Bill Would Bar US Companies From Net Censorship 309
Meredith writes "A bill that would penalize companies for assisting repressive regimes in censoring the Internet may finally be headed to a vote. The Global Online Freedom Act 'would not only prevent companies like Yahoo from giving up the goods to totalitarian regimes, but would also prohibit US-based Internet companies from blocking online content from US government or government-financed web sites in other countries.' Unfortunately, there's also a giant loophole: the president would be allowed to waive the provisions of the Act for national security purposes."
Stop other people from censorship (Score:4, Insightful)
National security more important than individuals? (Score:5, Insightful)
National security is HIS problem, not the individual's problems. The constitution doesn't limit the right to expression, assembly, and so on, on the condition that it be used to protect national security. If he can't protect his country without infringing on constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of individuals, then well, sucks to be him. I can has new country, pleeaz.
The individual is more important than the government, not the other way around. The government can die, for all we care - it can be replaced by another piece of paper quite easily.
Great news! (Score:4, Insightful)
Does that mean the "child porn" laws and DMCA are repealed?
What's the goal? (Score:2, Insightful)
What about hardware? (Score:3, Insightful)
oh, that is rich (Score:4, Insightful)
I would love to see (Score:3, Insightful)
IOW: Do as we say, not as we do (Score:3, Insightful)
One is "bad" the other is somehow different.
Re:Stop other people from censorship (Score:3, Insightful)
Another example would be using the web to follow or report on NYPD officers to plan when to plant a bomb or whatever.
Finally, let's say someone stole the plans to the F22 fighter that exposed a way to detect it via radar and wanted to post the information on their MySpace page from an Internet Cafe...
These are just a few examples of where I think the Prez should allow censorship of Internet activity. Generally, censorship is a bad thing, but not always. On RARE occasion (Very RARE), it's necessary.
Does that include ours? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So.... (Score:5, Insightful)
*Table thumping* In the name of National Security! (Score:4, Insightful)
Today, I present to you a bill to help spread freedom around the world. To stop companies doing evil and censoring global citizens from accessing the Freedom of Press here in America. (*sniff*, *sniff*, I love America...)
(Fist thumping the desk) But in the name of NATIONAL SECURITY, I'll reserve the right for the President of this (sniff) great land to, as he sees fit, step in and block access to any site he deems a threat to this great land.
Thank you all, and God bless ya'll.
Re:Great news! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:oh, that is rich (Score:5, Insightful)
You clearly don't like what they did before so why the hell are you whining about them trying to rectify that and ensure it happens less in the future? It's like your'e bitching for the sake of bitching.
Bad idea (Score:1, Insightful)
This is disastrous and will only make the economy worse.
This contradicts the DCMA (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:National security more important than individua (Score:5, Insightful)
Read it again. It is a list of things that the United States Federal Government is allowed to do, and enjoined from doing. It doesn't give anybody any rights...it enumerates specific rights (and an incomplete list of those rights) that the US Government is particularly not allowed to infringe.
Not "citizens".
Not "non-terrorists".
Everybody.
(well, that's the way it was designed, anyhow...)
Re:So.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:oh, that is rich (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, I can bitch for a lot more reasons than self righteous gratification.
Like shouldn't we put our own house in order first and stop giving our executive a free and warrantless hand to access any communications among its citizens that it wishes?
Our pot is so black none of the kettles should be expected to listen.
Re:What about hardware? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, you can not do that.
Re:So.... (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Good security can be effectively supplemented by obscurity. No security system is perfect, and it's perfectly reasonable to make the system harder for an outsider to understand. (Please don't bring up the Open Source argument. A water purification plant isn't a fun software project, and people don't augment that type of security system for fun.)
2) You just advocated allowing somebody to broadcast, "Come poison this well! Here's most of the information you need to kill thousands/millions of people." This should be allowed because their security isn't good enough? Are you crazy?
Re:So.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Your analogy fails (Score:3, Insightful)
Security through obscurity is in fact extremely effective, hence the reason people use camouflage, hide their military movements, encrypt their communications, hide their passwords, etc.
The only reason it is sometimes frowned upon is because the users might tend to be overly confident and overestimate the level of protection it provides.
