Tuesday, March 25, 2008

“If you want to control ones mind control the internet”

How can you censor something protected by the First Amendment? With today’s Internet crazy society can you imagine it not existing? Internet censorship is defined as the “control or suppression of the publishing or accessing of information on the Internet”. In many countries around the world it already exist, in some more than others, but they have found ways to “firewall” material that the government finds their citizens do not need to know. Such nations often censor political content and may retaliate against citizens who violate the censorship with imprisonment. Internet censorship did not happen overnight, but has slowly come to America's shores from China and other controlling countries.

Since the development of Internet censorship, a project formed called
OpenNet Initiative whose goal is to monitor and report on Internet filtering and surveillance practices by nations. “The project employs a number of technical means, as well as an international network of investigators, to determine the extent and nature of government-run Internet filtering programs.” They work hard at preventing the censorship these countries have created, but can only do so much.

Countries such as China, Cuba, and Iran are some that have created massive amounts of “firewalls” on website access. Their government’s feel as though the citizens should not be allowed to see certain websites in fear that they will rebel against the government.

Cuba has the lowest
Latin America ratio of computers per inhabitant and also the lowest Internet access, but even with that its citizens have to use government controlled "access points", where their activity is monitored through IP blocking, keyword filtering and navigation history checking. The government blames the lack of access to Internet services to high costs and the American embargo, but that is not completely true.

Iran Internet censorship is delegated to ISPs who attempt to filter contents critical of the government, pornographic websites, and political blogs. Iranian bloggers have been imprisoned for their Internet activities by the Iranian government. Most recently, the Iranian government has blocked access to video-upload sites such as YouTube.

China blocks or filters Internet content relating to Tibetan independence, Taiwan independence, police brutality, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, freedom of speech, democracy, pornography, some international news sources like the
BBC, certain religious movements as Falun Gong, many blogging websites, and Wikipedia. Most recently this issue has become very popular because of the upcoming Olympics and how China wants the world to view it; they want to bring the best about China and censor the bad, but citizens are speaking out. They have had enough and bloggers are going crazy constantly posting and being imprisoned for their online comments. Here is a CNN article that better explains China’s censorship strategies and how they control their citizens.

For many years, the web has been heavily censored in countries around the world. That censorship continues at this very moment. Now it is happening right here in America. It is illegal and should not be permitted by any country. The massive censorship of the web on a nationwide and global scale not only violates the first amendment, but human rights as well. This in my eyes is a crime and one not being taken seriously, especially since our societies are becoming more and more Internet based everyday. Something needs to be done before blogging and the Internet are completely controlled with our first amendment rights entirely revoked.

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Pictures from Google Images

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