Slashdot Mirror
The Coming Censorship Wars
KentuckyFC writes "Many countries censor internet traffic using techniques such as blocking IP addresses, filtering traffic with certain URLs in the data packets and prefix hijacking. Others allow wiretapping of international traffic with few if any legal safeguards. There are growing fears that these practices could trigger a major international incident should international
traffic routed through these countries fall victim, whether deliberately or by accident (witness the prefix hijacking of YouTube in Pakistan last year). So how to avoid these places? A group of computer scientists investigating this problem say it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to determine which countries traffic might pass through. But their initial assessment indicates that the countries with the most pervasive censorship policies — China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia — pose a minimal threat because so little international traffic passes their way. The researchers instead point the finger at western countries that have active censorship policies and carry large amounts of international traffic. They highlight the roles of the two biggest carriers: Great Britain, which actively censors internet traffic, and the US, which allows warrantless wiretapping of international traffic (abstract)."
Eventually the internet will treat the USA as damage and route around it.
A society that uses Censorship must have something or someone to hide.
I love life, live life to love.
How is that voluntary? In most cases you can only slightly "choose" your ISP, and even then you simply have to get the least evil. Voluntary for the ISPs, but that is not voluntary for the end user, not in the least.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Not about the censorship, that is an issue if you live in a country that does it, but the monitoring? I mean really, do you assume your traffic is private? If so that's a really bad idea. I've always assumed that my traffic going over the net could be watched. Governments aren't the only people who could watch you. For example at work, we have a packet sniffer to help diagnose problems. Usually it sits idle watching nothing. However we can watch any traffic we like, and can do so invisibly. If I want I can mirror a port and watch everything someone does.
So you should always operate under the assumption that your traffic could be watched. Your ISP, another ISP, your government, another government, a crafty hacker, etc all could watch what you are doing. That means that if what you are doing needs to be kept secret, encrypt that shit. Don't send passwords. credit card numbers, etc in clear text. Use things like SSH/SSL for important stuff. Heck use them for non important stuff too if you like, it isn't as though encryption hits modern computers that hard these days.
Point is I don't see why as an individual you'd worry if a foreign country is monitoring your traffic. They could just be one of many. I can see concern if your government is monitoring your traffic, and especially if they are censoring your traffic, but in general, assume shit you do on the Internet is watched.
Before the internet the only way you could have a voice that told a story to a large amount of people was to publish it, which cost a LOT of money and had a gatekeeper (editor) to decide if it was suitable. If your story was exposing corruption within a corporation and that corporation sponsored that publishing house, you have zero chance of it getting published. Publishing is not just the cost of printing, but the distribution network to get it to a large number of widely spread out locations. You could print the story yourself which would cost a small fortune, then drive around delivering it yourself which would cost another small fortune in fuel bills. Then your next problem is how to recoup your money. That's just the print industry. TV and radio are even tighter controlled and much more expensive to break into.
The point is that before the internet the elite had control over the gatekeepers; the gatekeepers can now be bypassed by anyone with access to the internet.
Even when PC's were still very expensive and programs were still complicated, knowledge like how to put up a website was seen as having skills beyond the normal user, internet censorship wasn't really an issue. From there grew some things that weren't illegal at the time but gradually became illegal like publishing child porn. The only reason these types of things weren't illegal in the first place is that when the laws were written they didn't foresee this "internet thingy" and had to be amended to take it into account.
As PC's get cheaper and easier to use, as services pop up that make it easier and easier, not to mention cheaper or even free for average non-technical users to set up some web presence. Throw a stick and you find plenty of examples from MySpace, Facebook, WordPress etc. This means that all those voices who had knowledge of some wrongdoing now have a voice and are increasingly willing to use it. It means that everyone willing to try and scam someone from a safe distance now has a way to do it. It means that everyone with an agenda (good, bad or just sad) now has a way to organize and recruit.
As people spend more and more time with online services which they are interacting WITH other people instead of being a target being sprayed with adverts from corporations in the hopes of leeching some cash for shit they didn't really need. Not only does that take their time and loyalty away from the traditional media companies, it also exposes them to different stories than they see in the mainstream, or different versions of the same stories. That's not to say everything they see / hear / read online is true, but then again that is also true of the mainstream media corporations who they previously DID believe to be true......before the internet made them skeptical.
Without this free access to publishing online, sites like wikileaks would never have gotten than knowledge to the masses. By "the masses" we're not just talking one country, we're talking "the whole planet". Well the whole planet who have not censored them. Without the internet that knowledge would never come out, and the corporations involved would continue to get away with murder because they control the gatekeepers of the knowledge. Any who step out of line have work addresses which can be visited by some "re-educators" with baseball bats. The internet has changed all of that, it's no surprise that the elite are scrambling around trying to silence stuff, they have a LOT of skeletons in their closets which would seriously damage their liberty, money or their reputation which they've carefully managed over the years by controlling the gatekeepers. In short, they have lost control, internet censorship is the only response they have to regaining that control.