Global Internet Censorship On the Rise 185
An anonymous reader writes "State-led internet censorship is on the rise around the world. According to a study conducted by the Open Net Initiative and reported by the BBC, some 25 of 41 countries surveyed were filtering at least some content. Skype and Google Maps were two of the most often-censored sites, according to the article. 'The filtering had three primary rationales, according to the report: politics and power, security concerns and social norms. The report said: 'In a growing number of states around the world, internet filtering has huge implications for how connected citizens will be to the events unfolding around them, to their own cultures, and to other cultures and shared knowledge around the world.'"
Big deal (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason this is different is that we aren't talking about newspapers, or television, or whatever, we are talking about The Internet. The Internet belongs to the people, not to the government, or, as some would like to make it, to big business. It is Ours.
And we want it to stay that way.
Re:Good a place as any to throw this one out... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Big deal (Score:4, Insightful)
To varying degrees, yes. I think the main news here is that some people's illusions are about to be shattered, because for some reason they thought this couldn't happen on the Internet.
I can't count how many debates I've had on Slashdot, where the other guy relied on something like Internet anonymity or hosting dubiously ethical content offshore to back up an argument. Sometimes the reasons were legitimate, and I was arguing that they should be more afraid of government or big corporate intervention making things worse. Sometimes it was more the other way around, as they flippantly argued that their "right" to defame someone anonymously (or to copy music illegally, or...) could not be stopped, as if the Internet is some all-powerful weapon of the people against oppressive governments everywhere.
IMHO, it would be better for all concerned if the reality was clearer, and I think this sort of eye-catching statistic makes it very clear indeed that the Internet isn't some brave new world, and for better or worse it will always have risks and opportunities similar to those of any other communications medium. We should regulate (or not), legislate (or not), standardise (or not) and seek international co-operation (or not) accordingly.
Re:Good a place as any to throw this one out... (Score:3, Insightful)
Gee... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
It's ironic that you wrote this just as I was writing the post below it about how some people's illusions are about to be shattered.
Please stop and think about this. Who owns the vast amounts of hardware infrastructure that have been created to support it? Who defines the standards and protocols on which it is based? How does an individual gain access to the Internet? If the Internet really belongs to the people, why do governments and commercial organisations dominate the answer to every one of those basic questions?
Re:Big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense! It's just as true as ever. What happened when Turkey blocked Youtube? Instructions were quickly posted on how to get around the block or download the offending clip from another site. What happened when the AACS owners tried to abuse the DMCA to stop the cracked key from being distributed? The key ended up on nearly every site on the Internets!
Even in highly oppressive regions like China, the users of the Internet are finding new and creative ways to circumvent the Great Firewall. Simply put, there is no way of stopping the information on the 'net. It's like the underground books that were distributed during Communism in Russia: They kept popping up no matter how much the Soviets tried to quash them.
Totalitarian governments (or even democratic/republic governments trying to suppress information) are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The only way to stop the flow of information is to yank the plug. But if they yank the plug or fail to install it in the first place, it's a guarantee that the country will collapse from a failure to be competitive in the Global market. So governments try and find a compromise by suppressing information on the Internet. Unfortunately for them, it doesn't really work all that well.
Re:Good a place as any to throw this one out... (Score:5, Insightful)
Look closer. We aren't exactly sending in the B-52s to airdrop loads of McMuffins, LOTR DVDs, sneakers, and twinkies onto the Noble Primitive Peoples who are Honoring the Sacred Traditions of Their Ancestors. It's a pull situation much more than a push. Western culture, simply put, is addictive.
It's the Noble Primitive leaders that don't like this, because the Sacred Traditions are invariably religious-authoritarian.
From over here we only hear about people bewailing Western culture, but we aren't hearing the real opinions of the Noble Primitive People themselves.
It Isn't Just Censorship - Monitoring Is Also Huge (Score:5, Insightful)
Carnivore would be an example here. The new leaning on ISPs for user records. Requiring archiving of all activity. Or just silently copying and keywording all traffic.
In some ways, monitoring is more dangerous and insidious than censorship as it allows building cases against perceived "enemies" of the state.
Re:Big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Fair enough. However, in that case, I can't help noting that most things run "by the people" do have some degree of order associated with them, in the form of governments and legal systems. At least in principle, these represent the interests of the people as a whole; being run for the people does not imply anarchy.
Right now, it is precisely the lawless nature of the Internet (in that it is unreasonably difficult to enforce accepted laws there, even when pretty much everyone agrees they are reasonable laws) that leads to problems like spam, defamation, phishing expeditions, and all the other bad stuff that I'm sure everyone except those benefiting personally could happily live without.
