Senate Bill to Subsidize Anti-Censorware Research

Senators Wyden (D-Ore.) and Kyl (R-Ariz.) introduced the Global Internet Freedom Act earlier this month, setting aside $60 million over two years "to develop and deploy technologies to defeat Internet jamming and censorship." Of course they don't mean libraries and schools in this country -- they're talking about countries like China, as Kyl et al. explain in a National Review article a few days ago. I guess it wasn't confusing enough to (1) subsidize censorware and (2) criminalize researching it -- we also need to (3) subsidize researching it. How about forbidding American corporations from trading censorware goods or services to these "repressive governments," wouldn't that be a good start? Update: 10/30 03:37 GMT by J : Here's the Wired story from early this month on the version that was introduced in the House.

(Sen. Wyden also teamed up last month with Sen. Cox (R-Calif.) on a little bitty resolution standing up for your fair use rights before the tank parade of the DMCA.)

Comments

The contradiction

[rknop]

The contradiction comes from the fact that our government-- especially Congress-- is not a single-headed entity, but a multi-headed entitiy pulling in lots of different directions. As a result, lots of contradictory noises will get made.

Indeed, the more often it acts like a single-headed entity pulling in one direction, the scarier it is. We come in danger of "groupthink", and worrying things like expression divergent opinions become labelled as "unpatriotic", and scary laws like the DMCA (which passed without dissent) or parts of the US PATRIOT act (I'm thinking the library stuff here) getting passed.

-Rob

Re:The contradiction

[Montreal Geek]

I don't see any contradiction.

The fact that a governement wants to encourage restricting avaliable information to the subset it approves (via censorship) is not incompatible to wanting to defeat the same mechanism in place in other places to coerce that subset to be the same as theirs.

Of course, the US governement would want to make sure that no other country can do the same. This way, the insignificant other 95% of the human race can bask in the greatness that is the (properly sanitized) Internet as defined by them.

This is all self consistent. (And scary).

--MH

You can see it now...

[MosesJones]

Judge: So who ordered you to perform this research ?

PhD: Err... the US Goverment

Judge: Are you aware that this breaks the DMCA ?

PhD: Not really, I mean the goverment asked me to do this, they wouldn't ask me to break the law would they ?

Judge: US Goverment did you ask this PhD student to break the law ?

US Goverment: I've never heard anything so ridiculous when would we ever do that ?

Judge: Nixon ?

USG: Apart from then

Judge: Iran-Contra ?

USG: Apart from then .... continue for two hours

USG: Anyway the Goverment never got convicted then, so that means we have a precedent...

Judge: Good point, Mr PhD Student I sentence you to 10 years in prison for violating the DMCA and 5 years for mis-use of federal funds.

PhD: ?!

USG: Nice touch.

True, for if there is no sin to resist

[Adam Rightmann]

what does that say about one's state of grace? As a Catholic, I recognize the sinfulness of pornography (in most cases), yet, when I refuse to succumb to the lure of such lurid depictions, I triump over sin. I would not have that opportunity if my interent connection was filtered, and I would eventually have a weakened moral system.

The Vatican has one of the world's great collections of erotica (for research purposes), and you would be very hard pressed to find a more moral, less sinful group of men in the world.

Do I Need To Say It?

[limekiller4]

A absolutely love the fact that we, as a country can, with a straight face, seek to prevent our own citizens from seeing certain things and at the same time subsidize methods to defeat such techniques in other countries ...all while maintaining a straight face.

But then, I guess if we can subsidize murder in other countries when it suits us and then have the chutzpah to call the same done to us as "terrorism," this shouldn't actually come as a shock, should it?

Just an idea

[ninjadoug]

How about an interview with a normal everyday user in China (i.e. the chinese version of the average /. reader) asking what it is like to be a computer user/nerd over there

Forbidding business?

[Alethes]

How about forbidding American corporations from trading censorware goods or services to these "repressive governments," wouldn't that be a good start?

That will work just about as well as forbidding the export of cryptography to rogue nations. It's assuming those governments are not capable of finding somebody that will either ignore the ban or just find somebody within their own ranks to write the software for them.

Geez, they could just have students write censoring proxy servers as projects and use the best one to censor the whole nation.

One part I take issue with

[truthsearch]

(e) LIMITATION ON AUTHORITY- Nothing in this Act shall be interpreted to authorize any action by the United States to interfere with foreign national censorship for the purpose of protecting minors from harm, preserving public morality, or assisting with legitimate law enforcement aims.

"Preserving public morality." The United States Congress's definition of morality. Because if they mean the foreign countries' definitions of morality, that would counter the entire bill. "Legitimate law enforcement." The United States definition of legitimate law enforcement, which these days is being contested by the public. To China, restricting internet access is a legitimate act of law enforcement. As to morals, I don't know what the Chinese government is thinking, but I would think part of their objection to free internet access is their thought that democracy is immoral. Of course the Chinese government is also afraid of what democratic ideas would do to their careers. But I'm afraid this will be interpreted as yet another abuse by the US of its power in the world.

