The dangers of Internet censorship
- From: Webmanager_CritEst <webmanager@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2008 04:34:42 -0800 (PST)
The dangers of Internet censorship
By Harry Lewis
November 5, 2008
SUPPOSE that government regulators proposed to read all postal mail in
order to protect families from things they should not see. Anything
not legally prohibited would be delivered. Any unlawful words,
pictures, or videos would be thrown away.
Sound like Orwell's "1984," or China? Perhaps.
Yet change the technology from ink on paper to bits in wires - the
zeroes and ones that flow through the Internet - and these are the
plans of significant democracies. France is targeting copyrighted
music and movies. Australian officials are going after child
pornography - but may check for other bad stuff while they are at it.
Objectionable snooping? Both governments say that law-abiding citizens
have nothing to worry about.
Could such ubiquitous surveillance gain traction in the United States,
with its Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches? A
proposal pending before the Federal Communications Commission raises
just that possibility. It would provide Internet service to all
Americans - with a catch. Content would be censored, free of "any
images or text that otherwise would be harmful to teens and
adolescents" under 18 years old.
No one wants young children viewing pornography. But to enforce the
FCC standard, someone would have to decide where the "harmful" line
should be drawn. What about medical illustrations, or a Globe story
about female genital mutilation in Africa? To be safe for all ages,
censors would have to exclude vast amounts of useful, lawful content.
And since only 57 percent of Americans have broadband connections
today, the censored service would for many people be the only service.
Determining which ideas are "harmful" is not the government's job.
Parents should judge what information their children should see - and
should expect that older children will, as they always have, find ways
around restrictive rules.
The Internet censoring proposal follows other government efforts to
limit speech in the digital world. In the 1990s, two US anti-indecency
laws were found unconstitutional because they unnecessarily limited
communication among adults. "Perhaps," wrote one judge, "we do the
minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they
will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their
protection."
Today parents fear that sexual predators will masquerade as children
on MySpace and Facebook. In fact, there is no evidence that the
Internet has increased the number of predators. Child sex abuse cases
actually decreased 50 percent between 1990 and 2005. Most sexual
propositions to youth come from peers, not adult strangers.
Nonetheless, encouraged by state attorneys general, businesses are
developing aggressive child safety tools. One product tracks a child's
every keystroke, calling Daddy's cellphone whenever Johnny googles a
prohibited word. Bills before Congress would block Wikipedia in school
libraries, sacrificing a useful resource in order to restrict
unsupervised use of social networking sites.
Yet for every child caught talking to a pedophile online, hundreds
would be discouraged from searching the Internet's vast electronic
library for truths their parents will not tell them.
Controlling every word children are saying and hearing, from birth to
age 18, isn't child protection; it's the perfect preservation of
prejudice and ignorance.
Moreover, Internet censorship does not work. Documents can get past
content filters if they are sent in encrypted form - and if encryption
itself were banned, the network could not support secure electronic
commerce.
Radio and television speech codes were constitutionally justified in
the 1930s by the limited capacity of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Internet technology has no analogous limitation, so there is no legal
justification for Internet censorship beyond the obscenity and libel
prohibitions that apply to print media.
The Internet has revived ancient fears about the risks of curiosity.
The story of Eden and the myth of Prometheus teach that open access to
knowledge is what makes us human, for better and worse. A key
principle of our democracy is that unfettered information flows bring
public enlightenment. The Internet is the greatest information conduit
ever invented. We should not dim its light to protect ourselves from
what it may reveal.
Harry Lewis is professor of computer science at Harvard and fellow of
the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He is co-author of "Blown
to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital
Explosion."
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/11/05/the_dangers_of_internet_censorship/
****
"Controlling every word children are saying and hearing, from birth to
age 18, isn't child protection; it's the perfect preservation of
prejudice and ignorance."
"Today parents fear that sexual predators will masquerade as children
on MySpace and Facebook. In fact, there is no evidence that the
Internet has increased the number of predators. Child sex abuse cases
actually decreased 50 percent between 1990 and 2005. Most sexual
propositions to youth come from peers, not adult strangers."
WM
www.critest.com
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