My argument in discussions like this has often been that trying to protect the Internet in its current state is not the best way forward, because its current state is broken in some fundamental ways, and support from more traditional government and laws will help to combat some of that abuse. What we should be doing, IMHO, is campaigning for principles like freedom of information and due process to be considered as relevant for everyone on the Internet as they are in many countries already, so that whatever common system of regulation and government ultimately does come out of it, the fundamental principles are fair and reasonable.
There is no question in my mind that a completely open system like the Internet will come to be more regulated, whether everyone likes it or not, for the same reasons that societies have developed laws to preserve order. What concerns me is that along with that regulation should come the same protection of individual rights and freedoms that free societies have also developed to avoid their laws becoming too restrictive.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Gee... (Score:5, Insightful)
Please spare us your random, unsupported UN-bashing. Right now, under US leadership, (a) the censorship is widespread (as TFA demonstrates), and (b) the US-based authorities have demonstrated a willingness to impose their own values on others (the .xxx domain to give one obvious example). How exactly could having the Internet under UN control be worse on either count?
Re:Gee... (Score:2, Insightful)
They(the UN) would probably set up a commitee w/ a rotating chair. This chair(a country) would then set the rules as to what constitutes censorship on the internet. That could be bad if say, North Korea would hold the chair of that commitee. Sort of like having Sudan voted onto the UN Commission on Human Rights. Oh wait...
Re:Good a place as any to throw this one out... (Score:2, Insightful)
What makes nations sacred? Who gets to decide what constitutes a threat to national security?
Re:It Isn't Just Censorship - Monitoring Is Also H (Score:3, Insightful)
However, monitoring is allowing free access but keeping tabs on the activities. Basically giving the citizenry the rope to hang themselves with.
In some cases, monitoring can be used to find terrorists and true enemies of the state. (whether a population prefers privacy over "security" is another issue) In others, depending on the paranoia level of the state, it can be used to find citizens who oppose a government or a "leader" but are not terrorists bent on killing as many as possible. Monitoring is the kind of activity that is desirable if you are a paranoid "leader" who wants to expand, consolodate, or hold on to power. It takes a lot of trust to allow a government to monitor and hope they won't use it for the wrong reasons. It seems that there are no examples where this has been allowed and not abused. Or even abused where not explicity allowed.
We are in one of those cycles now -- that's why more and more are calling for Alberto Gonzales' resignation over the illegal wiretaps that were justified as a way to combat terrorism.
Re:Good a place as any to throw this one out... (Score:5, Insightful)
Cultures aren't some delicate flower than can be crushed when a more popular once rolls around. It's a dynamic thing. Cultures aren't equal and aren't universally valuable. They are secondary traits of large groups of people. They will naturally mutate and hcange over time, drawing bits of neigboring cultures and dominant cultures into themselves. Those that are dying should problably die. Some cultures are more productive, more robust, more attractive and it's up to those who exist within that culture to ensure it survives. Culture aren't human beings. They are body of ideas. They should have no rights.
Re:Don't agree! (Score:3, Insightful)
You covered the most common argument. The second most common argument is this: If you let them make everyone familiar with their arguments, have the public discussion, and show everyone that they're wrong then many will accept their very well developed and sophisticated arguments when they make them in private.
My argument is much simpler. You can't impose censorship without necessarily censoring the meta-discussion about that censorship. If I want to argue that some hate speech isn't socially harmful, I can't start by giving an example of the hate speech that I'm talking about. If you want to argue that the law in the US where 17 year olds can consent to sex but not to being the subject of sexual photographs is absurd, you can't respond to the argument "17 year olds look too young, nude pictures of them will make perverts want to rape babies" with the most powerful response - a photographic counterexample.
Information isn't dangerous, uninformed people are. The only reason to censor discussion is to defend political positions that can't hold up to the close examination they would get if discussion were legal - or occasionally as a political tool to distract people from relevant political issues by reminding them of people/opinions they don't like.
Re:Don't agree! (Score:5, Insightful)
H
How 'bout you tell me why they shouldn't? Do you really think that Germany is a swarming mass of anti-Semitism, just waiting for a leader to come along and light the fire of the Fourth Reich? I would like to think that most Germans would be a tad offended by your implied sentiment - that if they heard a bit of Nazi propaganda, they'd start rounding up the Jews. We have Nazi propagandists here in America, and we don't censor them - we laugh at them (not that we're a shining beacon of freedom or anything ourselves; we just "get it" when it comes to political speech).
Let's try: Why should I give (fill in the blank) the right to be heard? Because it's a right - a fundamental right, just like the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold those truths to be *self* evident - that means they don't need to be justified. If your "culture" disagrees, then your culture is wrong.
