US-Made Censorware Used To Oppress Burma

An anonymous reader writes "The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that US-made censorware is being used to oppress the people in many countries, including Burma. That in itself may not be surprising, but a more interesting point is that according to lawyers interviewed by the CS Monitor it appears to be legal — in spite of all the economic sanctions against the country, and even though people know it will be used to hush up any mention of things like attacks on peaceful protesters."

Re:It's quite OK

[Camael]

Governments are allowed to censor and suppress their populations.

I quite disagree. More accurately, in a country that respects the rule of law, the general public may in certain limited circumstances allow their government to censor or suppress certain types of information, for example secrets which impact on national security, or financial information crucial to the nation's economy.

Perhaps what you meant to say was governments which are not popularly elected and which are not accountable to their citizens can by rule of force censor and suppress their populations who can do nothing about it.

Perhaps you will begin to see the legal or moral issue here if it was your blog or email being censored.

Re:US made guns used to oppress Burma

[aadvancedGIR]

As a sanction to the Burma junta, french compagnies are frobidden to deal with burman small businesses, but Total has a few large oil drilling contracts there, and some even say that the money from these contracts saved the junta at least once.

I bet this is a general trend (we all remember the iraki embargo in the 90's that resulted in tens of thousands children death by lack of food and medecine and the continuation of Sadam reign), the public intention of the west is to fight against dictatorships, but the action is twisted in a way that actually helps the dictatorships by hurting their population (and give a few billion to large corps in the process).

Re:US made guns used to oppress Burma

[Anonymous Coward]

A pistol? Are you serious? Based on what, exactly? What country, for that matter?

I'm serious. I live in New Zealand. A friend of mine is a member of the local pistol shooting club (pistols are highly restricted firearms here), and while I was there one day getting some sounds (44 calibre Desert Eagle, 9mm Beretta) for a project I was working on, I mentioned to my friend that I'd love to own a PS90. He turned to the guy next to him, and asked if that was a legal firearm here. The guy replied that it's classified a pistol due to its length (it's something like an inch shorter than the minimum legal length for a rifle), and is illegal.

Even though they make 10 round magazines for it? That's crazy. I mean, the Chinese knockoff AK-47 I had was legal to hunt with as long as I used the 5-round mag... That reminds me, I need to get a larger capacity mag for my 742 before some crazy congressman decides to reinstate the AWB...

I *think* you'd be allowed to use that, on the condition that it was not capable of firing in automatic mode, plus you'd need a special category licence for a military style firearm.

Re:This is news?

[G Fab]

yeah yeah yeah, Godwin. Except that I'm exactly right to make the banal observation that selling rat poison to Hitler is a special problem. Some things can uniquely be used to control. We can't forsee the future, but we can use as much sense as we can to limit software that prevents human rights workers from exclaiming their distress.

Morality is the basis of law. What else are we supposed to base our laws on? Efficiency? That's utilitarianism. If we know something is immoral to a level that is outrageous, then we make it a felony. This helps to adjust the market, of course, so that it is not cost effective to sell weapons to bastards.

Adam Smith was describing nature. Marx was inventing the concept of capitalism to describe the problems he saw in our system. What Marx explained was certainly not to be seen in Adam Smith's account. I understand I'm being unclear. Think of it like this: Adam Smith was the scientist describing Ted Bundy's physical body. Marx was the guy pointing out, for the first time, that Ted Bundy was doing specific things that were bad.

I don't understand your comment about selling weapons to the freedom fighters in Burma (if there are any left). What does that have to do with what we're talking about? Specifically as a comparison to censorship software. Are you claiming that somehow this software, in the right hands, can overthrow the Burmese government?

I think you got lost in the analogy and forgot it wasn't real (China gives weapons to the Burmese government for free, etc)

Huh?

[blackdew]

(i'll probably get modded into oblivion for this, but...)

What's exactly the difference between:

1) RIAA saying bittorent is bad because you can download pirated music with it.
2) CIA saying encryption is bad because terorists can use it.
3) The slashdot crowd saying filtering software is bad because you can censor burman internet with it.

Isn't that hypocritical? What happened to "guns dont kill people, people kill people"? am i missing something?

Re:This is news?

[Asic Eng]

Well to be honest, unless we're at war with them (or they're at war with one of our allies), no, selling stuff to them shouldn't be illegal.

Why not? Please can you explain the benefit why that should remain legal?

But that's the proper response in that case: don't do business with someone who's business practices you find disagreeable, don't legislate them out of existence...

Again - can you please explain the benefit of that?

Let the market deal with it; if people care about the people in Burma, they won't do business with a company supporting that government.

Neither me, nor anyone else on earth has enough time to evaluate the business practices of every single company they buy goods from, and of the suppliers of every single company they buy goods. The amount of information required to make such decisions in every aspect of live is ridiculously large.

Let's look at the facts here: if the market would solve these problems, the Burmese government would not have this software. They do, and that means that the market is not going to solve the problem. If you want you can blame the public at large for not caring enough about Burma - rather than those who don't have enough morals not to sell them the stuff in the first place. This doesn't really matter - regardless of the reason - fact is the market has provably not solved the problem. Why would you expect different results in the future?