Slashdot Mirror
China Orders E-Mail Screening
Greyfox writes: "According to this CNN article, China has ordered Internet providers to screen users' E-mails for subversive statements. See how fascist governments control the flow of information? Aren't you glad our government doesn't do this? Oh... Wait..."
Like it or not, privacy is not a fundamental provision of the Consititution.
No, but it can be inferred from the third, fourth and ninth Amendments (and probably bits and pieces of five and six). The third Amendment has been interpreted to mean that people have a right not be under constant surveillance by law enforcement. The fourth Amendment, The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, should be obvious. And the ninth Amendment is the one that says, basically, that just because the constitution only protects certain enumerated (spelled-out) rights does not mean the people do not have other ones, that arent explicitly forbidden elsewhere.
If you place your messages in the public domain (which is what you do whenever you send an E-mail over the Internet), don't be surprised when it is screened, read, etc., by either the government or anyone who happens to own the router that your message passes through.
Sending email is no more placing messages in the public domain than using the postal system is. Placing messages in a public forum (e.g., Usenet, Slashdot, etc.) would be, however. Simply because email is sent plaintext through a bunch of third-party routing servers does not mean it is public, no more than postal mail being handled by a dozen different postal workers, makes postal mail public.
There is a general mistrust of government in general in this forum, which is sad. While I agree that the size and scope of government should be kept to a minimum, we should be able to trust the elected officials in a republican system, since we choose who our representatives will be. And we should certainly trust the executive branch (the ones actually screening the public E-mails) to do what they need to enforce the laws our elected representatives pass. If they aren't, then the people should vote accordingly for representatives that will fix the problem.
Yeah, youre right, the people should. They should be able to trust the government, and should vote accordingly when the government betrays its ideals. Unfortunately, youre describing a functional constitutionaldemocratic-republic, not the United States, here.
[Law enforcement officials] are only concerned for the information that will help them protect the public from criminals.
The problem is what, exactly, gets defined as criminal.
Liberty in your lifetime
And neither have you, or you would understand that all dictatorships are benign - to begin with. The 2nd amendment to the Constitution recognises exactly that.
The intention or the degree of oppression is not the issue. Dictating directly or through propaganda what is right and what is wrong - as opposed to serving the will of the electorate - is oppression. I'd say that we have a government so composed of incumbents and hereditary heirs that it already views itself as master and not servant. A benign master perhaps, but a master none the less, and you don't give power to a good man that you wouldn't want his bad successor to have.
As you say, it doesn't look too bad right now. Of course, it gets just a little worse every year, but not so much that any one incident is enough to force the issue, and all the controls and crackdowns are justifiable. It's unfortunate that we can't move towards a more liberal society that treats people as innocent until proven guilty, but, hey, there's a lot of bad people in the world, right? Just one more restriction, then we'll be done, promise.
And so we go. Are you willing to bet that in 30 years, the next generation isn't going to look back and say "My god, why didn't you stop this peacefully when you had the chance?"
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.