Re:Tell that to women in India! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm also tired of the individualist vs. collectivist argument. There is a complex feedback system tying individuals and societies together in an interdependent web. It's not one or the other. As the African proverb says, only free people can make a strong tribe, and only a strong tribe can make people free. You can go on and on about how people are already free, and don't need anyone to make them so. Which is all well and good until the bad men with weapons come and you are all alone, prattling on about your rights. Rights only exist outside of theory when put into practice by communities willing to defend them.
And your ideas about punishment and motivation are also outdated and ineffective. Those kind of violent actions merely justify others acting violently for their beliefs as well. They perpetuate violence, not reduce it. "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind," remember? You may be justified in acting violently in your own head and heart, but so are they.
Your "solutions" appeal to the primitive, emotional side of humanity. They feel good, but they create the very thing they purport to work against.
Re:Big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you suggesting that technical aptitude naturally disposes one towards wanting to keep information free?
The idea that intelligence disposes one towards protecting freedoms is silly to me. While I would like to believe that anyone intelligent takes my position - freedoms should be protected over security or power - I realize this view has little basis in history. While many of the most intelligent people have pushed in for freedom, I'm sure a much larger number through humanity's history have taken authoritarian stance.
Beyond that, the knowledge you speak of - the ability to completely block access to certain information - is a very technical type of knowledge. Does that technical aptitude have any relation to one's political alignment? I doubt it.
Don't get me wrong. It would be nice if there were a stance in these matters that was the indisputably more intelligent choice, and that technical aptitude always went hand-in-hand with that type of social intelligence. But I have a feeling that those with such technical aptitude are usually put to use by those with a greater social intelligence and that their political alignments have little to do with their smarts.
Re:Big deal (Score:3, Insightful)
The Internet is useful as a tool for freedom? Do you really, honestly believe that more benefit is gained by those advocating freedom using the Internet in its current form than by governments using it as a tool to monitor their citizens? I'm not so sure. And in any case, I rather suspect that the kind of freedom you're talking about, which might be affected by greater regulation, is a vanishingly small proportion of all Internet use even in those countries with the kind of oppressive regime in power that prefers to limit freedom of expression for political reasons.
I'd argue the social problem is in connection with push marketing and one-to-many communication. I'm afraid I don't quite see how you're going to fix that social problem with a few tweaks to protocol, while still maintaining the freedom of the Internet, which you value. In the meantime, everyone is quite literally paying the price of spam, and it's measured in billions of lost time and wasted bandwidth, not to mention the general reduction in quality of life.
Spoken like someone who's never been on the wrong side of it. Not all defamation is trivial. Rightly or wrongly, this is a crime that can destroy lives, and almost by definition the victims of it are usually innocent.
Freedom of communication is not an absolute right, and never has been. Nor should it be a right at all, unless it comes with the corresponding responsibility. If someone won't accept responsibility for what they say, given reasonable safeguards such as due process, then I don't have a problem with restricting their right to say it.
Again, spoken like someone who has never been on the wrong side of it, and who has no appreciation for the damage that can be done.
Not everyone is as smart or Internet-savvy as the average person in this Slashdot discussion. While I am all for personal responsibility and teaching people to look after themselves, I am also a pragmatist, and I recognise that no-one is an expert in everything and sometimes it is appropriate for governments to step in to protect their people from abusive minorities.
For all your principled support of Internet freedom, things are rarely so black and white in the real world. This freedom of communication you defend so passionately comes at the cost of everyone's moral and legal rights to hold others accountable for damage they do, and thousands of people every year are paying some pretty steep prices as a result.
We should always defend basic human rights and freedoms against abuse, and we should never give them up lightly. But we should also recognise that sometimes different rights of different people come into conflict, it is impossible to fully respect all the rights of both parties in these cases, and we must choose which we value more highly. These decisions are never easy (c.f. arguments for greater government powers in the name of security during the ongoing terrorism saga) and never as one-sided as you make out.
Not even close to true. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that's a hell of an assumption. I know lots of very technically capable, bright, creative people, who are borderline amoral (at least when it comes to accepting assignments, not necessarily in their personal or private lives, or how they conduct themselves) and wouldn't have any problem working for virtually anyone who's willing to sign their paycheck.
In fact, I think the majority of really, really bright people that I know are like that, to a certain extent. They might have some personal hangups, but if you presented the (socially) "ugly" task to them as a technical challenge, and it really was a challenge, I know people who'd do it just because it was interesting. To a certain class of person, and I don't necessarily exempt myself here, doing something interesting is more rewarding than doing something good. Not everyone has the patience to be Mother Teresa; a lot of us would much rather be Edward Teller.
