B
B1ackwater
Guest
CNN
BEIJING, China (AP) -- At first, Liu Xiaoyuan just fumed when his
online journal postings disappeared with no explanation. Then he
decided to do something few if any of China's censored bloggers had
tried. He sued his service provider.
"Each time I would see one of my entries blocked, I'd feel so furious
and indignant," said Liu, a 43-year-old Beijing lawyer. "It was just
so disrespectful."
Liu's frustration is hardly unique. For China's 162 million Web users,
surfing the Internet can be like running an obstacle course with
blocked Web sites, partial search results, and posts disappearing at
every turn.
Blog entries like Liu's, which mused on sensitive topics such as the
death penalty, corruption and legal reform, are often automatically
rejected if they trigger a keyword filter. Sometimes, they're deleted
by human censors employed by Internet companies.
In the lead-up to the sensitive Communist Party Congress, which
convenes Monday to approve top leaders who will serve under President
Hu Jintao through 2012, authorities have been casting an even wider
net than usual in their search for Web content they deem to be
politically threatening or potentially destabilizing.
"What you see now is unprecedented," said Xiao Qiang, director of the
China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley.
"They are forcing most of the interactive sites to simply close down
and have unplugged Internet data centers. These are things they
haven't done before."
Thousands of sites suddenly went offline in August and September when
Internet data centers, which host Web servers, were shut down. In
three cities, some services were temporarily cut off, while some
interactive Web sites remain unplugged -- until after the congress.
It's not uncommon for authorities to crack down on public opinion
before party congresses, which are held every five years.
In an increasingly wired China, political rumors and speculation that
used to end up in Hong Kong's more liberal media are now often found
circulating first in Chinese cyberspace.
At the party congress, there's plenty of opportunity for commentary,
speculation and gossip. "Who's going to be up and who's going to be
down? Who's going to retire and who's going to be in the Politburo?
The losers in the Internet age aren't necessarily going to go down
quietly," said Xiao.
The government has built a patchwork system of controls that include
software to root out offensive keywords and block blacklisted web
sites. Government censors, known as Net nannies, surf the web looking
for pornography, subversive political content or other illegal
material. Major Internet portals like Sohu.com Inc. and Sina Corp.
employ their own censors to make sure nothing runs afoul of government
restrictions.
China is among a handful of countries that have extensive filters for
political sites. Iran, Myanmar, Syria, Tunisia and Vietnam also
strictly block political content, according to the OpenNet Initiative,
a collaboration between researchers at Cambridge, the University of
Oxford, Harvard University and the University of Toronto.
In a report this week, Reporters Without Borders said China's Internet
censorship system "is unparalleled anywhere in the world and is an
insult to the spirit of online freedom."
Commercial sites that don't comply with censorship orders are
criticized, fined, forced to fire the employee responsible for the
error, or closed down, the Paris-based group said. A point system is
also used to keep track of compliance, with sites that rack up a
certain number of demerits at risk of losing their business licenses,
it said.
- - - - -
So much for the claim that governments can't censor the
internet ...
I guess things HAVE improved there, slightly, however. In
the good old days, right after they deleted Mr. Lui's blog
some soldiers would stop by and delete Mr. Lui as well.
Clearly the technology and techniques now DO exist to
allow governments to impose serious censorship on net
content and information flow. Even if they can't block
every little crack, if they can keep 99% of the people
seperated from the verboten information then they've
accomplished their social-engineering goal.
As soon as the technology and techniques TO micromanage
something exist, governments WILL micromanage it. They
just can't help themselves, it's the nature of political
power - it must express itself everywhere "just because",
just so you'll know who's in charge.
In the USA and europe, who will the censors be and what will
they "disappear" for what goals ? Yes, ultraconservatives
have a thing for 'pornography' ... but frankly they haven't
done much about it. IMHO, it's the self-described "liberals"
who bear the most watching. Their perpetual emphasis on
"wrong-thinking", "wrong messages", "speech codes" and
"PC-ism" in general combined with their long support of
social engineering lead me to wonder whether left-wingers
would be much more active censors than their reactionary
cousins.
