Thai Government To Close 400 Anti-government Sites 267
Will Lord writes "The Guardian is reporting that the Thai government plans to close down 400 anti-government websites and is asking ISPs to block 1,200 more. The response follows a declaration of a state of emergency which has seen troops take to the streets of Bangkok to police anti-government protests.
With web crackdowns like this becoming more and more frequent, do you think we will start to see similar (overt) activities from US and European governments?"
In the U.S., expect it on behalf of the MPAA/RIAA (Score:5, Insightful)
It won't be so much the government cracking down against *dissident* websites in the U.S., it will be the government and major broadband ISP's cracking down on websites based on file-sharing and "Intellectual Property" violations (at the behest of the MPAA/RIAA and their ilk). It's only a matter of time before typing in piratebay.org into your browser leads you to a page that says "This page is blocked for copyright violations" or something similar. The courts have already directly taken down sites like Torrentspy [wikipedia.org] and Lokitorrent [wikipedia.org] in the U.S.
People will learn to get around blocks with proxies, true, but how long before ISP's start blocking major proxy sites too? If my workplace can use Websense [wikipedia.org] to block virtually any proxy list (and it's REALLY good at it too, BTW), there is nothing to stop my ISP from doing it too. And, like most people, I only have a couple of choices of broadband ISP's in my area (AT&T and Time Warner), so it's not like I could just take my business elsewhere.
Seriously now... (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously though, I don't think many western governments will be doing what this desperate Thai government is doing, not until there is rioting through the streets and they are fearful of their power. In that situation western government would probably do a lot worse than shut down websites.
Re:In the U.S., expect it on behalf of the MPAA/RI (Score:5, Insightful)
It's only a matter of time before typing in piratebay.org into your browser leads you to a page that says "This page is blocked for copyright violations" or something similar.
It won't say "This page is blocked..." it will say "Your IP address has been recorded and the FBI has been notified that you are attempting illegal activities."
With web crackdowns like this becoming more and mo (Score:5, Insightful)
The US government is controlled by financial interests. Whether the congressmen who vote because of local financial interests, or big oil causing wars.
So I would look to cases where sites are being cracked down where the sites protest against companies in an effective way. For example the RIAA, has been able to push DMCA and DRM through, which has been a disaster for all concerned. Yet they are now able to close down sites that share keytabs for guitars, many types of filesharing that in the past were just gray are now illegal.
RIAA/MPAA (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:story summary sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, and then you get accused of being the Imperialist World Police who should mind their own goddamn business.
How will Western country X lose its freedoms because of what's going on in third world country Y?
So what should the West do? Occupy every country where human rights aren't up to our standards? Then we'll be blamed of imperialism and genocide and God knows what else. We can't save all the peoples of the world from themselves, and it's not like we don't have problems of our own.
Anyway, we're already doing aid work and peacekeeping, giving money to developing countries and making a big scene about human rights violations (both real and imagined) through groups like Amnesty.
I don't think developing countries on the other side of the world are heavily involved in protecting Finland.
Re:Lemme think... (Score:3, Insightful)
The anarchists' website is still up - what are you talking about?
Maybe YOU think that "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble" includes blocking public access to roads, but I disagree. You can protest, but you can't render public infrastructure unusable.
Thoughtcrime. (Score:3, Insightful)
"In addition, a Thai court issued three orders to shut down about 400 websites, 344 of which, it claimed, carried material that was contemptuous of the country's royal family. The other blocked websites included two with religious content, one video sex game and five sites deemed to carry obscene content."
Ooh, contempt, content, games and obscenity. We wouldn't want any of that on our internet.
Q: With web crackdowns like this becoming more and more frequent do you think we will start to see similar (overt) activities from US and European governments?
A: No, they'll be as covert as possible.
Re:Roots of the Issue (Score:5, Insightful)
"I sincerely doubt it, this will clearly be more justification for the rest of Thailand to revolt against the Monarchy. "
Revolt against the monarchy? Uh this is Thailand we're talking about. Far far less than 1% will revolt against the King. This is not a revolt against the monarchy, this is a revolt against the government.
