Sat, Apr 19, 2008 page9

• Censoring online porn gives governments tools to block dissent

  Censorware never was just about teens looking at porn or employees goofing off, as governments use the same mechanism to limit what the public can see

  • By Seth Finkelstein / THE GUARDIAN
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  The issue of whether the Internet can be censored and how governments are trying to do it continues to be fought around the world.

  The OpenNet Initiative (opennet.net), a collaborative partnership of four leading academic institutions, has produced a book-length analysis — Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering (tinyurl.com/4v5ofh). It’s a primer in methods and an atlas of studies. The first sections provide an analytical framework. Then prohibitions are examined across dozens of countries. The results show that far from the earlier idea of the Internet destroying nations, nations are, arguably, domesticating the Internet (or at least trying hard). As one telling sentence puts it: “A key aspect of control online ... is that states have, on an individual basis, defied the cyberlibertarians by asserting control over the online acts of their own citizens in their own states.”

  DOUBLETHINK

  Back in 1996, during that year’s conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy, I literally talked myself hoarse trying to convince civil libertarians that censorware (a more accurate term than “filters”) would be a serious threat to freedom of speech (sethf.com/pioneer).

  Prevailing viewpoints of the time were an odd doublethink — that censorware should be touted as a solution for parents who wanted to prevent their kids reading forbidden material, but that the Internet couldn’t be censored by governments. More than a decade on, this book details how extensively governments have been attempting Internet censorship.

  The book’s very existence is a milestone. Over time an issue can work its way up the political food chain, from often-ignored grassroots activists, to marginal but significant mentions in white papers by think tanks, to full-scale consideration by policymakers.

  And the issues here encompass everything from the complicity of US censorware companies with censorious regimes to the collaboration of information storage giants like Google and Yahoo with repressive state actions.

  Censorware never was just about teens looking at porn or employees goofing off. When I speak about censorware, I often try to impress on people that technical architectures are different from personal values. That is, if parents can limit what teenagers can see, then governments can limit what citizens see. And the other side is if citizens can circumvent governments, teenagers will be able to circumvent parents.

  But there’s a refinement I usually don’t have room to discuss. That is, it’s arguably futile to try to eliminate sexual material in general owing to its sheer amount and possible interest by virtually all (male) adolescents and adults. But the number of people interested in, say, the independence of Tibet from China or dissent in Burma is orders of magnitude smaller. And that difference may make for a far more manageable banning problem. The details of how human rights reports or opposition sites have been blocked are putting this speculation to a practical test.

  However, it would be ironic if, at ground level, pornography-seeking uses of projects such as the Psiphon (psiphon.civisec.org) social networks-based program or the Tor anonymity system (torproject.org) ended up popularizing the programs for political uses.

  NEW ERA

  Some have suggested that we are entering a new Internet era with blogs and syndication feeds and massive digital sharecropping sites that will on the whole be more difficult to censor.

  My response to this idea is to remind people that essentially identical rhetoric was heard at the start of the Internet’s popularization. And we’re seeing now how those predictions were wrong.

  Indeed, there’s every reason to expect that similar trends such as centralization, willingness of corporations to collaborate, the power of the market for repression and so on will be applied to these forms of communication. The failure of technological determinism just a short while ago should argue strongly against such baseless optimism.

  Access Denied will certainly become a standard reference. But it’s sadly not clear whether it will be more as a foundation for anti-censorship efforts — or as an initial chronicle of how visions of freedom turned into realities of control.
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