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Human Rights and a Code of Conduct for China's Web
Ian Lamont writes "Human Rights Watch is preparing a code of conduct that specifies how major Internet service providers and portal operators should deal with Internet censorship in China. An officer for the group expressed concern that the Chinese government is 'setting the standard on control of the Internet' and also singled out international companies working in China for preemptively blocking access in 'anticipation of requests from the government' rather than waiting for orders from Beijing to block access. China has recently blocked YouTube following the posting of videos about the Tibetan protests, but has been unable to completely stop the flow of Tibet-related information in and out of China, thanks in part to bloggers and others using spam tactics to bypass Chinese filters."
It's interesting that this should even need to be spelled out. Normally you'd expect companies and the people who run them to have enough of a moral backbone that they don't need external input on things like this.
Because quarterly profits are the only yardstick by which management is rewarded / demoted all other considerations have gone out the window. As long as there is not direct link between ethics and profits I highly doubt any of this will make a difference.
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Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
ok seriously why are why having the Olympics there again?
I guess the day the world can't come to the conclusion that oppression is not unethical, is the day that humanity will lose all form of justice. I understand this isn't just about Tibet, but the overall censorship of China's web. However, when a country is censoring its own atrocities from its people it is a global problem.
No one cares of course, China's disregard for environmental and humane concerns of its own people give the rest of the world the cheapest goods.
Math
If the Chinese government chooses to block YouTube, or any site which publishes articles critical of the government, that is their right. Every government, whether you like it or not, has the right to dictate the rules within its boundaries.
Wrong. Governments are only valid if they rule with the consent of the people. Otherwise, they can and must be destroyed.
To use a very bad example, what if the U.S. blocked access to sites which promote Al Qaeda's agenda? Would that be ok? Shouldn't we be allowed to see that propaganda? Is that on par with what China is doing?
The US cannot do that, because it has no right to tell people what they can or cannot see. Should the US government do this, it becomes invalid and no longer has the right to govern, and must be overthrown.
There is no human right to the internet. Billions of people survive every day without being addicted to staring at a glass screen from which images produced by radiation appear.
There are rights to be able to read and gather information unhindered by government intervention.
Yes, it would be nice if every government around the world produced a utopian society where everyone could rollick and play as they pleased, where the people could read whatever they wanted, but that's not going to happen anytime in the next thousand years. The best one can do is not support those countries who do have real human rights abuses (China being one in particular) by not buying their products or supporting those who want such abuses to continue.
And here I thought freedom of expression, freedom to assemble, freedom of the press were already human rights. I guess in your mind people don't have those, or that the government "grants" them to us.
Please, do everyone a favor, and move to China.
It's not just ISPs and sites who can be faulted for co-operating with foreign censors. Much of the censorware used by such governments is developed in America. A great step would be to introduce legislation to expose which companies are selling censorware to foreign governments. This a tool of oppression, and exports should be scrutinized like weapons.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/opinion/09jardin.html
like the geneva convention stopped atrocities in war? please
human rights watch writing a code of conduct won't convince china of anything. it won't change its ways. if american companies didn't help them, they'd get someone else to help them, or do it themselves
what's more important to you? helping human rights in china? or shaming american companies? the shaming of american companies should be put aside in pursuit of the larger more noble goal: getting free imformation to chinese citizens
how do you do that? writing a code of conduct? preventing china from using your expertise to build their firewall?
no and no
you defeat the great firewall of china with better guerilla apps. anyone who care about this issue should forget about shaming codes of conduct or shushing american companies that helped the technocrats in beijing
instead what you do is you build proxy servers, ip obfuscators, p2p web traffic redirectors, content caching, etc., etc.: you wage war with the great firewall with china, you smuggle content around it, you render all of the technocrat's efforts to screen what chinese citizens see fruitless and pointless and a joke
that's where you put your effort
shaming colluding american companies or writing well-intentioned but pointless codes of conduct means nothing. results mean something
get to writing those guerilla apps if you really care about this issue. shaming american companies or writing ivory tower codes of conduct is pointless if you really want to help regular chinese escape their hermetically sealed tomb of sanitized braindead propaganda
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Can we get a code of conduct here in the USA about ISPs not blocking content? And, can we get Comcast to sign it?
Let's create a workaround and eliminate the need for for them entirely. That would be much more likely to bring about the desired result.
What?
If the Chinese government chooses to block YouTube, or any site which publishes articles critical of the government, that is their right. Every government, whether you like it or not, has the right to dictate the rules within its boundaries.
Rights? Governments have no rights. Rights are inherent to the person and not the state. They can neither be granted nor taken away by the state.
That said, Governments do have sovereignty which I agree that China has. However, the Chinese government does not have the right to torture, murder, or repress the freedom of its citizens. It is wrong and the practice should stop.
Now I will admit, I have a very relativistic western view on the matter, but I don't see how you can say that killing protesters even if they are violent is OK.
Even in the LA riots in the states we didn't have soldiers shooting people indiscriminately without attempts to use non-lethal methods.
At the same time, I will agree that its not our business to go into China forcefully with our military and force them to stop (or any nation for that matter) but it doesn't mean we shouldn't ignore the fact they do such a thing.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
It is a mistake to assume that governments still have unlimited leeway to do whatever they want within their borders. That is why we have human rights: to protect individual citizens against their states, and that's why organisations like Human Rights Watch can express opinions on the human rights situation in all countries, including China. In the past sixty years, these rights have grown from what you would probably call utopian ideals into actual legal rights in international law, so much so that the originally non-binding Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, is now considered to be an expression of customary international law. If a notion of customary law is too vague for you, the fact still remains that the great majority of states have signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees the freedom of speech in Article 19, which includes the "freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds". This right can only be restricted in accordance with the provisions of that article. China has signed up to this treaty, although it still has to ratify it. However, as a matter of treaty law it has to refrain from acts which would be incompatible with the purpose of the treaty there's quite a strong argument that arbitrary censorship violates it.
I will be the first to admit that there are all kinds of shortcomings in the protection of human rights through international treaties, but the only point that I want to make here is that you are incorrect when you state that every government "has the right to dictate the rules within its boundaries". That right is no longer absolute, and in large part this is the result of governments providing the stick they are beaten with themselves by signing human rights treaties. It took only sixty years to get where we are now, so the utopian society you mention may be less than a thousand years away.