The purpose of this page is first, to link to things that censors have tried to ban,
and more generally to show how the Internet can be used to render such bans impotent.
Please do not think that I agree with (or am even particularly interested in) all the things below.
I'm just anti-censorship.
I do not accept that any other adult has the right to tell me what I can and cannot look at.
It may be (and I certainly hope) that the Internet will finally put an end to this power that adults have wielded over other adults
since the very dawn of mass culture.
Index is not a neutral anti-censorship publication,
opposing censorship wherever it is found.
It is a left-wing, anti-American, anti-Israeli publication.
Islamism and communism
are the two main sources of censorship in the modern world.
But you would not realise this from reading Index.
This once great publication,
which once supported Soviet dissidents,
now seems to reserve most of its contempt for those democrats prosecuting
a war on Islamism.
It seems sympathetic to Islamism if anything.
Certainly it seems to publish nothing but leftists and Islamist apologists.
The van Gogh affair -
Index makes excuses for the killing of critics of Islam.
Theo van Gogh, murdered for speech by Islamic fascists in the Netherlands in 2004, is
the most prominent free speech martyr in the West
in our lifetime.
"What on earth has gone wrong at Index?
A publication that once vociferously defended Salman Rushdie now parrots the same sentiments
you hear from Muslims and so-called liberals on every talkboard:
"I don't condone his murder, but he asked for it ...""
"Please take that article down. If Rohan wants to applaud a murder
and support religious censorship, then let him find a more appropriate place to do it.
In Index, it's disgraceful."
Censor and sensibility
by Nick Cohen, 12 December 2004:
"What was most telling was Index's treatment of
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who worked with van Gogh
on the film. I can remember when she would have been a liberal heroine.
...
In the 20th century, feminists had a little success in persuading Western liberals that women should be treated
as independent creatures whose intelligence ought to be respected. But these small gains can go out of the window
when brown-skinned women contradict the party line that religious fundamentalism is all the fault of poverty
or racism or Bush or Israel and isn't an autonomous totalitarian ideology with a logic of its own.
Jayasekera dismissed Ali as if she was some silly geisha girl."
But, as with Index, their left-wing politics get in the way.
They cancelled (that is, censored) a
discussion on Islam in July 2009
when Muslim fundamentalists
and leftist censors
kicked up a fuss that the counter-jihad
Robert Spencer
was going to speak.
The ALA now plan to organise an event where no counter-jihad voice will be allowed.
Good summary of the censorship:
"What's the point of having principles if they are so easily tossed aside in the name of political correctness?"
If a video hoster like
YouTube
bans your video, it is not censorship.
They are entitled to host what they like.
The solution is simple:
Move your video to a different site.
Music
I was into music in the 1980s and early 1990s,
and I longed for music
that I could manipulate like the files on my hard disk.
I thought it was around the corner.
But it never happened.
Instead, we were sold paranoid, copyright-and-distribution-protecting formats
like CD and DVD.
These "digital" formats are in fact
not fundamentally different to vinyl, tape and VHS
- since they do not have digital's fundamental quality -
the ability to manipulate the data
with your computer.
It's all just a vain attempt to stave off the inevitable.
In the end, it will all be data.
It will all be read-write files on our hard disks and websites.
It's too late for me now, since I lost interest in music before it ever went digital.
But it's fantastic that I can now capture digital images, video and audio,
and integrate them into my website.
This is what I dreamed of.
In many ways I couldn't care less what happens to
David Irving.
When he
sued the historian Deborah Lipstadt for libel,
the judge said:
"The charges which I have found to be substantially true include the charges that
Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented
and manipulated historical evidence; ... that he is an active Holocaust denier;
that he is anti-semitic and racist and that he associates with right wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism."
But logically, I do think
jailing him
is an appalling suppression of speech.
What he says may be disgusting.
But in a free society it must be legal.
Deborah Lipstadt, to her credit,
after all he put her through, agrees.
She does not want to see him jailed (or even convicted) for his speech.
Now I support total sexual freedom for consenting adults.
I even regard tolerance of homosexuality as a litmus test of a free society.
And I agree that
the Bible is hate-speech.
But to make it illegal?
This is tyranny.
Why Do Only Conservatives Require Campus Security?
by Asaf Romirowsky and Jonathan Calt Harris
- "The incipient threat of violence on the university makes it unique in North American life. Minority views can be espoused without intimidation in the media, in political forums
and even in corporations."
Dissident Arab Gets the Treatment
by Ahmad Al-Qloushi, January 6, 2005.
