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Israeli Bill Would Allow Secret Blacklists For Websites
jonklinger writes with the lead from his report on a move to hamper internet freedom in Israel: "Israel is to attempt, again, to pass a bill that authorizes police officers to issue warrants to Internet service providers to block or restrict access to specific websites involved either in gambling, child pornography or copyright infringement. The bill itself proposes that such administrative procedures shall be clandestine and that court decisions shall be made ex-parte, where some of the court's ruling will not be even dislosed to the owner of the website, and the court may hear and use inadmissible evidence."
Oooh secret courts! Censorship! Illegally-obtained evidence!
So much for "never again". We have become our enemy.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
between "person who blogged about Olmert's overly aggressive war against Lebannon" and "Subversive Hezbollah sympathizer," that line needs to be in clear public view. It is a symbol of a country's bravery in times of fear. Ex-parte, non-disclosed proceedings will make it impossible for people to know the "why" and the balance the court has placed on fighting crime vs. sacrificing free speech. Without that visibility, there is zero chance that the line will be held in place, uninfluenced by politics.
Of all the people that I assumed would be on guard for the State taking powers that could easily be abused to silence the minority, I thought it would be them.
While there's potentially merit in your argument, I think most people worldwide would agree that "government censorship through secret court proceedings using illegal evidence" is not a beneficial protocol for... well, any country. This proposal isn't a slippery slope, it's a canyon drop-off, and at the bottom is "government-approved communication" and "arrests without trial for dissenting speech".
Last I checked Human Rights were called Human Rights, not qualified with "only for citizens of Country-XYZ". If a state wants to be considered civilised then it should have a civilised perspective on and adhere to human rights, whether it be Israel, China, USA or South Sudan.
Irony. You'd think that a country home to so many Jews would remember how well that worked in Germany.
While there's potentially merit in your argument...
No, there's no merit to censorship. Its all about control and who rules. End of discussion.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Which MP(s) are behind this initiative?
block or restrict access to specific websites involved either in gambling, child pornography or copyright infringement.
It used to be a joke when "copyright infringement" was put in the same category as serious offences, see this wonderful video. Are these politicians out of their mind, or are these people bought and paid for as the video suggests?
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
I always love the "freedom of speech may work in the US but its not necessarily appropriate for my country..."
Freedom of speech isn't the only thing at issue here; consider a company known to clandestinely distributing malware / legitimate software that monitors user's activities by reporting back to its servers. I'm talking about CarrierIQ which is installed in many mobile devices; reporting back keystrokes, messages etc., getting access to data even before it is encrypted on the device.
There was lots of noise about a year or so ago as I recall; followed by total silence. The Trevor Eckart's video revealed potential abuse of several federal laws, and yet the company seems to be operating unscathed.
Now, the Israel govt. has the choice to bring legal proceedings followed by lengthy trials etc.; but seeing as this matter has been hushed; might feel the publicity might not be worth the effort. So it could simply issue a blacklist order on all ISPs to simply blacklist the offending IP address and be done with it; pending investigation. This is not a Freedom of Speech issue; more of a national security issue.
There could be many more such scenarios.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
And let /. be the first on that secret list.
If democratically elected officials are following due process, and coming to arbitrary conclusions, their people deserve it, and need to elect someone else. That is a lesser burden on society than unfettered crime on the internet that does not go away.And if /. be deemed to be a dangerous site, so be it.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I don't recall Israel saying they wanted to kill all Palestinians. The converse however is not true.
will not be even dislosed to the owner of the website
And a few consonants will be removed.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
If they are trying to do good in a legal way, why does the government need such secrecy?
i.e. If you're not doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
>Each nation should be able to legislate and govern internet access in the way it sees fit; and best suite for its citizen's good.
They way you phrased this, someone could interpret you as saying that all governments act in the best interests of the people they govern.
That can't be what you meant, though, because I know nobody's *that* naive in this day and age.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Note that the proposed law gives the power to censor to the Israeli justice minister. Yaakov Neeman, the current justice minister, is kind of weird. News articles:
There's a sizable ultra-orthodox faction in Israel which wants a political system where rabbis run things. Neeman is from that faction. Israel already has rabbinical courts, but they're currently restricted to ruling on religious issues and divorces. Neeman has said he wants to expand the authority of rabbinical courts, which in Israel are dominated by ultra-othodox rabbis.
