Making Small Steps Against Censorship

JD writes "BBC News has an article about online censorship, blogs in particular. It points out that 'perhaps we need to accept that small gains and slight shifts in direction can make a difference to people's lives, and work for them instead of trying to blast down the walls of repression with a single blow.' Whittling away may be the only realistic way to see change happen."

Comments

Those who built it

[soupdevil]

To me the most interesting part of this is the group of programmers who have built and who maintain this giant filtering, spying apparatus for China. They appear to be competent, and they're probably intelligent and educated, and I would guess that they have access to most of the information that they deny to their fellow citizens.

So what's in it for them? How do they feel about what they do? Anyone have a link to any information about them?

Re:Those who built it

[Tackhead]

> > > So what's in it for [the programmers who build the Great Firewall of China]? How do they feel about what they do? Anyone have a link to any information about them?
> >
> >
> > AFAIK, a lot of this gets done by a variety of American companies, who are quite happy providing and customizing their filtering software for anyone willing to pay up. Unlike cryptographic software, there aren't any restrictions on the export of filtering software, and the continual efforts of users to get around the software provide a steady revenue stream.
>
> Well, if that's true, it's kind of evil, maybe even racist, isn't it? It's one (fairly bad) thing if China decides to exclude themselves from the global dialog. It's another (really bad) thing if we actually help them to do it.

What's racist about it? Developers code bits. Bits don't care where they're used.

There's a word for China: beta site.

The USSR and former Socialist Republics were the alpha site. The implementation collapsed under the weight of its own bureaurcacy. You're doing it with paper, not computers, so you're reliant on humans. The fundamental scaling limitation is that because humans can be bought - can betray you - so, for every layer of Secret Police you implement, you have to add another layer of S00per-S33kr1t Police on top of it. East Germany's STASI was the canonical example; an economy imploded because 30% of the population were paid informants on each other.

China, as the beta site, is doing something new: an industrialized society with totalitarian controls over information. The system is automated - avoiding the risk of implosion. The system works much like the standard USSR/DDR model, however, in that prohibited information is blocked from the population.

Full implementation of the production version will be even slicker. Unlike the Chinese model, where citizens know they've've crossed the line (because the request for that "interesting" URL was blocked, or because the email to that "interesting" person never got delivered), the live system will simply log the data for future reference and cross-archiving - it'll be done automatically, avoiding the problem that crashed the alpha site under heavy load.

Give a subversive enough rope, and he'll hang himself. And unlike the beta site, the production version will enable society to track its unreliable elements until they've exposed all of their secrets and, by extension, all of their friends' secrets.

Absolute social control, with minimal loss of economic productivity, and (unlike China), practically no diminishment of civilian morale, because everyone thinks they're still free-as-in-speech. Quite clever, really, and the Chinese (as one of the few societies that doesn't really have the morale problem that the beta version might induce in the target market) still manage to benefit by testing the beta version for a free-as-in-beer cost.

Everybody involved with the project - on both sides of the Pacific - wins.

The times they are a changing

[metlin]

It is unfortunate that we have gotten to the point where we have to talk about defeating censorship - it has permeated our society so much that we've grown to accept it. How did this even happen, how did we let it come so far? Several generations are to blame, but more importantly, those that were blind to the fact that this was happening in the first place.

Even today, look around you - most people simply do not care about what is happening, or how their rights are being trampled on, or even that they have any rights at all. The republic is not of the people anymore, it belongs to our corrupt politicians trying to remake things in the way that benefits them.

Really, really unfortunate. :-/ Leave the great wall of China, in the great US of A, we've the classic, "Ihr Papieren, bitte!" scenario.

small steps

[howman]

unfortunately our rights get taken away in huge leaps and bounds yet we are left with this advice that we need to take them back in small steps or nudge the course of law like a goldfish shouldering a tanker.
Does anyone else feel that these are OUR RIGHTS to begin with and we should not let them be touched at all? I mean you see someone messing with your new car, you step up and sort it right away, you don't wait till the car is stolen and have the police bring you back one piece at a time from the chop shop.

Slashdot itself is doing censoring

[Anonymous Coward]

For me Slashdot is doing some type of censoring on their own too. So I am a bit curious why they announce such an article.

Anonymous posts are limited to 10 posts now (ok we can live with that) but this new 'enter text shown in this image' is beating the hell out of me. Sometimes the chars are so hard to read that it's impossible to enter the right letters. Now if it's hard for me sometimes to read the letters how do disabled people or people with heavy eye problems feel, they are totally excluded from commenting on Slashdot because they barely are able to enter correct letters. Then there is another problem with anonymous posts a bug in the script or so. When you enter something and press submit too fast you get a message telling you that your last comment was not long ago and that you at least need to wait 2 minutes.. Unfortunately due to the bug you can easily wait 5 mins, 6 mins, 10 mins, 20 mins (which get shown too) and nothing much happens. That pretty much sucks.

If China was smart...

[Travoltus]

they'd give everyone video blog access, especially anonymously.

By the time the abusers - the anonymous stalkers, defamers and trolls - got done with the system - no one would believe anything that comes from the masses anyway.

Recently, there was an article about how the American press is less apt to use anonymous sources for their stories now, especially after the whole Quran-gate incident. There's a lesson to be learned in this if you're a totalitarian government trying to hold onto power while transitioning to democracy.

In short, the truth could hide in plain sight among the static. The dissidents would be silenced, nonviolently, by the very system they rely on.

Re:Abotu blogs and censorship...

[MightyMartian]

I think we've got separate private censorship (as in corporate or private websites). Certainly a company, group or individual has the right to moderate (even to the point of blatantly censoring) a forum. One form is movie rating systems, where studios have agreed to what factors will play into what rating a movie gets. While we may disagree with those rating systems (I know Roger Ebert has some big problems with the current system), the fact is that it is the action of a group of privately-owned companies.

On the other side is government controlled censorship, where governments make writing certain things illegal, amd use the force of law to assure that certain types of speech are stifled.

Distributed Blogging

[HFShadow]

Why have no blog sites come out with some form of distributed / anonymous blogging? Something similar to freenet, but optimized for blogs. It seems like a relatively simple idea to keep simple text anonymous when so much work is being put into making anonymous P2P systems.

All it would take is a simple little client app that connects to other peers around the world. A checkbox saying "Connect me directly to xxx.blogservers.com" could be turned on for users in the USA / Canada where freedom of speech isn't a problem and everyone. Give the client app the ability to read blogs (as well as having them web accessable) and I don't see why this wouldn't succeed. It certainly would be far safer than ranting about your government on an non-ssl'ed connection.

colonial newspapers vs blogs

[snooo53]

I disagree. The main difference with blogs today is that there are millions of them that only reach a small unconnected group of individuals.

Those colonial newspapers were few in number but reached almost 100% of a community (either directly or by word of mouth). It was a major form of entertainment, and could enact major social change.

The difference is today we have thousands of entertainment outlets as compared to a few dozen in colonial times. It may be easier now to reach millions around the globe, but it's harder to get anoyone to read in the first place. It's also harder to get a group of individuals with enough in common and close enough proximity to actually affect changes in government or whatever social cause you have. There's just too much noise out there on the internet.

But don't forget, the scale has grown.

[CyricZ]

The population a single blog reaches may be ten or fifteen times the population a colonial paper reached. Indeed, the scale has grown significantly between the 1700s and now. These days the cross-linking between blogs makes up for the fact that one particular blog doesn't reach 100% of a community. Over the span of several blogs, in the form of a blogwork (ie. a network of blogs referencing each other's content), the ideas are eventually propagated to a vast majority of the population.