Censoring the Internet

[<an50@desert.hacktic.nl> (Nobody)]

: GG> In another vien, it was noted that a David Southerland of the National
: GG> Advisory Council on the Information Highway stated that the council was
: GG> advising the Canadian Government on the regulation and control of the
: GG> 'net, and were pushing for a means of tracing messages sent through the
: GG> Internet [Does anyone know who these people are?, where they come from?].

: David Sutherland headed the organizing committee for the National
: Capital FreeNet and currently holds the positions of Chairman of the
: Board of Directors and acting President. Mr. Sutherland is Director of
: Computing and Communications Services at Carleton University in
: Ottawa. His major interests in this context are public literacy in the
: use of telecommunications technology and services, the social impacts
: of these services and the development of a "new democratic process"
: via computer mediated communications.

>Now isn't this gentleman also the person who recommended (and possibly 
>decided upon) the banning of the alt.sex* newsgroups at Carleton University?


"Electronic democracy" and "accountability", when applied to the
Internet, are being used as nice-sounding buzzwords that coverup
their practical consquences: the oppression of intellecual and
political minorities, and the conversion of the Internet from 
a decentralized system, relatively free of coercion, into a 
centralized, politically controlled "Information Superhighway", 
a convenient metaphor for centralized government takeover of 
the next generation media, on which our ability to freely
express ourselves depends.

The agenda of people like David Sutherland, L.Detweiler's
friend at the NSA who rants about a "Waco in cyberspace",
Al Gore, and their ilk runs along the lines of the following:

* identification and tracking of all posters and other Internet
users for the purpose of "accountability", ie, the ability to 
threaten and apply coercive retaliation
for expressing views that embarass them .  The targets
for censorship are for now not explicitly political (except
for such universally loathed groups as Nazis), but
rather selective enforcement of vague notions such as 
"obsecenity", "harrassment", etc.   These serve to set
precedents to allow further centralization and control in
the future.  These bullies call people who wish to 
speak free of such threats, such as anonymous posters, 
"cowards" because we do not wish to submit to their threats.

* attack against "pseudospoofing" (the alleged use of
multiple pseudonyms to make it appear more people favor
a point of view).  Many "electronic democracy" fans worship
the results of opinion polls rather than thinking for themselves; 
they get truly pissed by the possibility that their lemming 
mentality could be manipulated.  As freinds of the status quo,
they ignore the fact that modern centralized media can manipulate our
view of "popular" opinion far more radically than "pseudospoofing" 
possibly could.  As L.Detweiler (aka tmp@netcom.com) has quite 
unintentionally demonstrated, it is very difficult to maintain 
even a few vocal pseudonyms in practice without folks catching
on.  

* imposing radical, unprecedented controls on cyberspace to 
promote outmoted varieties of commerce (enforcement of some
kinds of copyrights and patents recognized by some jurisdictions, 
attempts to resolve commercial non-repudiation problems in ways 
that require elimination of privacy on the Internet, etc.) instead of 
working on new forms of free enterprise that complement, rather
than destroy, the freedom and privacy available on the Internet
(multinational small business, privacy preserving
digital cash, etc.).  For "Info Superhighway" fans, "the needs
of commerce" can provide nice-sounding excuses to kill free 
enterprise.

* similarly, extending outmoded forms of government operation,
such as Canada's ban on media coverage of certain court trials,
attempts to enforce collection of taxes on international
information exchange, and attempts to monitor "conspiracies"
(broadly enough defined to cover any group talking about things
that threaten them, and might be illegal somewhere).
The way they propose to avoid these "threats" is, again, 
to radically alter the entire Internet (not just Usenet) 
by instituting panoptic monitoring and content control.
Many politicians and fans of the status quo would rather
impose 1984 than adapt their operations to the coming
era of private, and even cheaper, worldwide communications.

* calling for "community standards" for a network that
criss-crosses communities that include, by no means at
the extremes, both Baghdad and Bangkok.  Often, the
assumption is that their view of North American standards 
can be applied to the Internet, and everybody else just
better go along, including those of us in North America
with different standards.  They'd rather impose their
community standards on others than using filters to
define their own unique local communities.

Freedom is, practically, given as much (or more) by the
tools we can build to protect it, as it is by our ability
to convince others who violently disagree with us not to
attack us.  On the Internet we have tools like anon
remailers and PGP that give us a great deal of freedom
from coercion even in the midst of censors.
Thus, these tools piss of fans of centralized information
control, the defenders of the status quo, like nothing 
else on the Internet.

You'll see these folks attacking anonymous remailers, 
cryptography, psuedonymous accounts, and other tools 
of coercion-free expression and information 
interchange on the net, ironically often in the name
of promoting "commerce".  You'll hear them rant and
rave about "criminals" and "terrorists", as if they
even had a good clue about the laws of the thousands 
of jurisdictions criss-crossed by the Internet, and as
if their own attempts to enable coercion bear no resemblance
to the practice of terrorism.  The scary thing is, they 
really think they have a good idea about what all those laws 
should be, and they're perfectly willing to shove it down our 
throats, regardless of the vast diversity of culture, 
intellectual, political, and legal opinion on the planet.

Alas, you'll also hear rhetoriticans otherwise promoting 
privacy and freedom piously dismiss tools as "mere technology",
or react against some of their unexpected, unfamiliar, in some
ways radical enchancement of privacy and freedom.  They do this
because as with most development, it follows a real-world nonlinear
path, not a nice logically consistent political argument.
These are the otherwise devoted libertarians who will quick
to say, "I'm no crypto-anarchist", after their opponents
have called them that in the midst of their typical reactionary
ranting.  But all the convicing rhetoric in the world doesn't 
finally decide these issues; in the end its what specifically 
we do with our cyberspace technology that will decide how free 
we are in cyberspace.



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