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Report Warns Against Well-Meaning Net Censorship

Posted by Zonk on from the happens-in-democracies-too dept.

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."'"

7 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Lots of this going around by nokilli · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

    --
    Censored by Technorati and now, Blogger too!

    1. Re:Lots of this going around by __aaabsi3154 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The important difference here is that google and technorati aren't governments, nor were their actions mandated by the government. I mean, it sucks for you that google doesn't like you, but it isn't the government's fault.

    2. Re:Lots of this going around by nokilli · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Excuse me, but how do you know their actions weren't mandated by the government?

      We certainly know they censor content when China asks them to.

      Why wouldn't they do the same when the U.S. Government asks the same?

      --
      Censored by Technorati and now, Blogger too!

    3. Re:Lots of this going around by Osty · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The thing about free speech, as protected by the US Constitution, is that it only protects you against the government (not private or public businesses) and it doesn't guarantee you a forum. If the US government chose to censor your blog, that's against the constitution. If Google decided that they don't want your blog on their Blogger service, that's completely within their rights to do and is not a violation of free speech. Without knowing why Google decided to remove your blog (did the Israeli government really pressure them?), there's not a whole lot you can do about it.

      That said, you can still say what you want. You just need to find another forum. Find a web hoster that's sympathetic to your cause (meaning they won't drop you) and host your blog there.

    4. Re:Lots of this going around by nokilli · · Score: 3, Interesting

      OK. The formatting is going to suck though...

      M.A.D. R.I.P.

      (If you haven't already done so, please read the Iranian nuke vs. Israeli nuke post, you can consider this post to be a continuation and/or expansion of the points made therein.)

      M.A.D. of course stands for Mutual Assured Destruction.
      It is what passes for sanity these days in international affairs. That
      said, it is also enjoying over a half-century of success. M.A.D. is the
      policy that justifies the nuclear arsenals being deployed throughout
      the world. The Soviet Union had them because the U.S. had them. France
      and the U.K. had them because the Soviet Union had them. China had them
      because all of the above had them. India had them because of China,
      Pakistan because of India. Now we see North Korea has them: they have
      them because we have them, we're the adversary sitting on the other
      side of the D.M.Z.

      Every nation in possession of nuclear weapons
      today has them because they're afraid some other nation has them and
      they're afraid that if they don't similarly arm themselves, their
      nation may only exist in the future as an entry in a history book.

      Every
      nation but one of course: Israel. Israel has no nuclear-armed
      adversaries. To be sure, it has adversaries aplenty, arguably of its
      own making, but it has demonstrated repeatedly now that its military --
      as provided for by the U.S. taxpayer -- is handily capable of defending
      against any manner of aggression these adversaries are capable of
      producing.

      The other way of saying this is that Israel is the
      only nuclear nation in the world today that is not employing M.A.D. as
      the rationale for possessing its nuclear arsenal. Israel is doing
      something else.

      (that's alarming because M.A.D., as policy, works. Israel pursuing some other policy therefore is really terrifying.)

      Here is a story by The Sunday Times titled Israel plans nuclear strike on Iran .
      So if you're wondering why it is I feel compelled to bring this subject
      up again, there you go. Israeli Prime Minister Ohmert recently
      acknowledged Israel was in possession of nuclear weapons too, and an
      entire post could be dedicated to the incredible hypocrisy seen
      expressed by our media in response, but what is likely a sober and
      factual report on impending nuclear war takes top billing today.

      Israel
      is set to take the world into nuclear war. And why? We are told time
      and time again that it is because it can't permit Iran to possess
      nuclear weapons. The Sunday Times story even trots out the
      "Israel must be wiped off of the map" quote attributed to Iranian
      President Ahmadinejad as rationale, even though it's been shown that he
      never said any such thing. It is being drilled into our heads that a
      nuclear Iran must mean the end of Israel. That M.A.D., a policy that
      has kept the world free of nuclear war for over fifty years -- and
      despite the bitterest hostilities between opposing nations -- cannot
      possibly work between Israel and Iran. And so therefore America must
      attack, or at least, look the other way as Israel attacks in its stead.

      Of
      course, this reasoning is flawed, its conclusion blatantly false. The
      established precedent is that M.A.D. works. Not only that, the
      precedent is that nations locked in cold war eventually tire of it and
      learn to accept the other side. I made this point before: if Iran had
      gone nuclear back in 1967, the internationally recognized border
      between Israel and Palestine would undoubtedly be the de facto border
      today and we'd likely see peace in that part of the world where we now
      see nothing but war. It is the huge imbalance of power in the

  2. Increasingly common restrictions. by metrometro · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. Western Europe by Monty845 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.