Everyone respects the King a lot in Thailand (some to the point of worship) see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhumibol_Adulyadej [wikipedia.org]
The government != the monarchy.
All Thai governments claim to support the king, otherwise they'd never get power or stay in power.
The king could probably stop the protests by just telling everyone to go home, and the king could probably kick the current government too just by disapproving of them. But so far it seems he hasn't showed his hand yet.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_May_(1992)#Royal_intervention [wikipedia.org]
When will the US do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
As soon as someone dips their toe in the water and realizes that, in addition to all of the other legal transgressions committed by the government in recent years, they can get away with this to.
By "get away," I mean that they can forcibly take down a website and the public reaction will be a bunch of angry blogging and a noisy protest march, both of which completely unfaze the government (nor does the direct action (aka vandalism, aka hissy-fits) of the so-called anarchists).
Considering that this was as much as anyone did when the government started a war under either deliberately false pretenses, cherry-picked intelligence, or outright incompetence, I think there are those already thinking about outright censorship, which they'll cloak in some kind of undead HUAC-style (except having to do with "terrorism") rhetoric. I don't think this is some dark conspiracy where they're twisting their mustaches and laughing easily. Rather, the urge of this government and the power behind it is a line on a project plan somewhere, mapped to some kind of sick bottom line.
The same was the result of monkeying with the electoral system, and the same is the result of the various crackdowns on protesters, illegal detention of supposed "combatants", extraordinary rendition, and so on. Angry blogging and impotent protests.
The issue here is that no one is really willing to risk their neck to confront the government, or those who are, are unwilling to commit legal or literal suicide in doing so when the most solidarity they can hope for is people posting a bunch of angry shit on the Internet when they are arrested or worse.
This administration is laughing in the face of our impotence as citzens. They've probably always felt this way about us, but are now doing it in our faces.
There's nothing we can do. We have made this military-industrial corporatist complex into a religion of sorts, and they have addicted us to it - our jobs count on it - and they've basically got our nuts in a vice. They've taken a whole lot already. You can bet they'll take more, and with the witless approval of between 40 and 60% of US citizens, too.
Re:you fail (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, I thought we were talking about taking action and making changes, not sitting around and feeling concerned.
When the US rolled into Iraq it was accused of being the Imperialist World Police and told to mind its own business.
Re:In the U.S., expect it on behalf of the MPAA/RI (Score:1, Insightful)
A lot of those old blocking systems are based off of IPV4; once IPV6 gets on the go, although it has some fairly frightening features, it'll be next to impossible to police anything; getting a new small subnet is cheap. Not to mention 3rd Party DNS services are also popping up which may if IANA starts blocking things, compete directly with IANA for DNS services.
Plus there's things like Tor and round robin. If you bit torrented a tracker site, then added a round robin DNS tracker to it like Wikilinks off of a 3rd party DNS tracker, then loaded all of it into a nice easy to execute app. The amount of resources required to block something like that; sure you could jam it but it isn't like the app couldn't be set up to check things like that. There's also things like WASTE still out there and kicking. Plus in a few years we'll see hard-drives grow by leaps and bounds so storing large data vaults will be less of a problem making public networks less necissary. It isn't too far off we'll see 1TB drives grow into 2TB, 4TB, 8TB, 10TB, 20TB etc. A 20TB drive can store a lot of data.
What will inevitably happen is the internet will force things into the public domain that aught to be in the public domain in the first place. Imagine a world where pornstars have a problem making a living since they have to compete with 1000's of people who've made porn before them; where there is so much porn it competes with your "product" and that's how it will be for music, movies, and other forms of media. Sure, there'll always be a market for the new stuff, and there'll always be a market for hard copy and concerts, but really copyright should not be about controlling the public domain.
Re:RIAA/MPAA (Score:5, Insightful)
This is America, the corporations ARE the government.
No, they are not. Actually being the government would leave them with all the bothersome stuff, like the national debt or the responsibility to run a country and provide at least basic services to people. Also the whole problem of elections.
Being "just very influential" to the point of control is much better, as it leaves you with the profits, but without the costs.