They'll start small, of course, with stuff almost everyone
despises ... NAZI/Skinhead websites and the more obvious
"Crime-U" sorts of places where you learn how to make
Molitov ****tails and such. But then ... well ... you
remember how "pornography" "objectifies" and "dehumanizes"
women according to the N.O.W. ? Gotta stop THAT, right ?
Then they've got to "hush Rush" once and for all, the NRA,
the 'religious right', anti-GW sceientists, anyone who
disagrees with them in the slightest .........
During the 50s and 60s, Soviet 'psychologists' offered
the opinion that anyone who disagreed with the Obvious
Truths of Marxist-Leninism was clearly insane and needed
to be moved to proper mental-health facilities instead
of the old-fashioned gulags. The founders of the modern
"liberal" movement studied at the feet of Marx, Lenin and
Stalin, adopting many of their perspectives on the human
condition and how to fix it.
Todays "liberals" are a bit less Marxist but persist in
the notion that humans have no "nature", that they are
infinitely malleable. This leads them to the conclusion
that simply eliminating "wrong thinking" will allow them
to fill the vaccuum with "RIGHT thinking". Instant utopia !
This attitude contrasts with the 'conservative' view that
human nature is largely fixed and the goal of law and
censorship is simply to suppress specific undesireable
activities. In short, they expect you to have a 'dirty'
undisciplined mind ... they just don't want you to DO
anything with those nasty thoughts.
So, 'conservative' = prevent certain DEEDS, "liberal" =
completely re-oriented THOUGHT so there won't BE any
"deeds".
Which philosophy do you think is the most dangerous ?
Which one is in a position to make the best use of
modern technology and technique ?
P.S. ... China is run by people raised with the Marxist-
Leninist-Maoist perspective on human nature ...........
BEIJING, China (AP) -- At first, Liu Xiaoyuan just fumed when his
online journal postings disappeared with no explanation. Then he
decided to do something few if any of China's censored bloggers had
tried. He sued his service provider.
"Each time I would see one of my entries blocked, I'd feel so furious
and indignant," said Liu, a 43-year-old Beijing lawyer. "It was just
so disrespectful."
Liu's frustration is hardly unique. For China's 162 million Web users,
surfing the Internet can be like running an obstacle course with
blocked Web sites, partial search results, and posts disappearing at
every turn.
Blog entries like Liu's, which mused on sensitive topics such as the
death penalty, corruption and legal reform, are often automatically
rejected if they trigger a keyword filter. Sometimes, they're deleted
by human censors employed by Internet companies.
In the lead-up to the sensitive Communist Party Congress, which
convenes Monday to approve top leaders who will serve under President
Hu Jintao through 2012, authorities have been casting an even wider
net than usual in their search for Web content they deem to be
politically threatening or potentially destabilizing.
"What you see now is unprecedented," said Xiao Qiang, director of the
China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley.
"They are forcing most of the interactive sites to simply close down
and have unplugged Internet data centers. These are things they
haven't done before."
Thousands of sites suddenly went offline in August and September when
Internet data centers, which host Web servers, were shut down. In
three cities, some services were temporarily cut off, while some
interactive Web sites remain unplugged -- until after the congress.
It's not uncommon for authorities to crack down on public opinion
before party congresses, which are held every five years.
In an increasingly wired China, political rumors and speculation that
used to end up in Hong Kong's more liberal media are now often found
circulating first in Chinese cyberspace.
At the party congress, there's plenty of opportunity for commentary,
speculation and gossip. "Who's going to be up and who's going to be
down? Who's going to retire and who's going to be in the Politburo?
The losers in the Internet age aren't necessarily going to go down
quietly," said Xiao.
