Censorship

Publicly predicting the future is a pastime best left to fools. That said, right now the clear trend is that governments are losing the ability to control information. (Witness the Wikileak thing) A new wide band data satellite was recently launched that promises to further blur international boundaries where information flow in concerned. Forgetting the Internet for a moment, you've already discovered that a cheap, tiny, ubiquitous memory stick will hold enough porn to last you for years.

The obvious danger is that governments might make information enough of a priority to figure out how to regain control; perhaps with some sort of widespread international cooperation.

(Hijacking alert: If this sub-discussion goes much further, a new thread on something like long-term story archiving/safekeeping or government censorship may be in order)

Guy

Governments have always wanted an unthinking population they can control easily, it goes back as far as the history of civilisation I am afraid.

I have a feeling that governments in Western Europe may find controlling the population extremely difficult over the next few years. If the penury we've been promised as a result of the banking crisis actually bites hard, I can't see the people taking it for more than a very short time, without civil unrest, or even worse a massive backlash of extremist political groups.
The idea that we're all in this together is a very sick joke. A little thing like petrol prices could be the starting point, or massive banker's bonuses when our kids can't get jobs or mortgages; but that's hardly a little thing.
Oh dear that was a bit serious for this topic.
Thanks for the praise re 2025 Ordalie.
I wrote that years ago during the boom years.

The internet has enormous potential for good and particularly in that it empowers individuals and small groups with little money. The official line from either a government or a commercial giant (like the Murdoch empire) is quite easily undemined. This is brilliant because it runs counter to commercial trends of globalisation, uniformity and customer demand manipulation. That said, it has huge potential for bad too: terrorist techniques and murderous slurs and false rumours spread as well as any other material, and a major danger (which I think can be seen in the way US politics has developed, for example) is that whereas people rooted in "real" communities - village, workplace, pub - come into contact with a wide range of views proportionate to the number of contacts, because the internet is so responsive to personal choice, you can simply reinforce your prejudices a thousand times.

I'd suggest that most government attempts to control the flow of information and opinions should be resisted, but not all. Would the British government in 1940 have been unreasonable to try to stop knowledge of its radar technology getting out to everyone? Is paedophiles linking on-line in order to plan abuse just a freedom from censorship issue? In the wake of race riots, would an attempt to block a false assertion that one racial group had engaged in ritual murders be oppressive? Basically, I'd suggest that while relatively few things should be illegal (only things that damage other people or the environment), if something would reasonably be illegal through other channels, the same should apply to the internet. Making that work, though, is a huge issue, and we only have to look (hope this isn't unduly political) at the way some governments have exploited legitimate concerns about terrorism to see how legitimate concerns could be abused. Moreover, international co-operation would very likely involve deals like "if you want to control adverts for tiger parts in medecine, you'd better agree to us controlling activity by political dissidents".

No easy answers, but I suggest concerned people minded to be free should get involved in the debates, discuss with elected representatives etc.

I had a Top Secret clearance for a while when I was in the navy. The thing I noticed back then is that most government documents are way over-classified, probably because the people classifying them are worried about covering their own asses in every contingency. The truth is that most classified documents would bore laymen to tears.

I think ChardT's point is an excellent one. Government's around the world (liberal and conservative alike) cheerfullly release information when it promotes their interests to do so.

So except for those very rare instances when there is an active military operation in progress as-the-speaker-is-on-the-podium, when you hear a politician say he can't discuss something because "it's classified" please subsitute "I don't want to discuss that because I did something criminal or criminally stupid, so I'm going to tell you it's classified, to avoid humiliating myself or going to jail."

Milos Foreman directed THE PEOPLE VS LARRY FLINT because as an immigrant from a Soviet satelite he understood that the government always starts censorship in the name of rounding up "perverts" a definition that quickly expands to include all views of which they do not approve. You see the same sort of rhetoric coming out of China and Iran today...

