Any regular reader of newspapers will be familiar with the phenomenon of the newspaper article which says one thing, but with a headline above it, written by someone completely different, saying something completely different. Yesterday’s Telegraph piece written by Bruno Waterfield, entitled Brussels admits defeat in EU blog wars is, I think, a good example. I read the headline and rejoiced, but then I read the article.
What Waterfield’s piece actually says is not that the EU has admitted defeat in the face of blogs, but that the EU commission does not like blogs. Blogs have enabled those who think ‘No’ to say ‘No’. Blogs are too cheap to be bought off or controlled, too easy to set up to be silenced. Blogs are bad news. Blogs have been especially bad news in Ireland, where Irish bloggers saying No lead directly to Irish voters voting No. But nowhere in Bruno Waterfield’s report did I read any suggestion that the EU commission is ready to give up in its struggle with this new media menace to its power, and just to lie back and allow people to put whatever they think up on the internet. On the contrary, this ‘secret’ report that Waterfield quotes from sounds to me not like a surrender at all, more like a declaration of war.
Agreed.
Most collectivists have no respect for any principle of liberty – including freedom of speech.
And this includes many (although not all) of those collectivists who are “civil liberties activists”, they want the freedom to express their opinions – not opinions that they oppose.
I do not know what the forces of evil (for that is what they are) are planning – but, sadly, I do not think they are as powerless in the face of the internet as many people think.
Indeed. There is a widespread delusion that the internet’s technology renders it incapable of being controlled. Of course that is nonsense. It is the same as saying the printing press is beyond control, because it allows anyone to print whatever they like.
All the state does is then arrest people for printing things it deems unacceptable. It’s no different. Technologies do not liberate, in that sense. You may be able to run an “underground” with complex encryption schemes and secrecy, but that is all. The control of the mass internet is as simple as a minister passing a law saying “you may not publish X on a website”. That’s it. Game over.
What I think we’ll see is some combination of (a) direct laws against defamation, hate speech, offense and regulating political speech and (b) the corporatisation of websites themselves. Bloggers will find themselves forced into sites owned by corporations, running strict AUPs. Owning your own domain, which is currently gloriously simple, will be made expensive and difficult through regulation and law. To do that they need to wrest control of the Domain Name System, which I’m sure they’re working very hard at doing.
I’d imagine that some time in the future, to set up your own domain will cost many groats to be paid to the bureaucracy, take about a year and require mountains of form filling, certification, inspection and justifications of why you want the thing in the first place and so on. Easy for big groups in the corporate state to do, effectively beyond the reach of the average bod. I don’t believe that a system so simple that I can set up a domain just with a credit card in a couple of days will be tolerated for much longer by our masters.
Ian B:
It’s actually even worse — printing and distributing stuff on paper at least doesn’t leave a permanent trail of who exactly printed and read it.
Or they can also pass a law making it illegal to even read it. In either case, getting all the necessary information on the offenders is a matter of a few keystrokes.
Well, not exactly, as has been shown in this film. I hope you all saw it – it’s a must.
Nowadays, you do at least get a permanent trail of who printed it. You only leave a trail of reading it if you forget to wear gloves. You’re waaaaay behind the paranoia curve, here!
As with all “security threats”, the government can clamp down on the law-abiding and ignorant fairly easily, while being completely helpless in the face of those who know what they’re doing, are capable of applying a bit of intelligence, and are willing to go outlaw. If you want to publish without the government being able to stop you, there is plenty of hard crypto about to make it possible.
The government can as easily and effectively ban dissident publishing as they can ban knives and guns. So in a sense, both sides are right.
If it is war they want, then war they shall have. I expect Anonymous to be all over this like a cheap suit fairly shortly. If not then they’re not the people I thought they were.
All a government has to do (if it wants to play this game) is control what most people see and hear – not a few die hards using……
I am sure there I are anti Putin people in Russia – but it does not matter if most people support him.
And Putin is just a pragmatic thug who has gained control of education and the media to further his own power (and Russia as an extention of himself – and his pals).
Certainly he was trained in Marxist tactics by the K.G.B. – but like many of this kind in its late period he is not really full of fire to create a perfect new society.
The political people who have this passion are closer to home – and the E.U. is not the most extreme example (whatever the various corporatists there really believe in, or used to believe in).
Although there is some cross over.
For example, the leader of the Italian left (the man defeated by Mr B. after Prodi went) wrote the introduction to the Italian edition of “The Audacity of Hope”.
He seems to me to be an “ex” Communist rather than an ex Communist – and there is a vast difference.
Someone who really rejects Marxism (having believed in it) finds their whole world (not just their interpretation of economics, but of history and of art and of, well everything) blown to bits.
It is a massive thing – involving the inner most self of someone. And often involves suffering.
The signs of a real rejection of Marxism can be seen – and it can be seen when they are not there.
I suppose the editor would claim it should be interpreted as, “EU (shyly) admits to defeating the other side in the war on offensive bloggers.”
It’s not yet a total victory, but they are trying!
Pa Annoyed:
I’d say that it’s much easier to ban dissident publishing, especially on the internet. The analogy with knives and guns would be accurate if all guns and knives came with a built-in tracking system that would enable the government to pinpoint their exact location with only a few keystrokes, and that could be circumvented only by a tiny handful of experts and would magically start working again in case any of them passed from the hands of such experts to an ordinary person.
But in any case, Ian B is very correct when he says that it’s a widespread folly to believe that the internet somehow inherently promotes and facilitates freedom of speech, or any other freedom. It doesn’t — it merely provides a vehicle for exercising these freedoms, assuming they already exist. If they don’t, the internet won’t make cracking down on dissent any more difficult; on the contrary, it may well make it even easier.
Take for example the Wikipedia article on Samizdat, whose authors show such naivete when they say: “With increased proliferation of computer technologies, it became practically impossible for the government to control the copying and distribution of samizdat.” No, it did not — the control was weakened because the regime became softer for other reasons. Lenin or Stalin would have had zero problems dealing with any sort of information technology by simply being ruthless and brutal enough. Unlike the USSR, the North Korean regime hasn’t softened since the Stalinist times, and they sure don’t look like their grip on society is shaken by any modern technologies.
To my mind, the money quote is “Both sides of the Lisbon debate actively the web [sic] however it was dominated by the No side.”
To me, that seems to clearly state “The general public were both pro and anti Lisbon. However, a great majority of them were anti.”
OK, so Brussels acknowledging the will of the people in order to use anti-democratic means to subvert it is nothing new. But we should still point it up, whenever they put it in writing.
Ivan,
Wouldn’t China be a more realistic reference point here? They don’t want to lose the economic benefits of openness or of access to IT and yet are reasonably effective at censorship. Yes, there is some underground traffic through the great firewall, but the critical mass of opinion seems to be under government control.
I would of course like to point out that the internet is already used on a daily basis for a great many illegal things and no-one seems to be able to stop those, nor do they show any sign of abating.
Despite the RIAA and co becoming increasingly militant, it has never been so easy to download music for free. The same goes for software and videos.
The Japanese programs ‘Share’ and ‘Winny’ are true distributed P2P with mandatory encryption (even of the cache, which is distributed) and are, I believe, untraceable – you cannot ascertain which files come from which IP and which files are hosted on which hosts – the ‘file resource’ is distributed amongst all online machine and encrypted on them. Connections are established to machines even if they don’t have the file you want in order to bolster the distributed file cache. These programs were written because in Japan copyright infringement is a criminal offence and carries a prison sentence. No-one has yet been prosecuted for the use of these programs nor does anyone seem to be making any headway in that direction.
What also are we really suggesting? The EU enjoys little international support and is woefully unable to project power. Is the USA going to enforce EU laws in regard to ‘banned material’ (supposing the EU manage somehow to pass a law banning the publication of ‘antestablishment texts’ on websites.) Somehow, I doubt it. Is the EU going to demand that websites be blocked in the same manner as happens in China and other countries? That would require a vast re-engineering of a great many datacentres and the cost would be astronomical.
The main concern is not the practicality or the theory. I work in the internet industry, it can be done. Anything can be blocked/intercepted if you spend enough money and make laws. You could make it mandatory for all ISPs to have a government-controlled border router one hop outside of their own border routers. Anything is possible. Buy Cisco and Juniper stock if you believe it’s going to happen as they’re going to be selling a LOT more routers in a very short space of time.
I think this edge case (actual laws being passed that restrict legitimate political speech) is the only real one we have to worry about and that’s not from any technological standpoint, but simply because if things have gone that far we find ourselves under naked totalitarianism, and at that point there will almost certainly be more pressing concerns.
Anything else is just window dressing.
Anonymous, I take it you’re aware that every ISP in Britain is now signed up to Cleanfeed, the
government’svoluntary internet blocklist?Talking of blogs and censorship, it appears that Inspector Gadget(Link) may have met his Waterloo.
Coincidentally he has just published or is about to publish a book(Link)… is that next on the list?
Ian, yes. While I don’t agree with Cleanfeed (nor do I view it as a serious obstacle to anything) I don’t see how it affects political speech in its current incarnation.
Can you list any political websites that are blocked?
Samizdata, blocked?
I said quite clearly that the capability always exists to ban anything you like through legal or technical means – Cleanfeed is currently used by UK ISPs voluntarily because they perceive it to be a benefit, if they perceive it not to be a benefit there’s nothing legally that stops them from un-implementing it. I am speaking about existing scenarios. If the UK government were to instruct a body such as the IWF to add political sites such as Samizdata to its blocklist and then to make the use of Cleanfeed compulsory, then we would have the scenario above, i.e. naked totalitarianism. I think at that stage we have a bigger problem.
Technical arguments are irrelevant to us. Technical arguments are relevant in China where oppressive censorship is slowly (perhaps) being defeated by glimpses of free speech and reality. In that scenario a technical method must be used to bypass oppression.
In the UK scenario, if we have to resort to technical means then the battle is already lost as we will have already gone from freedom to oppression. That is the point I am trying to make.
No. They signed up to it “voluntarily” because they were told by the government that if they didn’t, they would be forced to by legislation. The only “benefit” they have is not being accused of being enablers of child pornography by the political elites. It is a classic case of what Enoch Powell called “[replacement of the rule of law by] the Rule of the Threat of Law”.
Nothing legally. But there is the threat of the full power of the state and media being brought down upon them. This is how governments prefer to rule these days; indeed frequently they have. The British Board Of Film Censors was set up as a “voluntary” industry body, under threat of legislation, too.
I personally think industries should tough it out and force the government to legislate, since these “voluntary” bodies are far worse because they can hide behind that illusion of being non-governmental. But for the big players, such as BT, there is everything to be gained from sucking the government cock; that leaves only small players who could try to tough it out, and would be crushed by the state steamroller. So in practical terms they have little choice.
Firstly, freedom of speech is about more than just straightforwardly political speech, and in fact progressive governance is more likely to restrict other forms, such as “obscenity” and “hate speech”. Naive people think you’re free if you can say “down with El Presidente” but the EU is evolving to a stage where you can say that but not much else. Sites may not be taken down for saying “I hate Gordon Brown” but will be taken down for saying “I hate muslims” or the like.
The IWF believes its remit includes hate speech for instance. And the current system makes the IWF- supposedly a non-governmental body- judge, jury and executioner of the law.
As to what’s on the list, I have no idea. Nobody else has either. It’s a secret list.
I think that any ISP that removes itself from Cleanfeed because it’s being used to block legally protected speech will find nothing but sympathy with all of the print media, most of the visual media and a clear majority of the house of lords.
Do you think otherwise?
They’d also have the protection of the EU-enacted (lol) human rights act to beat the government with.
Goes both ways.
Anon, you might like to note that the IWF was created entirely because the ISPs were hauled over the coals as “child pornographers” in the popular press; the MD of Demon Internet was described as part of a “child pornography ring”. The media has every desire to depict the internet as a den of kiddie porn, terrorism, suicide cults and evil. Do you ever read the newspapers?
This is Europe.We don’t have any “legally protected speech”. You are aware of that?
You mean aside from that speech protected under Article 10 of the European convention on human rights, like I referred to? I’d like to remind you that precedents for US court rulings related to the first amendment make it effectively equal to Article 10, before you start there.
Also in the days you refer to, the internet was viewed as a new and worrying thing by just about everyone who wasn’t on it and you _could_ get some very nasty stuff simply by searching for it – and a lot of it was held on ISPs servers (usenet servers) so they were passively involved in redistributing it. It wasn’t like it was even hidden – if you had a usenet client and got the full list of newsgroups from your ISP it was all there to see.
I keep up to date with the news and I don’t see in general anyone demonizing the internet and being taken seriously. Too many people use it and know it for what it is.
I also think that when it comes to ‘serious business’ the media will side with the ISPs. I appreciate that you feel differently but I am fairly confident.
If you want to worry about something, worry about that day that will come fairly soon when an awful lot of parents suddenly realise that the only reason their teenage daughter has got a webcam is so she can show’ the goods’ on MSN/AIM etcetera. Then you will see trouble.
From that very article-
“The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial
integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in
confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.”
You call that protection?
And really, I’m sorry you can’t quite comprehend the kind of government pressure that hauls ISPs into the Home Office and tells them to “voluntarily” do as they’re told. If you don’t understand what a nasty and underhanded way for government power to be applied that is, I don’t think I can help you. Feel free to carry on not worrying.
Yes, I call that protection. As I said, taking the court decisions to date into account, it’s effectively identical to the current interpretations of the First Amendment.
It is not perfect but it is a legal protection and you can force people to abide by it. People _have_ sued governments in the EU Supreme Court and won. It does happen.
You also seem to think that because Cleanfeed was created and ISPs have been asked/forced to sign up to it that it can therefore be repurposed without any problems or dissent and I simply disagree.
Cleanfeed and the IWF were created under the auspices of existing legislation to ‘protect’ people from viewing material that was ALREADY ILLEGAL.
You are suggesting that either:
1. The IWF/government will add material to the cleanfeed list that isn’t illegal
or
2. Material will be made illegal and then it will be added to the list.
In the case of 1 I believe you will see the system dropped by ISPs and they will appeal to the media/EUCHR/EU Supreme Court/etc who will support them, in the case of 2 we have an overtly totalitarian government and worrying about ISPs merely doing what they’re ordered to isn’t that important any more; the frontline of the battle is elsewhere.
What do you think will happen, then? I’m a bit reluctant to continue this argument because I’m getting the feeling that maybe you believe that ‘they’ are all in control and that ‘they’ control the courts too and ‘they’ control the ISPs and that you are a fatalist. Maybe you’re right – but if you are, there’s no point in even discussing the matter because ‘they’ will do whatever they want regardless.
It isn’t protection. Virtually anything at all can be prohibited under such a broad range of exceptions. It is worthless.
As to ISPs taking cleanfeed to court; well, firstly it’s hard to see how they could, since it is a nominally “private” system. Nobody is forced to be on it legally. ISPs are merely “asked” to “voluntarily” use it. Who they gonna sue?
And secondly, you may not be aware, but the list is secret. Nobody knows what is on it. To deliberately circumvent it to find out exposes one to breaking the law, because to do so one would be deliberately accessing child pornography. So nobody can ever, legally, know what is being blocked. To look is to break the law.
Note that the two above points aren’t contradictory. While Cleanfeed is plausible-deniability voluntary, the presence of a site on its database would be fair warning that it is illegal, so to deliberately look is not legal.
It’s the same protection accorded US citizens and it relies on the courts deciding whether decisions to ban certain speech are in agreement with the article or not. Anything ‘can’ be banned, anything ‘can’ be struck down by the courts. It seems to work unless you assume that the courts will just rubberstamp any government decision. Is that your assumption?
I was also not talking of an ISP taking cleanfeed to court – if they refuse to use it, presumably someone will try to force them through legal methods, then they will have access to the courts. If they refuse to use it and no-one cares, there’s no problem.
Also the list is not ‘secret.’ It is restricted corporate information covered by a NDA. You can get it if you’re an ISP and you use their systems – in fact you can’t use the system without having it as you need the list of IPs and URLs to load into your proxies and routers.
When considering the list being ‘secret’ you have to also consider what that list currently is composed of.
Also if cleanfeed is operating it will be impossible to get to a site blocked by it so any lawyer who isn’t asleep on the job would be able to prove that it was an attempt to ascertain whether the URL was on the DB, not an attempt to view the site in question.
We are also, are we not, considering the possibility of cleanfeed being used for things that are illegal to PUBLISH but not to VIEW (hate speech etc) so the above doubly applies.
Could you answer the question I put in my post timed 04:02 PM please.
What question?
That one. Feel free to add a point 3 if I’ve got your interpretations wrong.
Agreed – and that’s where you have to get into what the government/court’s in questions predilection for censorship comes into play. The US, IMO, has a good track record in this regard. Canada on the other hand, with the same apparent rights, sees fit to set up “Human Right’s” commissions to limit free speech.
Honestly, an EU bureaucracy that sees Blogs as “worrying” and “uniformly negative” places them firmly in the latter camp and should be viewed with deep suspicion by any free-thinking person – irrespective of the “paper” rights accorded citizens
Anonymous-
Obviously I cannot say with any certainty what “will happen”. Like anyone else I can only speculate.
First of all, I must point out that you are inaccurate in describing the material on the IWF list a “illegal”. The sites on it have never been declared illegal by any due process by our court system. They are sites which the IWF consider in their opinion to be in breach of the law. This apparently elevates the IWF, a creation of what we may call “The ISP Guild” to the level of a judiciary. That is itself an interesting innovation. The best we can say about any blocked content is that it is allegedly illegal. So the your two possible interpretations aren’t very useful to us.
The main point I’ve been making isn’t about what I think may or will happen. It is a question of what has already happened, and on this we can presumably both agree. What has happened so far?
The entire internet in Britain is censored. This censorship is carried out by a private body which interprets the law, and a private company which implements it. All the other private companies who provide internet access have, after a chat with the Home Office, miraculously decided to censor themselves, and thus us. The list of that which is censored has no oversight under normal democratic or legal procedures. Material on the list is “guilty until proven innocent”. The material is overseas, so the producers of it, even if on the list, are unlikely to challenge it in the British courts, or European court, and it is hard to see on what basis they would challenge it anyway; the system is not official. It is entirely private. The fact that the government used all its coercive power to force ISPs onto it is neither here nore there. You cannot challenge a law which does not exist.
This is the worst of all possible worlds. If the government censors, one can mount a legal challenge. The law(s) must be debated in the commons and can be strutinised by political represnetatives. But this underhanded censorship by pressure on industry circumvents the political process, and circumvents the legal process. That is what I am objecting to.
How far they may extend it, I have no idea.
We need to remember there is no actual law against foreign websites. THere is a law against private individuals possessing various material that may be on them (an appalling law in itself). The IWF/Cleanfeed system is not implementing any law. It is merely doing as it wishes, because the government nicely asked them to.
I am not discussing whether particular material is worthy of existence or depraved or should be banned. I am discussing the political mechanism by which censorship of it has been implemented. Do you or do you not agree that the method I have outlined is improper for a supposedly liberal democracy to use? I remind you again that none of the censored material has been, by any due process, actually declared illegal.
Anonymous:
This is completely untrue. According to the current precedent in the U.S., when it comes to political speech, the only exception to free speech is incitement of imminent lawless action (which means giving instructions to specific people to commit a specific crime). This protects even the speech of the most rabid political extremists that openly advocate genocide, let alone anything less extreme than that.
In contrast, European courts are perfectly fine with a whole range of restrictions on political speech, not just for out-and-out Nazis, but also for all sorts of speech that is offensive to various religious, racial, ethnic, sexual-orientation, or whatever other groups. To take one of the most obvious examples, while the U.S. courts would strike down any government attempt to censor the Danish Muhammad cartoons, European Muslim organizations are planning to use the European Court of Human Rights to censor them out (after they failed to achieve it in Danish and French courts).
Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with such limitations, it’s an undeniable and obvious fact that the legal protection of political speech in the U.S. is far stronger and more universal than in Europe, both at the national and the EU level.
It’s not just malice; it can be stupidity. For whatever reason, I’m currently unable to connect to any site in the .cz domain, for reasons I’m unable to determine. (Is anybody else having the problem?)
I presume the entire Czech Republic hasn’t broken some law, and isn’t subject to cleanfeed.
Ted, I can get to http://www.czech.cz/ no problem 🙂
Your second paragraph gives me the chance to reiterate a significant point in this discussion; none of the sites on cleanfeed have broken any law.
I can’t really argue with you any more, Ian. You’re just ranting about how evil cleanfeed is, and I’ve agreed with you a few times already.
When people start fishing up legitimate (i.e. non-CP) sites that are on cleanfeed then I’ll give a damn.
In the meantime I don’t care because I believe it does what it says it does. If it starts being used for something else I think ISPs will drop it like a hot potato.
I think also that if a legitimate site were to find itself blocked by cleanfeed then there would be a great many legal remedies. Libel, slander, restraint of trade, antitrust… I’m no lawyer but those are coming immediately to mind.
And also if you’re going to have these discussions and then in the middle of it stick comments like:
then please be aware that a great many people will immediately assume that you only care about cleanfeed because it stops you getting CP easily, and I don’t think you’ll be finding many friends there.
That will definitely upset Anonymous.
I would have to agree with Anonymous here. It is very difficult for governments to censor the Internet if access to it is ubiquitous and demand for subversive material is high. In China, there is little demand for subversive material in the cities (where there is access) thanks to the strong economy in the cities. The Chinese government is fearful of taking action that would disrupt its economy. One could look at Internet Filters like “cleanfeed” or the “great firewall” as pressure barriers with pin-hole leaks. At low pressure, there is a tiny drip, at high pressure, there is a huge onrush of water as if the pin-hole was a big opening. In terms of information, the striking power gap between the government and individuals/small groups has shrunk.
Now imagine sometime in the future where you can manufacture anything in your garage, including personal WMDs. It will be a very bad day for the large centralized state.
Look up “fifth-generation warfare” and “super-empowered individual”.
Anonymous, I rather think you “can’t argue with me any more” not because I’m “ranting” but because you can’t think of a good counter argument to my main point, which is my objection to the method by which this censorship has been imposed. I can only presume you’re some kind of New Labour type authoritarian progressive, who cares nothing for principles, civil liberties or the rule of law so long as it gets the results you happen to like, the “who cares about habeas corpus, it’s only terrorists it affects” argument.
Presume whatever you want, I’ve made paragraphs of points above which you’ve never addressed, preferring to use that classic ‘internet argument’ technique of replying to my first paragraphs and then introducing five new ones each time you reply.
Ivan:
Yeah those Danish and French courts really suck… oh… ah…
If you’re gonna produce an argument, produce one that helps your case, not opposes it, you dolt.
Anonymous has no grounds for complacency. An appropriate law banning possession of some types of legally produced adult pornography has already been introduced, just in the last parliamentary session (see my URL link). Salami tactics, sure, and I can imagine it will be a little longer before political speech comes under serious threat. But that might come sooner if a big debate over the EU or some other sensitive element of the establishment agenda comes about.
I’ll assume most bloggers are aware of Canada’s recently very active battleground over internet censorship due to the activities of our various so-called Human Rights Commissions. Anyone not up to speed can get a good start with a visit to Ezra levant’s blog(Link).
It seems, here in Canada at least, the best way to survive and win, besides financially supporting each others legal battles, is to absolutely not be anonymous, but instead to be very, very public and very relentless about exposing what is happening using *all* the tools the Internet offers, including Youtube, networked cross-posting at sympathetic blogs, and coinciding ad hoc campaigns of letters to newspapers, news magazines and elected officials.
(By the way, watching Ezra on Youtube(Link) is a hoot)
The other important thing is to join the battle openly at the first hint of State coercion, loudly and with as much sarcasm as possible. Don’t let the bureaubots build up speed and momentum. Make them fight out in the open for every inch they try to take, and do everything you can to make them look like a joke while you’re doing it.
Those combined tactics mean that the State has to engage in a tiring, ever-expanding and increasingly expensive game of whack-a-mole(Link), except–happily for freedom–it gets to be like whack-a-hydra, way out in public where the bureaubots just *hate* fighting.
It’s kinda like that quote from the movie V for Vendetta: “People shouldn’t be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people.”
Make them afraid every time they even start to make you afraid. If you can, make them nervous every time they even question (let alone look to stop) what you’re doing.
So far, although the HRCs sadly still exist, these days the war between the censors and the bloggers has consisted of one loss or retreat after another on the part of the HRCs, with the most recent Supreme Court decision decidedly favouring the bloggers. The HRCs had it their way *until* the fight went ultra-public and the censorship victims developed deep enough pockets.
Nick, again I agree but I believe there are only so many times you can make a stand before you lose popular support (boy who cried wolf scenario, etc.)
Pornography is not the best argument to use because even in the USA the obscenity statutes still stand and pornographic material is not covered under ‘free speech’ legislation. I would like it to be, but it’s not.
Free speech groups that use the argument of free access to pornographers risk having their reputations damaged, simply because a lot of people (voters) are pretty ordinary and a lot of them haven’t ever seen anything nastier in their life than Page 3 of The Sun. This will probably change as the internet generation grows up so it is not really something I am concerned about.
In the meantime I am simply saying that it may be best, if we fear an imminent assault on free SPEECH, to save our ammunition. That is all.
Anonymous. You have singularly refused to address the issue here, which is that the censorship regime has been enplaced by skullduggery and placed beyond direct democratic or legal remedy, which I have addressed at some length. So it’s hard for you to argue that it is me avoiding issues.
As to your last comment, I’ll just remind you of this quote-
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
That’s not an ‘issue’ to be ‘addressed.’ That’s a statement of fact. Do I really need to say ‘yeah, sucks, doesn’t it?’ Does my 10:49 ‘ranting about how evil cleanfeed is and I have agreed with you already’ not indicate my opinion? What advance does this bring?
Also read my 10:49 in which I refer to legal remedies.
Will you please read what I write before bloody replying.
People have been pointing to the United States and the protection the Constitution gives to free speech.
That may be true presently – but things may soon change.
“But the Constitution says…..”
What the Constitution says does not matter (that was proved in the two gold cases of 1935, and had already been indicated by the second Greenback case way back in the 19th century) – what matters is what the judges say.
And that depends on what sort of people are appointed as judges.
If “progressive” judges are appointed, agreements by the “international community” to get rid of “hate speech” (and so on) will pass muster in the American courts.
People have been pointing to the United States and the protection the Constitution gives to free speech.
That may be true presently – but things may soon change.
“But the Constitution says…..”
What the Constitution says does not matter (that was proved in the two gold cases of 1935, and had already been indicated by the second Greenback case way back in the 19th century) – what matters is what the judges say.
And that depends on what sort of people are appointed as judges.
If “progressive” judges are appointed, agreements by the “international community” to get rid of “hate speech” (and so on) will pass muster in the American courts.
Paul,
They might for a while, the question is whether it would last when people wake up and start pushing back. Take the Canadian example. These predictions came true there, were enacted into law, and progressive courts set up to enforce them. And then Ezra Levant publicised what they were doing, and suddenly Canada’s name is mud, and alarmed politicians are starting to backtrack.
Nothing lasts forever, so everything we value must be maintained by constant effort. The question is not whether it could happen – because anything could, even in the face of a supposedly immutable constitution – but whether we’ll let it.
All those freedoms were won in the first place from tyrants with far greater control over their societies than they have today, by people with less power than we have today. It would only be by the most appalling laziness that we could do worse. Governments are in no way invincible, lost freedoms are not irreversible.
This business of censoring the internet is the same. Yes, they could pass laws to make it harder to access certain stuff, many people would struggle with the technical means to get round it, and would probably not find it worth the effort. They might get away with it for a while. But at some point the market for an alternative will grow big enough that the technical means will become more generally available, and anyone who wants it will be able to bypass the censors. In the same way they tried to ban drugs, pirate music, pirate computer games, to prohibit alcohol, to restrict pornography, to tax alcohol and tobacco out of existence. And in every case, people appeared to sell stuff out of the back of vans and bypass the regulations, because that’s what people want.
This is especially obvious in the case of the internet, which is why they get told so every time they propose something like this. The EU can write reports all it likes, there’s nothing they can do that we can’t get round, short of shutting down the internet and telephone system entirely. It’s simply not affordable.
Anonymous:
If you really believe that European countries and the U.S. have the same constitutional guarantees regarding freedom of speech (or similar to any extent that would justify calling them “effectively equal”), then I can only say that you are horribly ignorant of the actual situation. I advise you to educate yourself on the topic a bit, starting with a simple google or Wikipedia search with a few relevant keywords. But something tells me that you’ll rather choose to continue making an ass out of yourself in public.
I find it odd that people seem to be getting so angry when their positions don’t actually differ all that much.
Ivan,
In the extract quoted, Anonymous simply pointed out that you had said European courts granted less protection, and then quoted an example in which the European courts did grant protection, and that the Muslims have so far only planned to take to the ECHR. That point seems to be valid.
I’d suggest finding some examples in which Europeans have been actually convicted for political speech that would be protected in the US. And ideally, show that there are no (or far fewer) cases vice versa.
Pa, it seems as if by ‘European Courts’ Ivan was referring to courts set up by the EU, as opposed to the regular old courts of the individual European countries. He may have simply not expressed himself clearly enough.
Pa, I think it’s possible that Ivan may have taken exception to Anonymous’s entirely unnecessary use of the word “dolt”, there.
Alisa,
He may well have done. Or he may have been simply going by the well-known stereotype. I wasn’t saying anything one way or the other – I was just recommending a way to express himself more clearly.
Ian B,
I can understand him taking exception to the word – it wasn’t helpful. (Although my usual practice to ignore that sort of stuff if directed at me as I think it damages the abuser’s case more than the abused and is therefore most helpful to me.) My feeling is that both sides seem to be talking past each other and getting angry when you seem to have a lot of common ground.
But it’s important not to let abuse make you lose your head and miss important parts of the argument. In the Motoons case, two European courts did stand up for free speech, and while the ECHR has a bad reputation, all that was said was that the Muslims were planning to try to use it, not that the court had actually decided against free speech. The example doesn’t support the claim. And pointing this out doesn’t imply that Anonymous thinks the European attitude to free speech is identical to that in the US.
Rather than have Anonymous come back pointing this out in unhelpful and less than complimentary terms, which would only perpetuate the conflict, I thought it might be helpful to politely suggest how to fix the argument and push things back on the track of civilised debate. It shouldn’t be hard to find some other examples, and that would provide a far better response.
While we’re on the subject, I’m aware of another campaign against Jihadi websites in the US, in which people identify propaganda sites run by the Taliban and Al Qaida, and get them shut down. Apparently, it’s done under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows the President to ban doing business and providing services to designated terrorist organisations, including al Qaida. A lot of the ISPs have terms of service that include such limits voluntarily, anyway. And this is in America.
Thoughts?
Insulting people never helps the argument but at that stage it was pretty clear that the argument was over.
Ian seemed to me to be basically arguing with himself, I had a list of unaddressed points a mile long and you’ll note now that his latest post is a jab at me for being insulting, rather than a rebuttal. I’d already been on the recieiving end of a nice ad-hominem attack already and I really should have read the signs.
Ivan was the undeserving recipient of my frustration but his post was just begging for it. This is not a scenario where perception of the EU courts is relevant. The EU courts are ‘perceived’ as all sorts of things and as a rubberstamp of EU policy but so much of this legislation is new that there really haven’t been significant precedents set. The precedents that have been set seem to indicate that the claims will be dismissed when the courts hear them. If they’re not, then that will be the time to post about it.
I would also like to point out to various readers that for the English, the enactment of EHCR Article 11 is an improvement over previous laws as it sets down in writing protections which have not previously existed.
This is a hugely serious matter and overhyping things only damages the cause.
Pa, I agree pretty much entirely with your first reply to Paul and with your second – it’s an interesting one. A frequently quoted libertarian principle is ‘tolerance for everything aside from intolerance’ – under a libertarian government would you be able to contemplate the banning of websites that advocated restrictions of liberties? You’d probably have to if you wanted to maintain freedoms, as most people just love getting control over other people and telling them how to live their lives.
Freedom to do anything apart from anything which involves telling people they should have less freedom, the same way you can have democracy and simultaneously ban political parties that advocate the overthrow of democracy?
Personally, I’m in favour of always allowing people to advocate intolerance, but not necessarily to practice it. It depends what one is being intolerant of, though. There are plenty of things that I think libertarians should be and are intolerant of – things that do significant harm to others without justification, and society’s interference with people in matters that don’t, for example. But when it comes to advocacy, the only proper response is exposure and counter-advocacy to explain to people why you think it’s wrong.
It’s worth bearing in mind that there’s often a bigger audience here than appears in the comments, and even if you’re not winning over the active ones, it’s worth thinking about how your debate looks to all the others. Remaining calm and rational in the face of evident provocation earns points for your side. Losing it with a well-liked regular does the opposite. But I’m sure you knew that.
And the same rules do apply to the other side, too, I promise.
With the EU increasing their legal powers to compel service providers to provide full details of blogs, owners and any other information related to the bloger, they have all the powers they need to remove pesky bloggers.
With the EU increasing their legal powers to compel service providers to provide full details of blogs, owners and any other information related to the blogger, they have all the powers they need to remove pesky bloggers.
UK Voter,
Are you talking about IPRED?
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/01/eu-law-does-not-require
under a libertarian government would you be able to contemplate the banning of websites that advocated restrictions of liberties?
I’d be able to contemplate it, yeah…as a fleeting thought rejected immediately, like the idea that spaghetti is really a motor-car. I’m able to contemplate that: it just doesn’t make any sense. Companies could make whatever decisions they wished, but from a State perspective “Libertarian advocated censorship” is oxymoronic.
Freedom means freedom, including the freedom to be wrong. And in any case, the libertarian position, even if generally accepted and understood, is not and should never be beyond open criticism or disagreement.
“I believe In only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.” – H. L. Mencken
Pa Annoyed:
I hope you are right about people pushing back.
Although the Canadian example does depend, in part, on exposure the matter got in certain parts of the American media.
And leftist power in the United States would be expossed …….. where?
Paul,
In all the places in the world that America has spread freedom.
Nal komerex, khesterex, as the Klingons say.