Making Small Steps Against Censorship 188
JD writes "BBC News has an article about online censorship, blogs in particular. It points out that 'perhaps we need to accept that small gains and slight shifts in direction can make a difference to people's lives, and work for them instead of trying to blast down the walls of repression with a single blow.' Whittling away may be the only realistic way to see change happen."
Blogs: today's main Freedom Tool (Score:5, Insightful)
article makes a good point... (Score:4, Insightful)
small steps, it is how we loose freedom, it is how we get it back.
My fear for the U.S. is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Whittler's Mudder (Score:4, Insightful)
And what of those of us who live in relatively open societies where our governments, more and more, are restricting what we can say online?
Duck and cover, perhaps.
Re:My fear for the U.S. is... (Score:4, Insightful)
No they wont, blogs are too useful for astroturfing.
Does information want to be free? Do you? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, my own primary interest is at the personal side of things. I think we need to establish some kind of defensive perimeter around our personal information, or the very notion of privacy will soon be non-existant. That will become just another power used against each of us.
Re:Those who built it (Score:5, Insightful)
Letting them build walls while u take out bricks (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, it seems to me we live in a very passive generation of people, people who love Big Brother or Big Uncle and are afraid to stand up for what they believe in.
I refuse to live in Fear.
Re:Those who built it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Blogs: today's main Freedom Tool (Score:5, Insightful)
article makes a good point... or does it? (Score:2, Insightful)
I have to disagree with that. I've helped make quite a few, and if you start from your premise your bill will never make it out of the first committee in the long series it must pass thru.
Those who marshal their forces and alter the way things are done win way more often than those who try to put down one brick in the way of a flood. You need to use a dumptruck and divert the river further upstream, not in the wide plain right before it hits the houses.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't be placing the new channel parts before you divert all the river - you have to do the groundwork for a bill just like the new channel diversion trench, before you start dumping in rocks to choke out the old channel.
But how do you define who a "liar" is... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Those who built it (Score:5, Insightful)
So what's in it for them? How do they feel about what they do? Anyone have a link to any information about them?
You know how you get someone to implement a censorship system for you? You don't hire mean and cruel people, you get a few people who want to do good. Then you set up draconian punishments for violations of speech and thought codes.
Then (and this is the magic ingredient), you tell these people you've hired that their job is to keep people from getting in trouble by preventing the people from violating the speech and thought codes.
Pretty easy, really, and you put people in "helping mode." What's the old quote about "the tyrant may rest, but those who are act for your own good are tireless in their efforts." These people almost definitely believe that they are helping people - saving them from worse punishment.
And they're probably frustrated by how hard people try to prevent them from doing their job.
Geekspeak (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea of no censorship is a pure fantasy (Score:3, Insightful)
Speech that incites hatred against favored groups in a country will simply not be permitted on the grounds that the public order is threatened. For example, see the case of Oriana Fallaci [bbc.co.uk]. Now she may or may not be eventually ruled to have committed defamatory speech against Islam, but the principle stands that there is a line somewhere that cannot be crossed without a person being liable for government sanctions. As for the case of Europe, I predict this line will be drawn more and more in the direction that no speech critical of Islam will be permitted.
In the 21st century, almost everyone, regardless of civilization, accepts that there is no such principle as the unlimited right to publish any book.
Similarly in the 21st century, there is a consensus that some political parties should be banned. For an example, Belgium's highest court ruled that the Vlaams Blok is racist and banned it from political participation [bbc.co.uk]. Again, there is a line somewhere that cannot be crossed. In the case of Europe, I predict the line will be drawn where it will be illegal for a political party to advocate anti-immigrant positions.
Makes Sense (Score:3, Insightful)
It makes sense since this is how we have been losing our rights, whittled away bit by bit.
Re:Geekspeak (Score:3, Insightful)
But Slashdot moderation is optional. Not only can the entire system be ignored, with two clicks on any page of comments (surf at "-1"), but it can be ignored to degrees (surf at any level you like). And readers can weight any qualitative mods (whether they default positive or negative) any amount they want, weight individuals positively or negatively (friend/foe), use friend/foeship associations for weighting. That's a social model I often find too complex for uninitiated friends to even understand, but it's not complex enough to model our real life consensus builders. Which itself is deeply flawed.
