Slashdot Mirror
Details On Worldwide Surveillance and Filtering
An anonymous reader writes "Help Net Security is running an interview with Rafal Rohozinski, a founder and principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative, which investigates, exposes and analyzes Internet filtering and surveillance practices all over the world. Rafal provides insight on the process of assessing the state of surveillance and filtering in a particular country and discusses differences related to these issues in several regions, touching especially the United States and Europe. In the US, censorship is more difficult to implement if for no other reason than the court systems offer greater protections for freedom of speech. However, in both places surveillance is on the rise particularly as law-enforcement agencies become more adept at working in the cyber domain."
When we do it, it's to protect the children from porn and terrorism. When the godless commies do it, it's just plain evil.
The sad thing is, we can thwart these efforts, and we have been able to thwart these efforts for a long time. The majority of people, however, do not care as much about thwarting efforts at surveillance as they do about convenience. It is too inconvenient to carry a thumb drive with some software and crypto keys around*; the extra steps of inserting that device into a computer and running the software on it is more than most people are willing to deal with.
* Yes I know that this is not as secure as keeping your crypto keys on your own hardware, but it goes a hell of a lot further than any current methods do, and would require a lot of resources on the part of the government to break across the board (e.g. a targeted attack would work, but if they are going to the effort of targeting an individual they are going to break the crypto anyway, perhaps using the drugs+wrench method).
Palm trees and 8
In the US, censorship is more difficult to implement if for no other reason than the court systems offer greater protections for freedom of speech.
In the US, there are big telecommunication carriers who illegally spy on American citizens, and they go scot-free. The law is a weak line of defense when the government colludes against it. When the "leaders" have set their minds on something, it's going to happen. Laws will be changed, circumvented and ignored. There must be a strong factual defense line. In the case of communication that's cryptography, privacy enhancing routing protocols, redundancy and networks in the hands of the people.
It has those protections because people are so sensitive about those backward steps. Once people stop caring so much (which may have already happened with most people), those freedoms will be eroded.
Palm trees and 8
"The State of World Liberty Project was founded in 2006 by Nick Wilson, an activist and co-founder of the Libertarian Reform Caucus, an organization working to turn the United States Libertarian Party into a viable political party."
Their compiled list is nonsensical at best, and relies primarily on nebulous ratings of "economic freedom" from well known right wing political groups - like the Heritage Foundation.
Also note, that if you discount the economic figures, the top dozen or so countries are scored closely enough to lack any statistical significance.
And the economic figures are all based on taxation - since libertarians have never met a tax they liked.
Further - without being intimately familiar with the culture of each country, I could not honestly evaluate them - and it's glaringly obvious that no effort was made to do so on the site you are promoting.
So in summary, you're flinging out weak, biased data to support a conclusion you've reached without making any reasonable effort to ascertain the actual facts.
I still remain unaware of any specific country with greater overall freedom than the US.
Nothing you've posted could rationally be expected to alter that fact.
Perhaps not in the form of protecting us from communists but it will undoubtedly come back in one form or another. With complacency like yours it will come back even quicker.
The DMCA makes it illegal to publish an entirely open source DVD player. It effectively grants a limitless patent to the DVD CCA which controls who can make a DVD player and under what conditions. Software patents limit my ability to publish ideas I developed on my own having never heard of an obvious submarine patent that will bar me from publishing my software.
What makes you so sure the protesters did that? COINTELPRO was an FBI program in which agents infiltrated protest groups and started riots to make the group look bad, and to give the authorities an excuse to interfere with the group's free-speech rights.