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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..."
Now thanks to Red Flag Linux, filtering the thoughts of your citizens is cheaper and more reliable than ever!
Back in the day, you'd have to pay Microsoft big bucks to squelch dissenting opinions and always had to worry that radicals spreading Western ideals would be able to exploit OS vulnerabilities and cause trouble. Not any more!
I wonder if China will GPL their filtering software?
(By the way, I'm not being down on Linux. I'm just dismayed at the irony of a government using one of the most free [as in liberty] operating systems to actually reduce freedom.)
Do any readers here actually believe that snail mail to and from China is any less scrutinized than email will be? My sister lived and taught in China for a couple of years (we are Americans). Letters and packages I sent to her were routinely opened and inspected before they were delivered to her. I can safely assume that if she and I had access to email at the time, those correspondences would have been equally intercepted and reviewed as well.
You know what, I'm really getting sick of the bigotry that I see here on Slashdot. Anytime a story is posted based on our rights, department of justice, business, etc... there always has to be a flame aimed towards the United States of America. I'm assuming most of the readers here have mostly a leftist view on most political issues, and that's absolutely fine.
But what about the conservatives who read Slashdot? What about us? How do the people who read Slashdot with a right winged attitude feel about biased comments that contain negativity, and to some of us, a fallacy (sp?) towards our government, economy, policies, etc...
Comments as well (I'm posting this anonymously for a reason). Whenever I post a comment that will go against something I read in an article that will have a conservative view to it, maybe 75-80% of time time it will get modded down to -1 (52 posts, no flames, Karma 2, you do the math). Whatever happened to getting 2, 3, 4, everyone's side of the story?
The moderation system on slashdot is awful and wrong. Using an analogy of a hostile government. If I say anything remotely conservative, I will get modded down. Hmm... seems fair enough.
I know the editors will not read this comment, nor will anyone who read this care, but I hope that anyone who does read this post will maybe understand that sometimes you should take into consideration other people's ideas and thoughts and not just have a one track mind and think that whatever Slashdot rights is legitimacy
--Anon
Threre is a HUGE difference between censoring people's emails (what china will do) and simply reading people's emails. In my opinion, anything sent in plain text over the internet should be considered public anyway!
I can't believe you got a +5 for say reading email and censoring an entire population are the same thing. My God!
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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.