Slashdot Mirror
Academics Take On Government Net Censorship
Anonymous Brave Guy writes "There's an interesting article from the BBC today about a group of academics at the University of Toronto who are working to investigate and break down government-imposed censorship of the Internet. Are they defending human rights, or simply trying to impose their own beliefs on people from other cultures? Incidentally, one of their people was responsible for the previous Slashdot discussion of 'five fundamental problems with open source'."
the more you try and control it the more behind your back methods will be created.
Are they defending human rights, or simply trying to impose their own beliefs on people from other cultures?
Is there really a difference between the two? Fundamentally, the acknowledgement of "human rights" is a system of belief, born out of our culture. Certainly there have been plenty of cultures which have not accepted any of the principles which we want to "defend" today.
On some level, the concept of "human rights" is a claim that our cultural beliefs are better, and more right, then those that do not agree with them.
Since there is no absolute source of right and wrong in the universe, our own beliefs are the best we've got. And there are certain things that we believe so strongly, that we are willing to impose them on others. What gives us the right to do this? That we are stronger. Nothing else.
We ought to see this for what it is, and stop feeling bad about it.
And in other news today, the Government announced that funding for the University of Toronto had been cut by 50%. A source that would not be identified believes that this is reliation for an effort by academics to reduce censorship of the internet.
An official spokesman at the Education Department could not be reached for comment.
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
"Are they defending human rights, or simply trying to impose their own beliefs on people from other cultures?" Censorship is imposing your values on others, stopping censorship is not. Stopping people hiding information does not force them to have your values.
I disagree. If what Saudi citizens find out about other places via the Internet causes them to reject their Islamic culture and heritage, then perhaps it's a culture and heritage not worth preserving in the first place.
There are plenty of countries that are online, for the most part uncensored, and are able to maintain their culture. Next lame attempt at an argument, please?
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
University of Toronto? Interesting, considering the "Canadian Content"-based censorship laws in Canada, where foreign stations are banned (censored) due to lack of "Canadian Content".
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
When I worked at GTE the company got the contract to lay the fiber optic cable around the border of China and put in the network centers that setup a ring around China. Total control of all the traffic in and out of the country, or so they hoped. A career limiting move came when I wrote Chuck Lee, CEO of GTE, and said we were helping the same Communist government that gave us Tianamen Square and would continue to repress the Chinese people using this technology. But Bean Counters only care about profit and damn the people that get get screwed over in the process.
As a side note, I knew a lad working near me from China who had been at Tianamen Square the day before and then the day after the massacre happened. When he saw what the army had done to their own people he went home, packed and left for Hong Kong and then to the US.
Censorship is only one way the Communists will use to stay in power and shooting another bunch of college kids can happen again.
... are real of course.
What is not real is the suggestion that human liberty and freedom is culturally dependent. That is a lie used by repressive governments to justify policies that really only serve their own interests.
There have been many attempts in Western nations to repress individual rights because of the "common interest", and these rightly strike us as barbaric. No reason to apply different standards to other countries just because they are different.
However... the day I see an electorate in a "culturally different" country freely and democratically vote for a regime that restricts human rights, I'll change my mind.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
"Citizens can't just accept technology at face value."
*looks at Windows-loaded PCs on Best Buy shelf*
Ohhhhh yes they can.
The coolest voice ever.
No it's not. If Islam was a dying thing, like say the aboriginal cultures in Australia, then perhaps there would be an argument there. But religions are always passing converts back and forth. At the moment, IIRC, Islam has some of the highest conversion rates TO it. Which means "Islamic culture" is really in very little danger of going away, and there's no need to "preserve" it.
Plus, cultures are evolving things. American, Chinese, Islamic, whoever. Compare the governments in the Middle East around 1500 to what we have today. You could easily make the arguement that getting rid of the Princes and opening the country up is REALLY preserving Islamic Culture. (preserving it from the corrupt clerics, of course) It's all just a front for cynical politicians to control their populations in the name of God. As far as I'm concerned, the Chinese have more moral justification, since they're just operating under the "It's my party..." defense.
(disclaimer: respects all religions, disrespects all hypocrits)
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
What I understand, freedom of expression is guaranteed in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights
"Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression ; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of fronteirs."
[emphasis added]. So if there is any nation that is not a part of the United Nations, sure, imposing these restrictions on the freedom of the government of these nations would be imposing their own beliefs on these other cultures. This does not sound like what these people are doing, however. There is no excuse whatsoever for government censorship by any government who is a member of the United Nations(this means you, China, United States of America, and Canada).
Sure, one may argue that the United Nations may be unnecessary, outdated, completely irrelevent or otherwise, but as it stands today, we are obligated to fufil our part of the bargain, despite how sometimes we may disagree with it, or alternatively, decline membership to the United Nations and become a Rogue State, with none of the protections to you that The Declaration provides.
