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!
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"
...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
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.
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/
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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.
"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