Slashdot Mirror
Report Warns Against Well-Meaning Net Censorship
athloi writes "A report entitled 'Governing the Internet,' was issued Thursday by the 56-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The document, which highlights the increasing environment of internet 'policing' around the world, characterized the practice as 'a bitter reminder of the ease with which some regimes -- democracies and dictatorships alike -- seek to suppress speech that they disapprove of, dislike, or simply fear.' From the article: 'The OSCE report says Kazakhstan's efforts to rein in Internet journalism in the name of national security is reminiscent of Soviet-era "spy mania," and it says Georgian law contains numerous provisions curbing freedom of expression online. Web sites, blogs and personal pages all are subject to criminal as well as civil prosecution in Kazakhstan, and the country's information minister, Yermukhamet Yertysbayev, has vowed to purge Kazakh sites of "dirt" and "lies."'"
Technorati simply banned my site. Google first truncated links from other sites leading to pages on my blog, and when that wasn't enough, they simply had Blogger delete the blog.
No kiddie porn, no copyright violations, not even libel. Critical of America over the war on drugs and Israel over the war on terror though? You bet.
The posts that triggered this orgy of censorship saw me positing the likelihood that Israel had nuclear weapons forward-deployed in other nations. Shortly after the second post in the series, Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli who blew the whistle on their nuke program, got arrested again. It would seem as though there are some subjects Israel would rather we didn't discuss. I guess I can understand that, but since when does Israel get to control what I can or can't say?
They want to pretend censorship like this is only taking place in places like China. That's bullshit. It's happening here in America and with ever increasing frequency.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." -- Johnn F. Kennedy
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Censored by Technorati and now, Blogger too!
fp
since the tulyakev reforms of 2003, you are no longer having your penis cut off for watching the ladies making the sex on computer.
in addition, punishment for gay action reduced from 50 lashes to 3.
kazhak advanced country, as any other, and civilization very high!
Oxymoronic much?
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
If only there were a report that warned against "well-meaning" acts to force people to do (or not do) things against their will in general. That would be cool.
Forcing people to act against their own interests is bad in general. Especially when it's sold as "well-meaning". Censorship is no exception.
from Uzbekistan, namely about how there Potassium is better.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
All governments fear the free exchange of ideas among the people. Don't believe for a femtosecond that any government "cares" for its people or seeks to protect them. The only true function of every government is self-preservation, and increase of power. They hide their intentions for tyranny behind noble sounding goals like "preventing racism" and "protecting children", but have no doubt as to their real motives. Individual people may have good intentions, but governments never do.
Were you "censored" for spamming?
Because that's what you're doing on Slashdot.
you can't entirely shield people from themselves (ie, the thoughts of their fellow citizens). the internet is just a powerful way to do what people do anyways whenever and whereever they congregate: gossip and pass rumors
therefore, it would be more cost effective to censor nothing on the internet, and merely coopt it for your own purposes. pump out your own rumors and lies anonymously, effectively swamping out any anonymous sources of the "truth" with too much noise to get a good signal. people won't know what to believe, and cease to trust the internet as a source of any information about anything
but this approach belies a cold intelligence and understanding about what the internet really represents to a government. the censorship policies made an example of here are not based on anything like that. all that is evident in the actions of these governments is simple fear of the unknown, not leadership cunning
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...and all those other supposedly good things you want without getting the bad interference and ubiqitious filtering, you are fooling yourself.
The internet was much better when it was the wild west. If fact, it is over. We are getting the do-gooders and know-betters running the show, and it is game over, either with dems or reps in charge (excluding Ron Paul who won't win). Our internet will be turned into a PC, child-safe surburb unless we move on to some new dark network.
"road to hell is paved with good intentions."
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
This kind of censorship is something that a real-life Church Lady would do.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
The internet treats censorship as damage and reroutes around it.
A couple of 30-somethings embark on the ultimate roadtrip
It is dirty Uzbeki spies! They jealous of our Potassium export! High Five!
Sure baby, I'll give you my phone number...in Hex
Internet Crime, Ping-pong and rape.
I work with an international governance watchdog, Global Integrity ( http://www.globalintegrity.org/ ), and anecdotally we're seeing a marked increase in online censorship being reported, under democracies and dictators both, even since we started looking at this in 2004. It's like the anti-democracy elements of the world just now figured out how to do this in earnest. We've just begun tracking the issue rigorously this year - we'll let Slashdot know when that report comes out.