Slashdot has problems with a faulty model of an inadequate social system for evaluating expression. But it's a start. It's also changeable - get the sourcecode, or just make your own. We're kicking this one around, and discussions like the one you and I are having right now contribute to improving it. And thereby improving the real life interactions, as we come up with better ways online that are inevitably mimicked by people in the flesh. Even this conversation between you and I, strangers who will likely never meet in person, or probably even in online conversation again, would be impossible without Slashdot in this instance, or Slashdot-type websites generally. We take them for granted now, after a decade of the Web, and a generation of online discussions like Usenet and Compuserve. But they are extremely valuable, and a great hope for mutual human understanding: and therefore survival.
I also note that my enthusiasm in the post to which you responded was for Slashdotters' work in communications technologies generally, not in (or on) Slashdot itself. But my comments about Slashdot are even more true in the wider venue: telecommunications work by geeks. Keep up the good work
Re:colonial newspapers vs blogs (Score:3, Insightful)
The other area is related to truth itself. You can have *LOTS* of bad data and therefore come to a false conclusion. That's actually BushCo's current excuse for what happened in Iraq. (Not a valid excuse in that case, however, since they also had resources to check the validity of the data.) Another interesting example is all the American voters who think they had a good reason to vote for Dubya. However, I think the extreme case here is the Jeff-Gannon/Jim-Guckert (call him JG?) non-story.
It's a little bit difficult to clarify, though it is interesting that some bloggers were involved here. The JG story is a kind of meta-news story about deliberate manipulation of the truth. It has pretty much all the elements required for a sensational news story. Presidential politics, secrecy, and some unusual sex and tax evasion thrown in for the spice. But *POOF*. It disappears without a trace. At least as far as the MSM is concerned.
Remember the joke about why sharks won't attack lawyers? Professional courtesy.
So now the "real" journalists refuse to go after JG. Is that professional courtesy, too? But JG's other profession was prostitution. No wonder they call them media whores, eh?
Remember when journalism was supposed to be some sort of impassioned search to discover the truth and tell the people about it? Poor Benjamin Franklin must be spinning in his grave.
Ok, what if (Score:2, Insightful)
Enough people (in China) just kept on bloging or whatever.
What are the pigs gunna do.. arrest 1.5B people?
Meanwhile, all those young guys who are in the army have friends and loved ones who are contributing to the technological advances that allow them (the army guys) to enjoy the InterNet like everyone else in the world.
So it is not just the arswhole tech-guys that work for the government who are contributing (good or bad) to China's InterNet technologies.
I can NEVER understand why everyone always *acts like* leaders of countries have such power. THEY DON'T.. But they do have-to-have millions of people who agree with them (or not), and that is why/how they ever get anything done (good or bad).
Hitler, Sadamm and OBL would be nothing more than a *Big-Mouth* (like me) if they hadn't been so persuasive and in-line with what MILLIONS (BILLIONS?) of every-day folks already thought!
I just don't think the millions of cops or army guys in China will start arresting everyone, if it meant doing it would interfere with China's social or economic position in the world.
The question is, at what (Tipping-Point) would the amount of citizens would it take to make the leaders think that it would be counter-productive to arrest so many people. :)
Re:Slashdot itself is doing censoring (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The idea of no censorship is a pure fantasy (Score:3, Insightful)
Everything is pure fantasy before it comes into being.
it is the consensus of almost everyone on the planet in the 21st century that some forms of censorship are necessary.
Argument by consensus isn't valid.
Speech that incites hatred against favored groups in a country will simply not be permitted on the grounds that the public order is threatened.
Speech that incited blacks to vote in the American South simply could not be permitted on the grounds that the public order is threatened. Speech that incited people not to join the military simply has not been permitted on the grounds that the public order is threatened. Speech that we have not always been at war with Eastasia simply will not be permitted on the grounds that the public order is threatened.
Any important speech threatens the public order. If someone wants to ban it, then someone's outraged by it and can claim that it threatens the public order because it causes outrage.
Now she may or may not be eventually ruled to have committed defamatory speech against Islam, but the principle stands that there is a line somewhere that cannot be crossed without a person being liable for government sanctions.
So what you're saying is that you can't say that certain religions are wrong? There's consensus on that, too, and strong philosophical arguments for it. How can we just ignore the dangers in our mist if we arbitrarily silence people who would, correctly or incorrectly, point them out?
Similarly in the 21st century, there is a consensus that some political parties should be banned.
Again, argument from consensus is not valid.
It is utterly undemocratic to ban political parties. It's not a democracy if the government can disenfranchise anyone who disagrees with it. I never realized that the Iranian goverment was merely following Europe's lead in removing people it didn't like from the ballet.