To continue that historical example: lots of physicists and engineers -- many very good ones, some of the best -- worked in government labs on nuclear weapons programs; basically building bigger and better bombs. It's pretty tough to come up with a rationalization for why that's a Good Thing, but I can tell you from experience that most people who do work like that don't really even perform the rationalization. (The politicians do that, but I don't think the actual engineers really care that much.) They just focus on the work, because the work is interesting, and allows them a comfortable life; that's more than a lot of people get right there.
If you pay people right, and put them in the right atmosphere (basically closed environment with a lot of other technical people), and present the problem as a purely abstract intellectual challenge, very bright people will do all sorts of stuff that might, taken from a broader perspective, not seem like a social good.
Power, wealth and a challeng are human desires (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you underestimate the human desire for power, wealth, and a challenging task.
Some people want to be the hand that feeds. They want to keep their access to the information, and in addition would like power over other people trying to get that information. Working for the right government, this could make you quite wealthy too. As a bonus, staying ahead of those that try to thwart your efforts to restrict seems like it could be fun game of cat-and-also-cat. It would be one of the most intensely challenging games one could find for a career.
Depends on what one's interest is. If it's making sure everyone has the same level of access and freedom, then yes. If it's getting ahead, positioning oneself in a place of power, having access to the information, and stopping others from becoming better in the field than one, it seems like the most productive move. Again, you're assuming people think that their own good and the good of others are related. I think they are, but there are an astounding number of people who just look out for various small circles around themselves, starting with friends and radiating out to family / political group / nation / species.
I think anyone vying for power has to worry that the methods they put in place might be used against them. Obviously people get beyond this fear (or stop themselves from thinking about it) because seeking power is still something people do.
Some people want power. Some people hate other people. Technical people may be less likely to seek power than others, which is what you are suggesting. I think that hypothesis would require a good deal of research. But I would venture to guess that someone with great technical aptitude and a knowledge of networking would want power as much as any other type of person. They are just not as often in a position to grab it.
Re:Not even close to true. (Score:4, Insightful)
This struck me as a very insightful comment. It explains one way that people can rationalize doing something that, if they were able to step back and look at the big picture, or with enough hindsight, they would know it is wrong to do. Yet they do it, and while doing it, think it is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Sometimes, interesting means evil. A certain Chinese saying comes to mind: "May you live in interesting times."
Re:Big deal (Score:3, Insightful)
But you speak as if "government" is a single, unified entity. It never is. Government is composed of individual people, and if sensibly structured, it has checks and balances to ensure that no subgroup from among those people can exceed its lawful authority to act on behalf of the people without another group calling them on it. This is what separation of powers is all about, and the principle applies just as much on smaller scales, and particularly in the area of oversight of sensitive, security-related activities, as it does to separation of legislature, judiciary and executive branch. Other relevant issues include having a free press and freedom of information laws that require governments to disclose information openly to the public. (It is ironic, perhaps, that we have this discussion on the day the UK's Parliament voted to proceed with the process of exempting themselves from the current government's own Freedom of Information Act, which would seem pretty cynical if we weren't used to far worse from the current administration.)
Your argument seems to rely fundamentally on a government being weaker than an individual — which is not the same as weaker than the people as a whole. Realistically, this is never going to be the case in practice, since one of the primary roles of most governments is to administer the legal system, which includes enforcing the law. So in a very real sense, laws are always all that stand between a government, collectively, and doing wrong. This isn't a philosophical point; it's a practical and pretty much universal reality.
I've discussed this point in detail before, and I invite you to search my posting history on this subject. In short, on-line anonymity is rarely absolute — someone determined enough and with sufficient resources could track down almost anything — and I believe relying on it for protection in serious cases is over-rated. I believe it is better if people can express their opinions openly, with the full weight of the law and the state's law enforcement machine to defend them if they are unfairly challenged or penalised for doing so.
Obviously this requires a state that protects people's basic rights in the first place. Many of my arguments against anonymity do not really apply in places where this is not the case. But the biggest issue there is not the lack of anonymity, it's the lack of respect for basic human rights, which is a far more difficult problem to deal with.
However, in a culture that does respect freedom of expression and the like, anonymity is just the ability to speak without accountability, which like being free to do anything else without taking responsibility for one's actions is anathema to ensuring justice for all.
Re:Big deal (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really, I just accept that a government prepared to sidestep its own laws is probably as willing to develop the tools for this kind of surveillance covertly as to employ them illegally. If the checks and balances of government aren't working, then there are bigger problems than monitoring what the people are saying, and you're onto at least the second box.
I suspect that we're never quite going to see eye to eye on this one, even if we might agree on some of the general themes. For what it's worth, I admire your willingness to stand by your principles, even if I don't personally think that doing so is always the pragmatic thing to do, and I thank you for an interesting discussion.