A tool for freedom or repression?
The CNN lead to this story reads "Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and Cisco came under sharp attack from leaders of Congress and human rights advocates for aiding China's efforts to censor the Internet and punish dissidents."
Having read the story, it is more apt to describe what happened as the major companies that, to large measure control the Internet, refused to attend a scolding. But....I post the story because of the wider implications.
On one hand, the Internet stands poised as the greatest tool for freedom of information and empowerment that the world has ever seen. If knowledge is power, then the Internet is the tool for releasing that power. On the other hand, it creates and fosters an illusion of privacy when, in fact, nothing is private.
China has 30,000 people monitoring how its residents use the Internet. "Most authoritarian regimes try to control what their citizens read and do online, but China is far and away the world champion," says Lucie Morillon, Washington director of Reporters Without Borders. Even more frightening is that the companies named in the opening have all cooperated with the Chinese government to one degree or another. Microsoft deleted the blog of Zhao Jing, who works as a researcher in the Beijing bureau of The New York Times. Yahoo helped the police trace a private e-mail account of a Chinese journalist who was then imprisoned for revealing state secrets. Just last week, about a dozen supporters of a free Tibet picketed Google's Mountain View headquarters.
Perhaps more frightening is the US Government's request for Google's records of searchs relating to child pornography. Yes, we are all against child pornography, but what would they ask for next?
How about the NSA's use of cookies? Government spyware?
The article suggests that the Internet industry, as a group, to develop a set of global standards for dealing with censorship. I support the idea and would like to see that carried forward.