Re:So.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Or the 10-digit code used to unlock the front door?
a. telling them to pull that information down,
or
b. CHANGING THE CODES IF THEY'VE BEEN PUBLISHED.
Trying to stifle information is not wise. Correcting the problem itself rather than trying to hide it always works better. In your example, it's already been proven that somebody you trust is willing to publish that information. Pulling it from the net doesn't meant they can't tell friends, or that anyone who saw it before being pulled will magically forget it. Work to eliminate the source of the leak, change the codes in the meantime, and forget about trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
Re:Protect act of 2003 made them illegal (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm not advocating child porn, just wondering where the logic comes from.
Re:So.... (Score:3, Insightful)
On Sept 10, 2001, nobody had flown commercial airliners into the WTC or the Pentagon yet, either. "It hasn't happened yet" is a damned weak argument.
Re:So.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Another loophole (Score:3, Insightful)
And of course, another loophole is that the US government can go ahead and "censor" anything it wants (e.g., child porn, "terrorism" sites, whatever). National security, hmm... whatever happened to "give me liberty or give me death" and "the society that chooses security over freedom deserves neither"?
Re:What's the goal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Goal 2 is absolutely guaranteed, in the sense that it prevents U.S. companies from developing "unclean hands." If a foreign nation wants to censor the Internet and prohibit its citizens from seeing certain material, that's their prerogative -- but no U.S. company should ever be complicit in such censorship, and this bill would mandate a moral or ethical imperative for businesses. It's sad that U.S. companies wouldn't choose to avoid such coercion on their own, but as their rationale for supporting foreign censorship efforts is the consequence of non-compliance (i.e., not being able to do business in that country), these companies are heavily motivated to just "go with the flow" by profits. This law mandates a moral backbone at the expense of profits.
Personally, I don't see this as any different from child labor laws -- when such laws were enacted in the United States in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, many capitalists decried them, but morally it is the right thing to prevent the exploitation of children, especially in dangerous jobs. Many companies now get around these laws by exporting labor to countries which don't have adequate child labor laws (nor adequate enforcement of any existing laws), but the social climate in the U.S. has changed to the point where the exposure of such wrongdoing elicits the appropriate outraged response.
So, in the long view, goal #1 is preserved, even if in the short view Chinese citizens get a bunch of web sites blocked. In a sense, that's kind of the point -- force the issue and see what develops. If the Chinese people (or the Iranian people, etc.) don't complain and demand change after their own inept regime is forced to do all the dirty work itself, then they didn't deserve what little illusion of freedom they had to begin with. You're either totally free or you're not. I'm sure at least one of the authors if this bill is counting on the Chinese government reacting in knee-jerk fashion the second this goes through, possibly by yanking the rights of American IT companies to keep offices in and do business in mainland China.
Having said all that, I'm sure the Chinese authorities will probably take a pragmatic approach and try to reach some kind of compromise which allows them to continue with business as usual, while letting U.S. companies off the hook. "You can host whatever you want in our country, but we reserve the right to place filters on all network connections going in and out of your local data centers."
Insufficient protection (Score:3, Insightful)
With the proposed law, the national security exemption is the sort of thing we see as a typical fixture in totalitarian government, The government will have a constitution or a law which claims that the people have free speech rights, to make people think they do, but then in the fine print adds exceptions so vague you could drive a truck through it, like national security, which can be interpreted so loosely it can be applied to nearly anything by a corrupt regime. Many totalitarian governments have a form of this where these rights can be suspended in an emergency, so the government simply declares a perpetual state of emergency. Telling people they have free speech, but only as long as the government approves of it, is not free speech.
Re:National security more important than individua (Score:3, Insightful)
If I owned a business that could make a buck supporting a regime that wasn't anti-US, I'd do it no matter how "repressive" they were. That sort of ruthlessness helped win the Cold War, and there is no reason the shrink from it now.
So you would support the massacre of 200,000 [thirdworldtraveler.com] people? That's what President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger did when they supported the Indonesian dictator Suharto's [gwu.edu] invasion of East Timor. That 200,000 massacred was 1/3 of East Timor's population.
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