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

Blogs: today's main Freedom Tool

[CyricZ]

Blogs are the modern versions of the small, local newspapers the Founding Fathers had. They allow lone individuals to reach the masses with minimal effort and overhead. It is no wonder that blogs are leading the freedom train.

Re:Blogs: today's main Freedom Tool

[CyricZ]

Every media source is free from fact checking. That includes the Big Media. Hell, if they had done their fact checking then they would have never helped generate as much public support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq as they did.

My fear for the U.S. is...

[gg3po]

The government will use bloggers' desire to be taken seriously as real journalists as an excuse to apply the same kind of censorship the FCC effectively has doled out for some time to the traditional media.

Re:My fear for the U.S. is...

[Black Tezcatlipoca]

The government will use bloggers' desire to be taken seriously as real journalists as an excuse to apply the same kind of censorship the FCC effectively has doled out for some time to the traditional media.

No they wont, blogs are too useful for astroturfing.

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

[Shadow Wrought]

My guess is that a lot of them have drunk the punch, so to to speak. They probably really do believe that all of those external sites extolling the virtues of freedom and democracy really are bad, and so they probably enjoy the challenge of blocking them. Intelligent and educated doesn't always imply open-minded and tolerant; it just ups the odds.

Re:Those who built it

[MourningBlade]

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

You know how you get someone to implement a censorship system for you? You don't hire mean and cruel people, you get a few people who want to do good. Then you set up draconian punishments for violations of speech and thought codes.

Then (and this is the magic ingredient), you tell these people you've hired that their job is to keep people from getting in trouble by preventing the people from violating the speech and thought codes.

Pretty easy, really, and you put people in "helping mode." What's the old quote about "the tyrant may rest, but those who are act for your own good are tireless in their efforts." These people almost definitely believe that they are helping people - saving them from worse punishment.

And they're probably frustrated by how hard people try to prevent them from doing their job.

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.

Whittler's Mudder

[Anonymous Coward]

FTFA: "As more and more governments start restricting what their citizens can say online, those of us who live in relatively open societies need to decide what to do."

And what of those of us who live in relatively open societies where our governments, more and more, are restricting what we can say online?

Duck and cover, perhaps.

Does information want to be free? Do you?

[shanen]

That's a deliberate juxtaposition because these issues are all so tightly related. For example, if information about the abuses of power was freely available, it would often be more difficult to abuse it. On the other hand, if our personal information was more freely available, it could often be used against us. We value our own privacy, but that's essentially the same as saying we want the right of censorship over who knows our personal information. Meanwhile BushCo wants to keep private such things as how the energy policy was created and how and when the decision was made to take out Saddam...

Anyway, my own primary interest is at the personal side of things. I think we need to establish some kind of defensive perimeter around our personal information, or the very notion of privacy will soon be non-existant. That will become just another power used against each of us.

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.

Re:The times they are a changing

[Kesh]

This is not a recent thing, contrary to popular opinion. Things weren't better in the "good old days."

Point of reference: The Alien And Sedition Acts, signed into law by President John Adams in 1798.

Luckily, it didn't last long. But, other laws did. It took us a very long time to stop censoring entire classes of people, and things were still a lot more constrained than today.

It's not an excuse for the abuses of today, but it's false to think things were really better a long time ago. Censorship has existed since the first words were spoken.

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.

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.

Geekspeak

[Doc Ruby]

The best small step you can do to "fight censorship" is to help others communicate. Sure, geeks are known for limited interpersonal skills. But we commune with machines like brothers. And these machines are the engines for widespread personal communication. Getting more people around the US, around the world, to communicate more, and more effectively, harnesses the unbeatable power of expression. Censors benefit from centralized communication bottlenecks; geeks help people route around them. Slashdotters are part of a global mass movement of people helping each other communicate, which trumps the censors every time. I'm proud of you :).