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Users Rage Against China's 'Great Firewall'
slugo writes with a CNN article about young professionals increasingly aware of the small part of the internet they're allowed to play in. Intelligent and internet-savvy, these users are frustrated by China's overactive concern for internet health. "Yang Zhou is no cyberdissident, but recent curbs on his Web surfing habits by China's censors have him fomenting discontent ... Yang's fury erupted a few days ago when he found he could not browse his friend's holiday snaps on Flickr.com, due to access restrictions by censors after images of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre were posted on the photo-sharing Web site. "Once you've complained all you can to your friends, what more can you do? What else is there but anger and disillusionment?" Yang said after venting his anger with friends at a hot-pot restaurant in Beijing. The blocking of Flickr is the latest casualty of China's ongoing battle to control its sprawling Internet. Wikipedia and a raft of other popular Web sites, discussion boards and blogs have already fallen victim to the country's censors."
Actually the censor and two other journalists were fired.
Jose Padilla is an American citizen who was first detained as a material witness, then deemed -- by administrative fiat, not by any due process of legal action -- an enemy combatant and transferred to military custody; when his attorney filed a habeas corpus petition, the administration fought it all the way to the Supreme Court, finally winning at that level, and was then challenged again in a different jurisdiction, where a an appeals court deemed Padilla's indefinite detention lawful. Just to be extra safe, last year's Military Commisions Act, helpfully passed just before the Republican party lost its control of Congress, then proceeded to explicitly and absolutely strip away the power of civil courts to hear habeas corpus petitions pertaining to "enemy combatant" detainees, and further stripped the jurisdiction of any civil courts to hear appeals of a military comission's decisions or constitutional challenges of the use of such commissions.
There is no bloody way that's constitutional, but Bush and the former Republican Congress did everything they could to ensure that challenges will take years at the least. Any effective challenge to a detainment would have to begin with the arduous task of getting the Military Commissions act struck down (habeas corpus is guaranteed by the Constitution, and power to hear cases arising under the Constitution is granted to the courts directly by the Constitution with no ability for Congress to take that away), a process which would likely take the rest of this decade and might not even succeed, given the current makeup of the Supreme Court.
Unfortunately, that is not my (very limited) experience. For example, an American-educated Chinese expatriate I knew who had been living in Virginia for several years still believed that Taiwan and Tibet both clearly belong to China, and that any talk otherwise was just insanity. Oppression can be pretty powerful if you don't know any different, and the ability and willingness to unlearn things that aren't true is not exactly mankind's greatest attribute.