Re:finally

[Christianfreak]

This is a troll but I'll bite.

I am a Christian. I believe that porn is morally wrong (For reasons other than "God said so" but that's a discussion for another day.). I also believe it is wrong to censor porn because some people don't have problems with it. I would love porn to go away but that would require a change in people that view it and I understand that you can't legislate morality people have to be moral on their own.

Just like we can't bring morality by legislating a technology that can censor, we really shouldn't be legislating against that technology either. We have free speech in the U.S. and nothing should be allowed to come between us and that freedom. But people have the freedom to choose to censor things. I don't want to see porn so I don't go to porn sites. I don't need a technology to censor that because I can choose on my own and I've used the Internet long enough to make sure I don't accidentally do that. What about a child? If we ban censoring technology can parents still get software that that helps keep them from coming across porn? We do need better parents but buying such software should be a parent's choice and it shouldn't be legislated one way or the other.

That said I'm now going to say its not "right-wing Christians" that are producing or mandating censorware. The people who are doing that corporations which after they develop a technology they come on TV screaming "protect the children" which insites some people, including some Christians to demand it. If censorware is legislated then certain companies make lots of money. So it all comes down to money.

And finally I'm not rabid I've had all my shots.

In the long run, I'm not sure it matters ...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

... that the US government tries to censor the Net at home, if they're funding research like this. The fruits of this research will spread around the world at the speed of electrons. I can easily see a situation in, say, 2006 where a) the US has developed compact, easily distributed anti-censorware tools and got them into China, b) China has realized the futility of trying to control people's Net usage when such tools are available and given up, and c) US Net usage suffers from increasing restrictions that do nothing to slow down the h4x0rz but makes everyone else's life more difficult than it has to be. And then what? Why, then, the friendly folks in China start e-mailing innocuously named files ("vacation_pics_from_Beijing.zip") to their friends and relatives in the US, and ...

Freenet just asked for money

[Britz]

In the release statement of Freenet 0.5 on Slashdot yesterday it was noted that the project needs money. Am I the only one wondering about this coincedence? Since Filesharing is possible over Freenet (among many other anti-censorship uses) it will probabely get nothing.

Glaring Loophole in the Bill

[The Importance of]

LawMeme points out a glaring loophole in the bill.

Re:finally

[swillden]

I understand that you can't legislate morality people have to be moral on their own.

Stated more strongly: Enforced morality is of no value.

We do need better parents but buying such software should be a parent's choice and it shouldn't be legislated one way or the other.

I also think the knee-jerk /. reaction on this issue is incorrect: The application of censorware at home does not automatically imply lazy/bad parents. Even good parents (I think I'm one, I know my wife is one) can't keep an eye on their children every second of every day.

Here's an anecdotal example that happened in my home on Saturday: My wife came out of our closet to see an explicit photograph of an anal sex act on the screen of her computer, with our five year-old son trying to figure out what it was (luckily it was an ad and words partially obscured things -- not the "key" parts but enough to make it difficult for my son to figure out what was what).

She had been in the room just moments before, and what he was doing on the computer was completely innocuous. How did he get there so quickly?

When she told me, I grabbed my laptop, ssh'd into my router/server, which is running a transparent squid proxy, checked the logs and reconstructed the events.

What my five year-old had done was:

• Mispell "disney.com", instead typing "dicney.com" which is a meta-search engine of some sort.
• He was looking for games, so he clicked on "Games", part of a link entitled "Card Games" (he can't read yet, but there are words he recognizes).
• He got back a page of search results and clicked one at random, which took him to an on-line casino.
• Apparently it had either a banner ad or a popup for "sex.com", which he clicked, probably because it was flashy.

I'm not sure if he clicked something else or if it was just a bunch of popups directly from sex.com (the log gets pretty busy), but a bunch of pretty raunchy stuff came up.

Elapsed time from the GET of dicney.com to the flood of sexual material, according to the squid timestamps: 18 seconds. Anyone who thinks that it's possible to supervise your children every second of the day has never been a parent, and particularly not a parent of multiple children.

Now, my older children know a little more about "things", but this one is not ready to deal with sex, and particularly not the raunch that came up. For that matter, the older ones aren't ready to deal with S&M and anal sex, but they've been taught at school that when such stuff starts to come up on the screen the correct response is to "crash" the computer -- meaning hit the power button (since popups spawn popups spawn popups and it's nearly impossible to close them all).

I'm not quite ready to install censorware yet, but I can certainly see how it would be helpful. At the moment I've just switched the kids from IE to Mozilla and disabled popups. And when they're on the computer and I'm working where I can't see their screen I keep an eye on the squid logs.