The government has built a patchwork system of controls that include
software to root out offensive keywords and block blacklisted web
sites. Government censors, known as Net nannies, surf the web looking
for pornography, subversive political content or other illegal
material. Major Internet portals like Sohu.com Inc. and Sina Corp.
employ their own censors to make sure nothing runs afoul of government
restrictions.
China is among a handful of countries that have extensive filters for
political sites. Iran, Myanmar, Syria, Tunisia and Vietnam also
strictly block political content, according to the OpenNet Initiative,
a collaboration between researchers at Cambridge, the University of
Oxford, Harvard University and the University of Toronto.
In a report this week, Reporters Without Borders said China's Internet
censorship system "is unparalleled anywhere in the world and is an
insult to the spirit of online freedom."
Commercial sites that don't comply with censorship orders are
criticized, fined, forced to fire the employee responsible for the
error, or closed down, the Paris-based group said. A point system is
also used to keep track of compliance, with sites that rack up a
certain number of demerits at risk of losing their business licenses,
it said.
- - - - -
So much for the claim that governments can't censor the
internet ...
I guess things HAVE improved there, slightly, however. In
the good old days, right after they deleted Mr. Lui's blog
some soldiers would stop by and delete Mr. Lui as well.
Clearly the technology and techniques now DO exist to
allow governments to impose serious censorship on net
content and information flow. Even if they can't block
every little crack, if they can keep 99% of the people
seperated from the verboten information then they've
accomplished their social-engineering goal.
As soon as the technology and techniques TO micromanage
something exist, governments WILL micromanage it. They
just can't help themselves, it's the nature of political
power - it must express itself everywhere "just because",
just so you'll know who's in charge.
In the USA and europe, who will the censors be and what will
they "disappear" for what goals ? Yes, ultraconservatives
have a thing for 'pornography' ... but frankly they haven't
done much about it. IMHO, it's the self-described "liberals"
who bear the most watching. Their perpetual emphasis on
"wrong-thinking", "wrong messages", "speech codes" and
"PC-ism" in general combined with their long support of
social engineering lead me to wonder whether left-wingers
would be much more active censors than their reactionary
cousins.
They'll start small, of course, with stuff almost everyone
despises ... NAZI/Skinhead websites and the more obvious
"Crime-U" sorts of places where you learn how to make
Molitov ****tails and such. But then ... well ... you
remember how "pornography" "objectifies" and "dehumanizes"
women according to the N.O.W. ? Gotta stop THAT, right ?
Then they've got to "hush Rush" once and for all, the NRA,
the 'religious right', anti-GW sceientists, anyone who
disagrees with them in the slightest .........
During the 50s and 60s, Soviet 'psychologists' offered
the opinion that anyone who disagreed with the Obvious
Truths of Marxist-Leninism was clearly insane and needed
to be moved to proper mental-health facilities instead
of the old-fashioned gulags. The founders of the modern
"liberal" movement studied at the feet of Marx, Lenin and
Stalin, adopting many of their perspectives on the human
condition and how to fix it.
Todays "liberals" are a bit less Marxist but persist in
the notion that humans have no "nature", that they are
infinitely malleable. This leads them to the conclusion
that simply eliminating "wrong thinking" will allow them
to fill the vaccuum with "RIGHT thinking". Instant utopia !
This attitude contrasts with the 'conservative' view that
human nature is largely fixed and the goal of law and
censorship is simply to suppress specific undesireable
activities. In short, they expect you to have a 'dirty'
undisciplined mind ... they just don't want you to DO
anything with those nasty thoughts.
So, 'conservative' = prevent certain DEEDS, "liberal" =
completely re-oriented THOUGHT so there won't BE any
"deeds".
Which philosophy do you think is the most dangerous ?
Which one is in a position to make the best use of
modern technology and technique ?
P.S. ... China is run by people raised with the Marxist-
Leninist-Maoist perspective on human nature ...........
