about numbers stations - shortwave radio stations that broadcast encrypted messages to spies worldwide. I hadn't known about this, though it makes sense if you think about it - the U.S. government uses a similar scheme to communicate with nuclear subs at sea. The article includes links to a site which has .mp3 recordings of some of the transmissions. Spooky. They've even transcribed some messages for a possible crack attempt, though if the men in black are truly using one-time pads this seems (ahem) unlikely to succeed.

Salon is running a cool article about numbers stations - shortwave radio stations that broadcast encrypted messages to spies worldwide. I hadn't known about this, though it makes sense if you think about it - the U.S. government uses a similar scheme to communicate with nuclear subs at sea. The article includes links to a site which has .mp3 recordings of some of the transmissions. Spooky. They've even transcribed some messages for a possible crack attempt, though if the men in black are truly using one-time pads this seems (ahem) unlikely to succeed.

Hundreds of people from around the world are coming together in Munich for a three-day conference, September 9-11. They represent the largest internet corporations and first-world countries. They've been working on this for years. They have millions of dollars. They're very, very serious. And someone forgot to tell them that information wants to be free.

What's going on?

Labels are the big thing. Labels are everywhere. Television has labels, after Congress threatened to not renew station broadcast licenses if the networks didn't comply. Video games have labels, after Congress threatened the gaming industry. Music has labels, after Congress and Tipper Gore (Al's wife) threatened the recording industry. Anyone remember the 80s, when musicians and fans both seethed at the very idea of labels slapped on our music by some politician? Now even MP3.com has a parental advisory icon.

And of course, movies have labels, the motion picture industry being the most dangerous threat to America's youth next to the internet. Hollywood labors under hundreds of censorship laws.

Now Senator Lieberman wants to rate every audio-visual product produced in the U.S. with a violence labeling system. (Lieberman was primarily responsible for the video game ratings and television ratings as well.)

Proponents of these censorship systems sometimes like to call them "voluntary". They're as voluntary as death and taxes. Or as voluntary as not being able to sell your product at all - that's what Lieberman's bill would dictate, if you don't comply. Salon said it well:

"The point has always been to change what actually gets broadcast through the flexing of government muscle. In simpler times, this was known as censorship."

Labels and censorship go hand in hand. The American Library Association speaks plainly: "Labeling is an attempt to prejudice attitudes and as such, it is a censor's tool." Some groups do stand up for what's right. You'll notice you don't see parental advisories on library books. Yet.

Think of how it works in practice: items with labels are stigmatized, attacked by Congress and pressure groups, and eventually - through law or simple bullying - they aren't available anymore. Think of the NC-17 label. All it's supposed to indicate is fare fit for adults - and since adults are 80% of the population, there ought to be plenty of movies made for them. But since most theaters (over 90%) won't run NC-17 movies, and most newspapers won't carry ads for them, any NC-17 movie is doomed to be a failure. And thus the only movies that make it to the theater are those deemed fit for children. Movies bearing that label were easy to attack - just take the most horrible movie you've ever seen (Debbie Does Dallas? The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Stargate?) and whip up a public frenzy, then say, "We can get rid of this filth if only you'll stop showing NC-17 movies, Mr. Theater Owner." The pressure was applied at different steps in the distribution process - at the movie theater chains and newspapers, rather than at the consumer's end - but the result is the same: you can't see it.

Or you can't see it the way it was intended. Stanley Kubrick was known first for his work, and second for the exacting craft with which he set up every single shot. If even Kubrick's famous final-cut contract couldn't keep the MPAA vultures from digitally painting over his sex scenes, how is any director safe?

But we digress. We were talking about labels, and Internet censorship. These things intersect in a technology called PICS.

PICS stands for Platform for an Internet Censorship System - well, close enough. It's a specification for attaching labels to internet content - Web pages, Usenet posts, chatroom messages, emails... anything. In theory, you could rate anything on any scale you chose - journalist Simson Garfinkel made a tongue-in-cheek PICS rating system to rate pages based on the amount of Simson they contain.

But that is theory. In the real world, you could rate music or video games on the basis of Simson too, but nobody does - because life is short. Just like all the other labeling systems, it turns out that the only Internet labeling systems that anyone cares about are pejorative labels - rating pages for sex, or foul language, or heresy, or violence. Why? Because these are what the censors want to get rid of.

The people getting together in Munich are doing so for the purpose of developing a single, uniform, international rating system to be applied to all Internet content worldwide. It's not a voluntary system - several countries have already declared their intent to make it mandatory, and Jim Miller of W3C (and co-creator of PICS) put it nicely when he said -

"It's going to happen and the publishers are going to resist it as long as they can, but they'll have to realise that they must rate their content or face prosecution."

Who's a publisher? We are. You are, if you post a reply to this thread. If the system gets set up as scheduled, you'll be forced to add a rating to every post you make, every email you send, every webpage you publish - or face prosecution. After all, you're protecting the children.

Or more precisely, the adults. Australia wants to ban the sex categories from its entire population - Germany wants to ban the hate speech categories. Just like at the movies, it's easier if you attack higher up in the distribution chain.

Rather than making it illegal to download Mein Kampf or purchase it from Amazon.com, it's much easier if you make a law that applies to the telecommunications providers. They're big companies. The bigger they are, the less likely they are to buck the laws - and since there aren't many of them, they're easy to monitor for compliance. Civil disobedience isn't in their vocabulary: give them a law, and they'll just implement it. Such as censoring out all material with a certain rating at the backbone.

Oh, it's true that it won't be 100% effective. Banned documents will still be smuggled across the electronic borders. But for most people, in most circumstances, it will be plenty effective. If you like your internet unlabeled, it's just about too late.

by Michael Sims and Jamie McCarthy

(More tomorrow on the Munich conference and recent events in the development of the Global Rating System.)