A New York Times guest editorial titled Stop the Great Firewall of America says “China operates the world’s most elaborate and opaque system of Internet censorship. But Congress… is considering misguided legislation that would strengthen China’s Great Firewall and even bring major features of it to America.” The culprit is the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act. Sounds good until you read that “The bills empower the attorney general to create a blacklist of sites to be blocked by Internet service providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks, all without a court hearing or a trial.” Rather like the Department of Homeland Security’s seizure of websites for copyright violations without the constitutionally-required court orders. If you’re not an American citizen, why should you care? Read this Techdirt article telling how the U.S. seized a Spanish domain name that had already been declared legal by the Spanish courts.
There’s also the Great Firewall of South Korea, a masterpiece of the conservative government at present. Maybe internet censorship is a growing trend among democratic countries.
>censorship
>democratic countries
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk
While democracy is supposed to imply that all citizens have an equal say in decisions that affect their lives, it has actually come to mean that all you get is to choose a temporary dictator among a subset of candidates sponsored by private interests.
Isn’t that called a republic?
Be it a republic, a kingdom or whatever, being “democratic” doesn’t seem to mean much more that being able to elect the next president, rather than having an actual say on what goes on.
Democratic countries? What are these democratic countries of which you speak?
There’s also one here in Norway. Granted, it’s for “preventing access to child pornography” – it’s still a secret blacklist that all ISP needs to implement.
Indeed, and that’s just what happened here in the UK. Content holders have successfully forced some ISPs to use their child porn filter to blacklist a usenet search engine.
The People’s Democratic Republic of China justifies its great firewall on the basis that it reduces child pornography. This is also the reason cited by many US congressional representatives justifying the need for government internet controls.
Child porn is the perfect false justification for government censorship, a great way to divert the public from the real reasons. After all, who could possible argue against restricting “child porn”?
Nicely put
WATOTC? “Won’t anyone think of the children?”
The ultimate red herring indeed.
And websites inside of South Korea only work with IE.
No they don’t!
Just some government sites use an ActiveX control for identification. (Which IS ridiculous in 2011)
Stop spreading FUD
All banking sites and webshops depend on ActiveX too.
And thus creators of other websites don’t even expect people to use an other browser. Thus when you use Firefox or other browser certain things will just not work.
all webshops? like amazon.com? or only Korean webshops?
and that some sites require IE doesn’t mean all (korean) website builders should assume everyone uses IE all the time. I have spend plenty of time in Korean internetcafé’s and ALL of them had at least firefox or chrome and many had both AND MORE.
South Korea is one of the top countries with fast internet and IE is only used when necessary….which is hardly ever (basically the same as here where some intranet sites require IE)
Riiight… http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-KR-monthly-200807-201111
(oh well – I guess, at the least, it just didn’t occur to you to stop, think, and notice that your usage patterns – and of those few locals you were in contact with – don’t have to be representative at all)
Sure, it started to visibly improve over the last few months, but IE at 83% is still pathetic (even when remembering how Statcounter is quite likely at least several points off http://www.osnews.com/thread?493282 ).
Come on, that’s ~2 worse than “Worldwide” and “Asia” – heck, that’s even much worse than North Korea! (however meaningless and fluctuating their stats are with barely any outside connections and, apparently, virtually whole traffic limited to their “country intranet”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwangmyong_(network) )
Now compare that (just a menu choice away on Statcounter) with some of my favourites in browser usage share: Russia, Ukraine, or Belarus.
What, are you kidding me? I’ve had no trouble here at all. Seriously.
Consider this. All the South Korean websites are monitored by the government’s presidential agency. The police agencies and the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office can track almost every post you wrote through your Residence Registration Number. They can imprison you with “internet” evidences.
In the U.S. we’ve traditionally had very fine law enforcement professionals. If we keep forcing them to act without proper court orders, eventually the good people will leave and we’ll be left with the kind of people more comfortable with enforcing the rules of a police state than protecting the public of a free country.
WTF is wrong with our governments nowadays? (I think I know what you’re going to answer to that
)
We’re seeing a whole lot of stupid changes get into laws that lets enforcing authorities to circumvent the court.
That’s actually equivalent to saying that the people promoting this bill want to strip you out of your right to have a decent trial, and also of your right to privacy. We’re seeing the same trend here in Canada, and IIRC in Europe it has the same sound to it.
Why the heck would people want to abandon such basic rights? That’s what we need to tell others when we want to convince them that all the shit happening in recent bills is plain wrong.
The right to privacy doesn’t mean “the right to hide yourself when you commit a crime” like some poeple are implying with the saying “It shouldn’t matter if you don’t have anything to hide”.
The right to privacy is actually a means to slow down police/fbi/whatever enforcing authority from obtaining personal information so that the court can judge whether the evidence or doubt against someone’s activity is concrete enough to let them intrude.
Without this right, citizens are absolutely powerless in front of the authorities, and a lot of innocent people face the risk to get sued or imprisoned without a valid reason.
btw, check out this site if you want to add your voice to the opposition in a way: http://americancensorship.org/
You are so right. For some reason people are confusing getting tough on crime with their basic rights that protect them from false accusation. If we don’t need these basic rights, let’s just save a lot of money and dispense with the court system altogether. We can just let the police determine who is innocent and guilty!