With the advent of one-viewpoint "news" outlets such as Fox News and Al Jazeera plus popular/powerful one-viewpoint media commentators/entertainers such as Rush Limbaugh, one unfortunately need not use the Internet to have his/her prejudices reinforced a thousand times over. These outlets are happy to perform that service 24/7.

In the past, all news organizations at least made an attempt at objectivity. Objectivity was seen as part of the professional ethics of the reporter. Opinion was once only allowed in clearly labeled editorial pieces. Today, opinion is seamlessly integrated with the "news". All pretense of objectivity seems to be gone. at least, this is true here in the USA. I hope it's not so in the rest of the world.

What ever happened to critical reading & thinking? Has that died? It is no longer taught in school? Sometimes I wonder what people are thinking (or if they bother to think at all).

Mind you, it's perfectly OK to be politically conservative, or to follow any religion you choose; but that doesn't remove one's need to see all sides of an issue or to sample other viewpoints.

Guy

Yes, I'm aware of that, Guy. It's not so bad here, but there are powerful people trying to push us that way, and that includes denigrating anything like the idea of public service or politics itself that get in the way of reducing everything to relations between the individual consumer and the business - which is often a false freedom for the consumer. Anyway, politics grew up to try to resolve issues where people disagreed and they couldn't all have their own individual ways because there was only one green space to build on, make into a nature reserve or leave as a kids' kickaround space, or where my right to play the music I like as I like conflicts with your need for sleep.

The internet can combat these trends or reinforce them. I suppose one additional problem is that the world now appears to us so diverse, so confusing, that the urge to seize on a simplifying message that's basically totalitarian gets very strong. People tend to explore freedom from a base they feel sure of.

I agree Chard's point is important and that governments overclassify. Actually on the Wikileaks issue I don't have a strong view, tending to feel that the US Government had every right to try to keep diplomats' confidential briefings confidential and that Wikileaks had every right to publish them when it got the chance. My opinion of US diplomats has actually gone way up from reading a whole lot of perceptive analyses saying things like "this man may be strategically important to us, but he's a brutal dictator and sooner or later his people will have had enough". But I don't think the Chinese, say, would have been quite so frank to US diplomats if they'd known their words would be on the internet, and I can quite understand why a responsible diplomat wouldn't want his honest scathing opinion of the local dictator published, still less anything that might point to his sources.

Back to the power of the internet: people action through the internet can have a huge impact quickly and involve many people, but unlike traditional forms of action through political parties, religious organisations, pressure groups and trade unions, it doesn't contain mechanisms to keep it going through lean spells. It tends to rise up, win a short-term victory and fade away, while the government or the corporation to which it was a nuisance is still there to win back lost ground. So the two forms of action need to be linked.

I wouldn't assume that the internet is likely to remain outside of the control of governments indefinitely. You only have to look at the recent domain seizures by the US Government (acting on behalf of the MPAA/RIAA) who seem to exhibit the worst of dual standards.. not to mention some of the actions carried out in response to Wikileaks which makes me think that the difference between the US and Chinese governments may not be the gulf I always imagined it to be. I'm sure it's not just the US government though, I suspect the majority would act the same way if they had the necessary influence.

Another thing to keep a very close eye on is the ongoing net neutrality debate. I do think we all need to be aware of what's happening .. otherwise one day we're likely to wake up and wonder "what happened to the internet?"

A few links:

domain seizures:
http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-seizes-bittorrent-search-engine-domain-and-mor e-101126/

http://torrentfreak.com/mpaariaa-lobbied-extensively-in-favor-of-domain-seizures-1012 19/

http://torrentfreak.com/us-government-made-painful-mistakes-in-torrent-finder-seizure -101217/


Net neutrality:
http://www.savetheinternet.com/

"What ever happened to critical reading & thinking? Has that died? It is no longer taught in school?"
I know it isn't any more. You have pinpointed the problem.