Internet Censorship Political Trickery

Bloomberg Net announced today that the State Department has started Twitter feeds in Arabic and Farsi to communicate with the public in the Middle East and Iran and will soon start similar feeds in Chinese, Russian and Hindi in an effort to reach most of the world’s population. Hillary Clinton is pushing the US Congress to ‘Global Internet Freedom’. Clinton said that the US has allocated millions of dollars for technology to circumvent Internet firewalls erected by repressive regimes and that the State Department will award $25 million this year to support counter-censorship technology, secure mobile communications, digital safety training and assistance to dissidents under threat for web-based activism.

“The United States will continue to promote an Internet where people’s rights are protected and that is open to innovation, is interoperable all over the world, secure enough to hold people’s trust, and reliable enough to support their work,” Clinton will say. “There is no silver bullet in the struggle against Internet repression. There’s no “app” for that. And accordingly, we are taking a comprehensive and innovative approach — one that matches our diplomacy with technology, secure distribution networks for tools, and direct support for those on the front lines.”

But the greatest paradox of all is that the US and Google have already a pronounced experience with Internet censorship. The warning signs for the crackdown on the web have been with us for over a decade. The Clipper chip controversy of the 90s, John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) system pushed in the aftermath of 9-11, backroom deals between the Federal governmentand the Internet service industry, and the Patriot Act have ushered in a new era of Internet censorship, something just half a decade ago computer programmers claimed was impossible given the nature of the web.

News reports on the War in Iraq or Afghanistan, on US diplomatic and political scandals (like Wikileaks notorious cables) have been disappearing from Google and other search engines as fast as they appear. Unfortunately, Google is not alone in working closely to chill Internet discourse. America OnLine, Microsoft, Yahoo and others are slowly turning the Internet into an information superhighway dominated by barricades, toll booths, off-ramps that lead to dead ends and track you… Read More