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."'"
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.
...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.
The internet treats censorship as damage and reroutes around it.
A couple of 30-somethings embark on the ultimate roadtrip
It would probably help if you didn't say things like "The racist Jews at The New York Times simply desire to preserve what little credibility they have remaining..." (Ironically, your blog is still cached by Google.)
You come very close to stepping over the line from "anti-Zionist" to fundamentalist racist in that sentence.
Well in a society that respects free speech he has every right to post that trash. Racist speech is protected.
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
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/
"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
That reminds me of the infamous Bonsai Kitten Website fiasco where a university student did a farcical Website "selling" Bonsai Kitten paraphernalia. The site got banned from just about every hosting company that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) found out about, and the FBI even investigated the site and the people behind it. PETA actually wanted the people behind the site arrested.
It doesn't really matter what you publish; if it is popular enough and there is an Interest Group that doesn't like it then it will likely be censored. If a Website author is rich, then there will be more options, but most people would likely just give up. And if the site was political and controversial, then there may be government "hate crimes" to deal with, blocking from censorware, etc. There is no easy solution to dealing with censorship. If Google just decides it's easier for them to not list the site in their search engine then they will not list it, which makes the site unavailable to those who are not already aware of it.
One solution would be Freenet, but that too is only available to those who know about it and make the effort to install the software and find the proper "keys" to access the site. Freenet too can also be hampered by legislation in Western countries. The same with Tor and the Onion Network. Tor is rather easy to censor since the IP addresses of the proxies are easily available http://proxy.org/faq.shtml.
And there are always the un-brave who just give up trying to say anything in the first place. When one has to worry about SLAPP (unjustified lawsuits to silence people), Law Enforcement (the war on terror, drugs, think-of-the-children, think-of-the-pets), Special Interest Groups, the PC (Politically Correct) crowd, employers data-mining their employees (or potential employees), even DDoS and "hackers" / crackers; self-censorship is probably more prevalent than people realize. Words, ideas, pictures, humour, and just about every form of communication can be seen as dangerous. The Internet was once a relatively easy way to express oneself, but it is getting harder all the time. ISPs are even finding ways to censor P2P traffic that is designed to obfuscate itself.
The only real solution to censorship is to change the attitudes of the people who have the authority and control to influence the Tubes. Since these people are mainly politicians (like Ted Stevens) who are largely ignorant of the technology they legislate and who could care less about the social dynamics of freedom (beyond their own narrow paradigms), the future does not look bright for an unbridled flow of (uncensored) information.
References:
http://www.shorty.com/bonsaikitten/bkgallery.html (Bonsai Kitten mirror)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai_Kitten
http://freenetproject.org/
http://tor.eff.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAPP