From The Inquirer
IN THE NEXT FEW months a significant bill will be under discussion in the US Senate and House of Representatives. The proposal is that US government authorises $50 million in 2003 and 2004 for the “funding for a new Office of Global Internet Freedom to counter Internet jamming and blocking by repressive regimes”. (The full proposal can be found in PDF format at this address.)
The document which detailed the proposed GIFA (Global Internet Freedom Act) bill lists those repressive regimes as “Burma, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, the People’s Republic of China, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Vietnam, among others” and goes on to claim that “All people have the right to communicate freely with others, and to have unrestricted access to news and information, on the Internet.”
One supporter of this bill even stated, somewhat grandiosely “America cannot afford to allow repressive regimes to black out information and silence free expression of their citizens by jamming the Internet.”
The bill also states “Nothing in this Act shall be interpreted to authorize any action by the United States to interfere with foreign national censorship for the purpose of protecting minors from harm, preserving public morality, or assisting with legitimate law enforcement aims.” and this is a point we will return to shortly.
This all might sound fine on the surface but what are the arguments against such a proposal?
Firstly there are the technological issues that might render these efforts useless. Most approaches at bypassing any form of web censorship use either variable IP addresses or the transfer of data via some innocuous gateway machine. Depending which report (or marketing material?) one reads, the same methods might be highly successful or attempts to counter them may have been successful.
Secondly the bill assumes that censorship is a bad thing and it fails to accept that countries and cultures will vary in their attitudes and tolerance to pornography, racism, religion, violence, sexism and many other matters. Note that we are expected to believe that the techniques to bypass Internet censorship will somehow be able to distinguish these matters from genuine news and information – but at the very least we need to ask who would decide which items should not be blocked and which should be.
The USA already has censorship policies in place that restrict access to violent, pornographic, racist or sexist material in printed material, in movies and music. Shakespeare has been banned from some schools, as has Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and even The Diary of Anne Frank.
In the bigger picture the US has a record of imposing severe censorship of certain political beliefs and has tried to ban the sale of certain products.
Thirdly the US government is being remarkably hypocritical because it is trying hard to increase the amount of surveillance and logging of Internet activity in order to protect its own domestic interests but the proposed GIFA bill is intent on removing the capability of other countries to perform similar functions to protect their domestic interests.
Fourthly, those proposing the bills claim “All people have the right to communicate freely with others, and to have unrestricted access to news and information, on the Internet.” This wonderful assertion is sheer sophistry because there is simply no such right for all people in all countries. It does not even apply in the USA where one cannot falsely shout “Fire” in a crowded public place – it might be free communication but it is illegal and punishable. In a similar fashion there is no right to access to news or other information on the Internet, just as there is no right to any Internet access whatsoever.
Fifthly, and most importantly, one interpretation is that the GIFA bill will defy the basic principles of international law and try to impose US law in other countries.
You can read the rest of the article here
