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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom government transparency ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies too much government

No Joking Matter

He thought he was just horsing around.

Using the popular app WeChat, a Chinese construction worker supervisor Chen Sho Uli made a gossipy joke about government officials while chatting in a chat group. But being too casual about what you say — and where — can be dangerous in China. For his sin Chen was incarcerated for several days. 

Picking quarrels” is another no-​no in the country.

In lieu of Orwell’s telescreen in every room, modern Internet technology enables repressive governments to punish citizens for thoughtcrime that becomes app-​speech crime. If the Chinese government can spy on you, it will. And penalize you for remarks it deems offensive to the dignity of the state.

Because of such repression, blogger Stephen Green observes that “strong encryption is everybody’s friend — except the tyrant’s.”

Agreed. Encryption is an important line of defense. 

But some societies require this more than others, because harmless, incidental communications are not equally attacked by government, from country to country. Which means that encryption is actually a second line of defense. 

The first is a cultural and political tradition respecting individual rights.

For one thing, robust encryption helps only those who engage in hyper-​careful private discourse, or hyper-​careful anonymous public discourse. Encryption won’t help thinkers of controversial thoughts who wish to express those thoughts publicly and under their own name. Everywhere we can, then, we must strengthen both the technological and cultural defenses of open discourse — recognizing that the latter is the more crucial and fundamental.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Categories
general freedom too much government

1984 in 2010

Students in a Pennsylvania school district are learning more about George Orwell’s novel 1984 than they had expected.

No, they’re not being subjected to “a boot stamping on a human face, forever” — the bottom line of Orwell’s bleak techno-​totalitarian dystopia — but they sure have gotten an unexpected taste of the telescreen in every room.

The Lower Merion School District says it intended no such thing when it handed out webcam-​equipped laptops to 1,800 students. It says that the only purpose of its ability to switch on the cams remotely was to help track lost or stolen laptops.

But Blake Robbins, a student at Harriton High, found out different. According to a class action lawsuit against the district, assistant principal Lindy Matsko confronted him about a bad deed he had allegedly done at home. As proof, Matsko pointed to an image on the laptop taken by the webcam. Matsko thought it showed Blake taking drugs. Blake says he had simply been eating Mike & Ike candies. Nor had he reported a lost laptop.

What exactly happened with these webcams will be thrashed out in court. It’s also being investigated by the FBI. But the district admits it never told anybody that it could operate the webcams remotely.

The kicker is this: Kids at the school had just read Orwell’s novel. I guess they’ll remember it better now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.