Jak se mas?
Yermukhamet Yertysbayev is number 3 prostitute in Kazakhstan with the mouth! I like!
"Yermukhamet Yertysbayev, has vowed to purge Kazakh sites of "dirt" and "lies." "Those who think it is impossible to control the Internet can continue living in a world of illusions," Yertysbayev told the Vremya newspaper in a recent interview."
Which admittedly sounds like he has an obsessive-compulsive disorder related to housecleaning, and possibly bulimia, but it's really not that bad:
"On Thursday, in a speech at OSCE headquarters in Vienna, Yertysbayev insisted his country was committed to democracy and the creation of what he called an "e-government" that would expand Internet access and make "our information sphere more open and our media more free.""
See? So it's all OK. Everyone is very free, and also clean and well-purged.
we will end no whine before its time
That's Borat on bread and water then
The difficulty is that different corporations wield a lot of power in different ways. No one is complaining that 3M is censoring people, but Google and other media and/or advertising companies are going to come up against that accusation a great deal. We need to be able, for reasons of oversight and policy, to better define corporations and what they are and are not allowed to do. If we see it as necessary to prevent broadcast companies from portraying images of naked people, or not have audible swear words between certain hours, then we can probably bring ourselves to find it necessary to extend constitutional protections against censorship to people who use private services that are capable of rendering leverage in that arena similar to a government's.
That said, if the site being 'censored' by google is hosting or verging on hosting hate speech, one might ask if their terms of use weren't violated? You can't ask a private company - or a public one, or the government - to do something illegal to protect a tenuous protection. Hate speech, or speech meant to incite to illegal action, has generally been found to be less protected than 'regular speech'. I might suggest that if one has an important message to spread, one makes every effort not to use invective or monikors that suggest a generalized set of people are acting in a particular way. Transmit data, not bias.
[Ego]out
European Government for teh win!
Take that Americains!
And then you expected American companies not to punish you for doing so?
So very, very naive...
Didn't Digg try this censorship thing once in response to a DCMA takedown request? I recall that it didn't seem to work very well.
The web is too decentralized, too anonymous, and too inexpensive a medium to censor. The government may be able to take down individuals, or individual web sites, but the information can't be surpressed for long. No government can silence the millions of voices with the power to make themselves heard.
And I hope this notion strikes fear down to the very core of the politicians, bureaucrats, and anyone else in positions of authority who would rather we the people not have this power.
A criminal bureaucracy will just harass you until they get what they want -- your money generally. Once they have your money and you're broke, they'll just make sure you toe the line, but otherwise they'll let you be because they recon they cannot get blood from a turnip. It's called a kleptocracy and it's very common now and in History. You are more than welcome to practice warfare against them because it's fair game to try to throw down a dictatorship of thugs.
But the absolute worst nightmare is a bureaucracy of well-meaning weenies, always concerned about your own well-being, sometimes genuinely. Those won't stop harassing you, ever. They know what's good for you. They know you're too dumb to survive without them. And they know that they need to constantly babysit you from cradle to grave. There is no way to get them to stop. You cannot throw money at them to have them leave you alone, because they want you to be happy. Of course, they'll make you miserable. They are the nannycrats.
We are clearly in that case here. And you know the cinch? When nannycrats get ousted, they are surprised, nay, shocked that people don't want their overbearing, crushing attention.
Beware of people who want to make you happy in spite of yourself. Gimme a thug anytime over a nannycrat.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
I admit that I did not read all of your, ah... extensive... writing. But I think that you need to step back and study international politics a bit more. Not everything revolves around M.A.D, and Israel could have any number of reasons to have nuclear weapons. The thing you might do better to come to understand is that the difficulty in the Middle East is far from simplistic; certainly no singular decision at any point in history would have changed that situation to one of easy peace. As I'm sure the recent conflict in Lebanon made all too clear, Israel's primary enemies are not really the sort they can nuke out of existence. Forward-deployed nukes are not going to do them a great deal of strategic good, as deterrents or for more nefarious reasons.
In short, though, you're jumping to about a dozen conclusions without supporting evidence, only thinly reasoned hypotheticals. It is small wonder few are taking you seriously.