Re:In the U.S., expect it on behalf of the MPAA/RI (Score:1, Insightful)
Please do not use the term "cracking down" with respect to peaceful, voluntary activity. This implies something wrong or immoral about what the victims of the "crackdown" are doing. By any stretch of the imagination, a peaceful protest cannot be viewed as aggression, and by using the propaganda term "crackdown" we are only furthing the cause of the true aggressors (government).
Again, government cannot "crack down" on peaceful activity. Government can attack and oppress peaceful activity, but they cannot "crack down" on something which wasn't morally wrong in the first place.
The correct term here is "oppression", not "crackdown".
Archive.org..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yup. Here's how we do it [archive.org] in the States.
You'll never hear about 90+% of the shutdowns because the takedown order will come with a legal threat (from the FBI) against even talking about it. A gag order [wikipedia.org].
-Matt
Stupid Question (Score:2, Insightful)
No, and equivocating a place that gets rocked by military coups to the most stable, progressive democracies in the world leads me to think your world view is wildly fucked up.
The right to criticize the governments of the west tend to have been enshrined in law at the most basic level for decades or even *centuries*. Our right to criticize the government is one of the civic cornerstones of our culture. Nothing short of catastrophe, revolution, and fascism will change that. Get out of the basement and get some perspective.
To all who will provide examples of recent "fascist" tendencies, I say these aren't recent - they've always been with us and they always will be, because we're human, and humans are horrible shits. Luckily we have very mature systems of government that minimize our tendency to be shits to each other, like representative government, independent courts, and the right to disagree enshrined in fundamental laws.
Re:RIAA/MPAA (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that none of these are the responsibility of a properly-functioning government. There is no right to "basic services". There is only the right to your life and your property, the protection of which is the function of the government. The debt can easily be handled if the government shuts down the services that it does not have the right to run, and sells off the infrastructure and equipment used to maintain and facilitate those services.
A company can persuade all it wants. It is only when an elected official helps pass laws in that company's favor that corruption occurs.
Re:In the U.S., expect it on behalf of the MPAA/RI (Score:4, Insightful)
It won't be so much the government cracking down against *dissident* websites in the U.S.
Yes, only on /. is it "Insightful" to compare an attempt to foil software pirates in the U.S. to the attempted annihilation of expressing political beliefs by those in another country.
The last I checked, both of our major political parties thrive on protesting each other. Somehow I do not see this changing anytime soon. The right will want people protesting the left, the left will want people protesting the right, etc. This is kind of a tradition here.
Anyone who moderates up this kind of garbage really should be ashamed. People in Thailand are up a creek without a paddle and you actually encourage bringing a discussion of U.S. piracy into the thread. Shame.
What's next? GWB isn't going to leave office peacefully when the new guy is voted in and immediately begin leading an army of robots to take over the world? That sounds "Insightful". /rant
Re:RIAA/MPAA (Score:3, Insightful)
No, you have it backwards. These are all things that Libertarians want Congress to *stick* to doing, and stop doing all the rest of the stuff like wealth redistribution that they have no authority to do.
Re:RIAA/MPAA (Score:3, Insightful)
Things like this are very easy to say for people who have grown up on these basic services.
Having a "right to life and property" doesn't do you much good when you have no money or facilities to defend that life and property.
Re:RIAA/MPAA (Score:3, Insightful)
The function of the government is whatever we say it is. Why is your opinion more important than mine?
Re:RIAA/MPAA (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not following you. I am aware that in the US, the people decide their government's responsibilities. You are question begging - the whole purpose of my discussing it here is to try to persuade people to understand why government services should be restricted to upholding and protecting individual rights. All you've done is identify what everyone already knew - that this country is based on democracy.
"The people as a whole have the right to sell off or nationalise telco or oil companies as they see fit."
No, they do not. You cannot legislate rights out of existence. The government does not grant individual rights - rather individuals come together to permit the government a monopoly on enforcement of those rights. When the government nationalizes a company of ten, one hundred, or one thousand employees, those rights are being violated in every case. As for your "argument" - it is simply an exaltation of the powers of the majority to control the minority, founded on the false premise of the existence of said powers.
"If the People do not retain the power over their own land and laws..."
You've stripped property of all meaning, and in turn have destroyed any meaning behind life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.