Re: DON'T Nuke Singapore Back into the Stone Age

[Arun Mehta <amehta@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in>]

At 15:18 01/09/96 -0700, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh wrote:
>Arun Mehta wrote:
>> and India will be too: the law here holds the ISPs responsible
>> for ensuring that nothing objectionable and obscene is carried by
>> them, and what simpler way to comply than to
>
>FWIW: "There is no need to licence content providers; Internet
>service providers are not responsible for illegal content." R K
>Takkar, Indian Telecom Secretary (at the time of interview)

What Mr. Takkar says isn't law, plus he's gone. The law clearly
holds ISPs responsible for
content: when it suits the government it will pull it out.
Doesn't even have to be the government: some headline-seeking
opposition politician could take the government to task because
the government-run ISPs aren't complying with the law.

And please don't get lulled into complacency by a stupid law that
isn't being enforced: in 1975, Indira Gandhi pulled out a host of
them to *legally* impose dictatorship.

>> Ideally, I should be able to 
>> send via pgp and anonymous remailer a request for a page, which would soon
>> come beamed down unencrypted via satellite. No more waiting hours
>> for the latest version of Netscape to download
>
>(!) you'll only have to wait hours for your anonymous-remailer-web-to-e-mail
>gateway, EVERY time you want a page. 

every time I want a BANNED page -- I'd say it's worth it. In the
process of accessing it, I also show it to everyone in Asia, thus
giving the banned stuff much more publicity than it otherwise
would get on the net.

>governments will 
>eventually see sense and stop censorship, if they're interested in
>making their countries rich. Singapore in every other field of work
>has shown its interest in deregulation; I would expect them to do so
>on the Net as well, when it becomes clear that there's rather more to
>it than porn and subversion.

Governments everywhere (see Declan's long list) seem to think
they can separate out the porn and subversion from the "rather
more". Just as in the German case, where the Zundel-site was
mirrored so that Germans could access  it, external measures to
help Singaporeans access what they like would certainly help
their government "see sense."

>In the meanwhile, there's not much point 
>trying to "help" them, apart from providing moral support.

Guess I'll risk being accused of indulging in cliches when I cite
the famous Niemoeller quote once more which begins, " First they
came for the communists, and I did not speak out, for I was not
one"... and ends "And then they came for me. There was no one
left to say anything..."

Freedom is won and lost in inches, and you have to fight every
single inch they try to take away. 

Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta@cpsr.org
http://www.cerfnet.com/~amehta/  finger amehta@cerfnet.com for public key