Ultra-orthodox groups are very anti-Internet. This goes way beyond censoring pornography. There are special censored ISPs that only allow a list of 400 approved sites, most of which are religious.
So that's where this may be going, or at least where one faction would like to go. (Israel politics is currently deadlocked worse than US politics. There are many parties, none with a majority, and shifting coalitions. Different factions control different ministries as part of the deals made to put coalitions together. Just because the Justice Minister wants something doesn't mean the Government does.)
Except that if you want to get into politics in Israel you have to recognize the state of Israel as a Jewish state.
In other words, people who belong to certain religious group are more equal than others.
I don't recall Israel saying they wanted to kill all Palestinians. The converse however is not true.
There certainly are extreme factions within the Palestinian community who want to kill all Israelis, just like there are extremists in Israel which want to kill all Palestinians. Wasn't it Rabbi Meir Kahane who called Arabs a "cancer" that had to be cut out of the flesh of Israel? How do his utterances differ from those of the most hateful of the Hamas extremists? The man advocated the abolishment of democracy in Israel in the event that Israeli Arabs became more numerous than Jews to secure the dominance of the Jews because otherwise, by the rules of democracy, the Jews would get outvoted. To me that sounds like a pretty close description of the apartheid state in S-Africa. There are ignorant fanatics on both sides, your attempts to try to convince us that the viewpoints of the most extreme of the Palestinian fanatics are the views of all Palestinians everywhere just serves to highlight how intolerant and ignorant you are yourself.
The only good news is that I think (hope?) that this proposal has little chance of passing. Past experience with fighting such stupid proposals tells me that we (voice of reason) can usually garner enough support within the parliament to block such stupid law proposals.
Please remember that proposing such laws only require one member of Knesset. Passing them, well, that requires a little more.
Shachar
In 2005 such a DNS based filter was rolled out here in Denmark, First toured as a filter against Child pornography, as a none binding aggrement between the danish branch of save the children and the biggest Isp. By design its ofcause a none public liste, later in 2006 allofmp3.com was blocked using the same system, then the pirate bay was added, then sites that sells medicin that requires a prescription, and the lates addion was gamling sites that doesnt pay danish tax. In 2008 the list was leaked ( http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Denmark:_3863_sites_on_censorship_list%2C_Feb_2008 ) , was found to be blocking sites not related to what it was intented to, legitime sites. It always starts out as against Child pornography, and then they will start put more and more into it.
You're entirely right, except you missed the part where Israel made Meir Kahane's faction illegal in the country.
Contrast this with Hamas or Fatah where Kill all Jews and destroy Israel is literally in their charter.
It might very well be that the view is extreme, but as long as that is the view of their government, that's the main view you have to worry about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas_Covenant - It's official Hamas Policy.
The Fatah charter said it until 2010. Now it doesn't specifically name Israel or Jews, but still outlines the struggles against the enemy that must continue, so take that for what it's worth.
This is bullshit. Israel defines itself as a Jewish state. It demands that other people recognize it as such.
The US specifically defines itself NOT as a Christian state.
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beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
The summary, as well as the article, contains the sentence "Israel is to attempt, again, to pass a bill ...".
Another way to phrase it is: "The bill did *not* pass last time, and may end up not passing again.".
Sounds less sinister, doesn't it? And non-news....
In other words., unlike some other countries (most notably the U.S.) where laws for taking down Websites have passed and have been used, laws outlawing various behaviors that have nothing to do with copying as "copyright circumvention", laws allowing people to be banished from the Internet have passed etc., - none of this crap exists in Israel. So if anything, the Internet freedom situation is *better* in Israel than in most countries.
Technically correct, and completely symbolic and irrelevant.
Israeli policy in the West Bank has typically been to take land by force and demand that the Palestinians do nothing about it. Israeli policy in the Gaza Strip has been to blockade all shipments to the area and to forcibly prevent anyone from leaving, and then periodically "mow the grass" (this is the Israeli term for their periodic indiscriminate bombing of Gaza).