[Ego]out
Please don't mod the parent post down -- I asked him to post his content here so we could take a look at it and better evaluate his claims. I actually disagree with his claims and his viewpoint, but he shouldn't be penalized for what I asked him to do.
..about the secret blocklists that are in use in at least Sweden and Finland. In Finland it is to be used against child porn and everyone swore that the lists would not be used for anything else .. until suddenly someone wanted to block out foreign poker sites. Sigh... Atleast in Kazahstan you know.
...
Yet.
(IANAL)
I think it is interesting how there is no mention of western european censorship: Hate speach (France etc...), Holocaust Denial (Germany etc...) We may not like what people say, and may even wish they couldn't say it, but censoring it is wrong. If this commision isn't equally as worried about that, then they are really just trying to look good by identifying the faults of others, rather than effecting change.
And this may be obvious to others but it just occurred to me. Hasn't most trouble, pain, and suffering in the world been caused by movements which "have vowed to purge"?
I'm an athiest, and I used to think that it was religion that caused most of the trouble, pain, and suffering. But I have to admit that athiest regimes have just as much blood on their hands. Then I started chalking it up to human nature (which it may be) but that's not a very useful distinction, what with not being a distinction at all. Recently I've started thinking that it is the idea that we must "cleanse" or "fix" things that is the cause of most evil. The idea that if we could only rid the world of a certain type of person or activity then we'd be much better off. I think that is the flag that indicates trouble. And people of all beliefs and political positions can get into this mindset.
Of course, I have to watch myself as it becomes easy to want to rid the world of people who "vow to purge", which makes me another monster. Instead I try to remind myself I can stand up in opposition to such a thing without trying to purge it. I don't want to kill or dethrone the leader of Kazakhstan, I just don't want him to go after people or their expression in attempt to cleanse things. All things have muddy gray edges, and there are cases where I'm sure this yardstick won't work perfectly. But whenever I find myself saying "the world would be a better place if we could only rid the world of these people..." I stop and check myself.
Anyways, just thought I'd mention it. I think that the ideal world is achieved by not worrying so much about trying to make the ideal world, and just doing your best and enjoying life and letting others do the same.
Cheers.
By attacking The Pirate Bay with child porn allegation and threat of censor, the Swedish police a few weeks ago proved that censorship is impossible to implement in a society which aims to be democratic. It's really as close as you can get to a mathematical valid proof of a societal matter, the experiment goes like this: You limit yourself to censoring the absolutely most horrific thing in society. You wait one year. If The Pirate Bay is still not mentioned in the context of the filter, you might have something that works. If The Pirate bay is mentioned, censorship doesn't work and it never can work. It didn't work.
Don't be crazy anymore!
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -C.S. Lewis
Creative Demolition
It is not like the the censors are sitting somewhere rubbing their hands thinking, Ok, who am I gonna stick it to today...
They all mean well...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I'm glad, your Israel-bashing was bashed back into whence it came from (more detailed anatomy would be off-topic). This censorship does not bother me at all — and not because I support Israel's right to exist, but because the policy of censorship itself can be discussed freely.
On contrast, Chinese censorship is self-perpetuating (or, hopefully, merely self-prolonging), because they can't discuss topics like the very fact of censorship and the alternative forms of government themselves.
This is an even more important difference than that in China censorship is government business, while you have no evidence of your speech having ever been targeted by the US-government.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
No, HTTP is over. Maybe even SMTP and POP.
Is Gopher cool again yet?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I guess that means no more Pravda in Kazakhstan. Bummer. How will the Kazakhstanis now learn about breaking scientific developments?
I had a site once primarily devoted to outdoorsy stuff and survival/preparedness. Somehow I got on the JDL and SCLC shitlist, and started noting my site was being blocked by "net nanny" type filtering software as a "hate speech" site, which was ludicrous. Most likely they saw the "survival" part and just added it to their list by knee jerk reaction. I've investigated since then and found out both those orgs go around and "advise" police departments and various groups on their versions of political correctness, and if you get on their shitlist you can possibly be banned or at least be listed or harassed (email threats for example, stuff like that, and ya, I got some of those).
So ya, I can believe your story.
Yeah but people want to be protected from terrorists. They want to have a big brother looking over their shoulder, making sure they don't do anything immoral. They need the comfort of knowing that in THIS country we don't burn flags, marry gays, have abortions, or play violent games. If it's what the people genuinely want, who are you to say they shouldn't get it?