These guys sound down-right nuts, though. If a dictator is willing to kill thousands of his own people, what makes you think they won't assasinate you, if you actively mess with them? Kudos to their efforts.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Fascinating. I suppose you think you live in a country with free speech due to some sort of virtue on your part? Perhaps you have managed to overthrow a dictatorial government and replace it with a liberal one yourself?
Seriously, is it any surprise to anyone here that the government is involved in social engineering programs? They've always used any form necessary/available to bend our thinking into what they want their population to be, and as soon as the next far-reaching information/media service becomes available you can bet they'll be using that too.
Resistance is futile.
Let's say we have this little thing called "science" that enables us to approach real truth - not just culturally-relative beliefs about something we call "true." Let's say with science we begin to have an informed vision about how people can live better than the beliefs of their local culture would allow. For instance, we can teach them how to dig latrines instead of shitting upstream of their water supply. We can also teach them how their local leaders are lying to them about what's true, in the scientific sense, when they persist in foisting culturally-relative beliefs about, say, the supposed inherent inferiority of women (perhaps they are the variety of Muslims who justify this with a claim that women "don't have souls").
... well, please get out of the way while those of us who know the power of science to actually discover and share real, useful, even salvational facts about the world give those children the chance to benefit from these truths, and perhaps - if those facts are about ways to establish human liberty and not just about how to build munitions - even encourage them to make their cultures less dangerous to our own.
If you are a post-modern simpleton, who believes that everything is constituted by belief, that one belief is as well-founded as another (because none are founded at all except in social practice), and that suffering from ignorance should be the accepted plight of children born into particularly ignorant and anti-scientific cultures
Because the only other alternative is to wipe out the ignorant, religious savages as they get better at coming after us to enforce their own anti-scientific, anti-human (as we know it) belief sets. And as much satisfaction as some of us might take in battles fairly won against truly evil (because ignorant) populations, surely the satisfaction is sweeter if we can transform them to something approaching civilization (even as we are only approaching civilization, and have not reached it yet - witness the Bush anti-science agenda).
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I live in Dubai, which is the financial capital of the UAE. As net censorship goes, it isn't as bad here as it is in Saudi Arabia or Iran. The censorship is generally applied to "home" based Internet access, while access is open for office based Internet. Initialy, internet access was unproxied, but some neighboring countries complained about having access to "Questionable" material (anyone who has ever studied Middle Eastern politics understands how poisonous it can be), so BAM came the proxy and all the headaches that goes with it. My problem with censorship however is that it encourages the very behaviour it was intended to stop. Whenever I try to visit a site that just happens to blocked, I get so irritated that I can't help but try to defeat the proxy. Worse, there are plenty of legitimate sites that are blocked because of poor filtering parameters. There are plenty of ways around the proxy though, so its more designed to keep children out and clueless adults (The same clueless adults who are afraid of the BIG BAD net). Censorship has nothing to do with "preserving" religious values, it has everything to do with power and maintaining control by witless clerics and hypocrites. Islam flourished when muslims hungered for knowledge, it only started to decline when clerics decided that muslims already knew enough and didn't need to know more. In the UAE, we have this proxy just to shut the neighbors up, I am looking forward to the day when it finally goes down.
You are right that Freenet is very frustrating to use, but I'd rather that something like it exists and be developped so that when we start to really need it, the kinks have been worked out. That's why I run a node although I don't actually browse freenet; it's a kind of donation to what I believe is a worthy project.
It's the same everywhere, really. The first people who bought hybrid cars didn't get machines that worked as well, were as fast and efficient as those we have today (have you seen the 2004 Prius? or the 2004 Civic Hybrid? And soon there'll be Accords and Camrys) and they had to pay a higher price/deal with more problems, uglier designs, etc.
Same with the people who buy version/revision 1.0 of video cards, motherboards, etc. More bugs, higher priced, etc.
But without the early versions, we wouldn't get the killer apps later on.
I'm sure that better routing/whatever will be developped for freenet, and with bandwidth and storage becoming cheaper all the time, the network will be more efficient than it is now at equal number of nodes. It just takes time to get there... Of course there could be some theorical bottlenecks to the project that can't be easily solved without changing some of the fondamentals, but maybe that's possible too without compromising the goals too much.
My 2 cents (canadian).
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
China is poised to become the most economically powerful nation in the history
of the world. You had best care very deeply about goings on in China.
I can only assume this display, "The Chinese people PUT their Goverment in Power PERIOD..."
is an innocent expression of ignorance, and not a troll. If every single
person alive in China during the revolution were still living, they would only
comprise about %25 percent of the population. Seeing as the revoltion ended
in 1949, this is not very likely. But let's, for the sake
of argument, say they are all living. That leaves one billion living human
beings who were born and raised under the rule of a totalitarian regime.
Were you alive when The Peoples' Army crushed the protesters in Tiananmen Square?
Try this one, this one, this one, or this one
You asked "...WHY THE FUCK SHOULD I CARE ?" You should care because if you are
ever in a position where you feel it is your duty to oppose a dictator,
you better pray you get more help than they did.
-- "It was as if the paint factories had decided to deal direct with the art galleries." - Thursday Next