Any reasonably fair way of looking at the conflict in the Levant acknowledges three basic facts:
1. Both Israelis and Palestinians have been absolutely brutal, including attacking and terrorizing civilians.
2. Israel is currently winning by a wide margin. For instance, in the last dust-up, approximately 1200 Gazans died, and approximately 10 Israelis died. Or you can look at who controls what land. Or you can look at the casualties over the last 10 years, which give Israel approximately a 6:1 advantage.
3. Neither Israel nor Hamas nor Fatah operate within the bounds of international law.
I am officially gone from
You're entirely right, except you missed the part where Israel made Meir Kahane's faction illegal in the country.
Contrast this with Hamas or Fatah where Kill all Jews and destroy Israel is literally in their charter.
It might very well be that the view is extreme, but as long as that is the view of their government, that's the main view you have to worry about.
In 1948 a group of Jewish militia murdered count Folke Bernadotte. This was the same Folke Bernadotte who negotiated with the Nazis for the release of thousands of prisoners form Nazi death camps while most of the rest of the world was refusing to believe these camps existed. Bernadotte then became a central figure in organising a convoy of vehicles to travel from Sweden (running a gauntlet of Allied submarines and naval mines) to collect these people. Clearly these Jewish activists had murdered a man who by rights belonged on that deservedly much admired list of the Righteous among the Nations that the Yad Vashem in Israel keeps. Now if you thought that the state of Israel threw the book at the killers of this man, you would be wrong. They did convict them of murder but then immediately pardoned them. One of the shot callers behind the murder, Nathan Yellin-Mor, was even elected to the Knesset. The moral of this story is that the state of Israel has a long history, going back to it's foundation, of appearing to severely punish extremists like the Kahane faction only to let them off the hook once Israel's leaders feel the dust has settled.
P.S. In case you are wondering, the last time I checked Bernadotte had still not been added to the list of Righteous among the Nations even though his convoy rescued hundreds of Danish Jews from Theresienstadt concentration camp and thereby from certain death. The murder of Bernadotte continues to clog up relations between Sweden and Israel today, over half a century later.
Technically correct, and completely symbolic and irrelevant.
Israeli policy in the West Bank has typically been to take land by force and demand that the Palestinians do nothing about it. Israeli policy in the Gaza Strip has been to blockade all shipments to the area and to forcibly prevent anyone from leaving, and then periodically "mow the grass" (this is the Israeli term for their periodic indiscriminate bombing of Gaza).
Any reasonably fair way of looking at the conflict in the Levant acknowledges three basic facts:
1. Both Israelis and Palestinians have been absolutely brutal, including attacking and terrorizing civilians.
2. Israel is currently winning by a wide margin. For instance, in the last dust-up, approximately 1200 Gazans died, and approximately 10 Israelis died. Or you can look at who controls what land. Or you can look at the casualties over the last 10 years, which give Israel approximately a 6:1 advantage.
3. Neither Israel nor Hamas nor Fatah operate within the bounds of international law.
I know a doctor who has been going to Gaza for years to operate on people injured and crippled in Israeli attacks. According to him, while the Israelis don't block medical shipments, they delay them until medications are time expired and they do things like store delicate medical equipment outside exposed to the elements until it is useless before releasing it or search sealed sterile containers without resealing them properly resulting in equipment arriving full of dust and dirt i.e. useless. If you want to get medical equipment into Gaza you are better off shipping medicine and medical equipment to Egypt and then negotiating with criminals to smuggle it into Gaza via tunnels. At least that way it will get to Gaza in a usable condition. The Israelis will also refuse medical professionals and aid workers entry after making them wait for weeks, without any rational explanation as to why they are being turned back.
> For instance, in the last dust-up, approximately 1200 Gazans died
According to Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cloud_Pillar ) this is actually the number of Palestinians *injured*, not killed:
"Between 158 and 177 Palestinians died in the operation, with between 55 and 120 of them being combatants. An additional 1,200-1,300 Palestinians were injured, and between 350 and 700 Palestinian families displaced."
I learn from all my mistakes, I intend to be a genius at the end of my life.
Google Mufti of Jeruzalem. A man much admired by Fatah and its leadership and one of the architects of the holocaust.
Your turn.
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