For years now, Western countries have been condemning China and many other countries for censorship. And with good reason. Without access to information, the general public has no mechanism to oversee what their leadership is up to.
Now, however, many Western countries—with Germany and Australia in the lead—are quietly implementing censorship measures. This is an outrage and is unlikely to even address the alleged issue of curbing illegal activities such as child pornography. Let me explain.
What Went Wrong
The censorship is being implemented by means of blacklisted websites, i.e. a list of websites deemed illegal. Using the anecdotal sample of the leaked Australian blacklist, we find sites such as:
- Religious groups
- Political contrarians
- Pro-abortion sites
- A dentist
- The blacklist itself
It’s quite possibly that some of the sites have ended up on the list by accident, but it’s hard to conceive of a scenario where the sites presenting dissident opinions have been “accidentally” censored. In any case we’ve ended up with a policy of censorship with no transparency and a seemingly arbitrary process of selection.
I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she’s too young to have logged on yet. Here’s what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say “Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?”
Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Why It Wouldn’t Work Anyway
Okay, fine, so we give up a little bit of freedom in exchange for stopping the real criminals. That must be worth something, right? Actually, no.
The “real criminal” would simply contact a server in, say, Russia over a secured line, bypass your blacklist, and continue his work unimpeded. Or use Freenets. Or use any of the millions of computers taken over by trojan horses, maybe even yours. Or a VPN or a VNC. Well, you get the idea. Even the creepy, low-tech uncle from next door could easily use any of the freely available proxy servers on the web.
For anyone committed to doing so, circumventing the censorship is trivial. The only thing these censorship measures accomplish is to limit the freedom of the average, honest citizen.
What Should We Do Instead
At a bare minimum the criteria for the censorship must be made public and the process of blacklisting transparent. But that’s just adding polish to a rotting system. The real solution lies in international cooperation to cut to the core of the issue by rounding up the organized crime organizations and individuals committing atrocities.
Will you quietly accept these steps to an Orwellian future or will you speak up and ask our leaders to walk the talk? This is not a conspiracy theory. I wish it were. This is happening in our own backyards by our own politicians. Speak truth to power.
