Tag: web

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First Amendment rights social media

Website Suppression

censorship

Censors are on the march … seemingly everywhere. Strike them down one place, they pop up three others. 

Or, in the U.S., two: the House and the Senate. 

“Earlier this year, U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren introduced a new pirate site blocking bill, titled the Foreign Anti-​Digital Piracy Act,” we read at Torrent Freak, which goes on to tell us that, in late July, “a similar proposal was introduced by Senators Tillis, Coons, Blackburn, and Schiff. The bipartisan bill, titled Block Bad Electronic Art and Recording Distributors (Block BEARD), aims to introduce a legal mechanism for rightsholders to request site blocking orders.”

Ostensibly, the Block BEARD Act targets websites accused of harboring pirated materials.

But Reclaim the Net observes that the legislation would establish “a formal, court-​approved process that could be used to make entire websites vanish from the American internet.” ISPs would have to obey orders to take down websites.

Once government has this new means of torpedoing websites, what counts as prohibition-​worthy content could easily expand. The bill doesn’t require transparency, so the public would not have to be told what sites are being blocked.

Or why. 

Or for how long.

Reclaim the Net points to how easily the “takedown notice” provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act has been weaponized to censor content in the name of protecting copyright. Everyone from artists to political activists have had content scrubbed because of DMCA notices for work “that clearly falls under fair use, commentary, or criticism.”

Platforms eager to avoid liability delete content even when a DMCA claim is clearly illegitimate. Then publishers must engage in a time-​consuming legal process to maybe obtain permission to restore the censored material.

If the Block BEARD Act is enacted, suddenly whole websites, not just individual pages, could be unjustly disappeared so skittish ISPs can avoid liability. Can we trust the U.S. government — and various disgruntled people — to possess that power?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

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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

encryption, freedom, Chen Sho Uli, China, Chinese, Orwell, repression

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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Accountability crime and punishment folly general freedom media and media people moral hazard nannyism responsibility too much government

Another Push for Censorship

Great Britain, Tory, Prime Minister, PM, censorship, terrorism, internet, web

It’s almost as if politicians are hell-​bent on expanding government at the expense of our freedoms … and grandstanding to ‘look like they are doing something.’

The two proclivities are not unrelated.

Take Theresa May, Great Britain’s Tory Prime Minister. After yet another terrorist attack in her country, this time on the London Bridge, she re-​iterated her party’s intent to censor the Internet.

“We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed,” May said on Sunday. But this “safe space,” she went on, “is precisely what the Internet, and the big companies that provide Internet-​based services, provide.”

Now, blaming ISPs and social platforms is a crude form of business scapegoating — something I would expect from her opponent in the upcoming elections, Jeremy Corbyn, the much-​loathed (but inching ahead in the polls) top banana of Labour. 

As a conservative, May should understand markets and the limitations of government interventionism a bit better than a near-communist. She might recall that previous attempts to regulate the means of communication almost never to work, and, in those few cases when they do, never stay scaled to the original target issue. 

They expand. To cover more than just terrorism, as in this case.

What’s more, Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group makes the case that such a move would likely “push these vile networks into even darker corners of the web, where they will be even harder to observe” — scuttling the alleged purpose of the Conservative Party’s longed-​for censorship. 

May knows this. But she is a politician. She has power, and she wants to keep it.

It’s almost as if power corrupts or something.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom media and media people responsibility

Less Innocent Times?

Dan Balz, Term Limits, coffee, internet, media, web, trust

Many years ago, waiting for coffee at a vendor in front of the Washington Post building and across the street from my U.S. Term Limits office, I often exchanged friendly banter with the Post’s Dan Balz. 

Coffee in hand last Sunday, I read Balz’s column, “A scholar asks, ‘Can democracy survive the Internet?’”

“In more innocent times, the rise of the Internet was seen by many people as a boon to democracy,” Balz began, adding that “the Web broadened the flow of information, introduced new voices into the political debates, empowered citizens and even provided a powerful fundraising tool for some lesser-​known candidates such as Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders.”

Obama, Sanders … all to the good!

“Now, in what are clearly less innocent times, the Internet is viewed as a far less benign force,” he continues, next to a picture of President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed.  “It can be a haven for spreading fake news and rewarding the harshest and most divisive of political rhetoric.”

Mr. Balz’s time continuum is faulty. The “innocent times” when Bernie Sanders used the Internet to raise money were the same “clearly less innocent” times when voters elected President Trump. 

“Neither the legacy media nor the established political parties,” Balz bemoans, “exercise the power they once had as referees.”

Nathaniel Persily, the scholar cited by our legacy-​media columnist, shares Balz’s anti-​Trump bias. But he makes an important point, writing that the Trump campaign “could only be successful because established institutions — especially the mainstream media and political party organizations — had already lost most of their power.”

People voted against the less-​than-​innocent political (and media) establishment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration based on original artwork by PRO With Associates