An America-loving (and Israel-loving!) Kuwaiti Arab Muslim
comes to the US to study, and is attacked by his lefty professor
for his support for America.
See timeline.
"The Americans
.. came in to liberate us and asked for nothing in return. I love this country for the freedom
it provides and for rescuing Kuwait's liberty in the first Gulf War.
12 Years later, America once again has selflessly protected my country and my people by removing Saddam Hussein."
"I have since learned that mine is not an isolated case.
Many students in American universities are being indoctrinated and silenced by biased professors who hate America.
America saved my life and the lives of my family. How can I not speak out?"
Thomas E. Klocek,
fired by DePaul University
for supposedly being "disrespectful" to ignorant anti-Israel students.
As I say,
I'm a libertarian or a classic liberal, not a conservative.
I believe in hard work and responsibility,
but I see no reason why consenting adults cannot
do anything they like.
It's your life.
It's not for the state to tell you what to do.
You can have fun,
but similarly it's not for the state to save you from yourself.
You can have fun,
provided you take responsibility for your own choices.
In the early days of the Internet and Web,
porn was hard to find, and pioneer sites collapsed under the strain.
Those days appear to be over.
It now looks as if the Internet will eventually be able to satiate the world's demand for pornography
(yes there is a limit).
We may all be better off as a result.
Sexual literature
- some high-brow, some just pictures.
All has a right to a home somewhere.
As far as I can see, the following URLs are all you need for a
lifetime of porn browsing,
if that happens to be your cup of tea.
These URLs should be around forever, and you can just jump in and start exploring any time.
The porn issue seems to be over, and the censors have lost.
And if you don't like "pornography", don't look at these sites.
Go away. Is that so hard?
Parental control
Children, children, children, children. Sigh.
OK, let's talk about children.
You do realise this is all just an excuse, though.
There are people out there who want to prevent adults talking frankly to other adults.
But since the Enlightenment and the idea of free speech and human rights, they have had to restructure their attack.
They used to talk about corrupting the sensitive minds of their wives or their servants
and the lower classes.
But that's not allowed any more.
So they talk about children. We must protect children from pornography.
Therefore all adult communications must be reduced to a level suitable for a child.
You do realise this is all just an excuse?
There are many answers to protecting children from indecency.
Firstly, you assume we all agree it's bad for children to see pornography.
Well no actually, I don't agree.
I think it says a lot more about the parent than about the child.
If the child's not interested, then, well, they just won't be interested.
If they are interested - in the teenage years - then is it so bad if they see it?
But let's leave that aside.
Let's grant you the right to decide what your children can see.
The point is that you can do this
without bothering anybody else.
You buy a
filter
that allows access only to 10,000 hand-picked child-friendly sites.
You can't type in URLs, you can't follow links to new or unknown sites.
You can only wander round the space of hand-picked sites.
The net can be awash with pornography, but the child can never see it.
It may seem restrictive to block all sites by default, but the parent can add hand-picked ones as the need arises.
It may seem that such a filter spoils the serendipitous nature of the web, but not so,
you can turn off the filter when you're present, and wander the web with your child.
You can censor yourself without bothering others.
For more, see here
and here.
OK, the technology exists, so leave us alone.
I'll even helpfully suggest that once your children or your school class are on the Internet,
tell them to start at the
Yahoo
and
Google
kids' directories.
These index the sex-and-drugs free subwebs of the web.
Now go away.
You're still here? You're complaining that little Johnny has managed
to hack his own Internet access.
That he's disabled the filters, written his own browser?
If he's smart enough to do all those things,
I think the days of you controlling what he looks at are coming to an end.
I am in favour of the sexual revolution,
as are (it might surprise you) many on the right.
Photo from
here.
See terms of use.
"I will not criticize the power of pictures and words to arouse;
to arouse passions or ideas, erections or damp panties, fears,
curiosities, unarticulated yearnings and odd realizations.
Sexual speech, not MacKinnon's speech,
is the most repressed and disdained kind of expression in our world,
and MacKinnon is no rebel or radical to attack it."
- Susie Bright
replying to pro-censorship campaigner
Catharine MacKinnon.
Drug use should be legal.
Adults want to mess with their bodies and minds - always have, always will.
It's science's job to make it interesting and safe.
It's not the government's job to enforce someone's idea of a religious or moral code of behaviour.
We lock up in jail
people who take drugs even if they harm nobody and are leading productive lives.
This can only be based not on public health
but on the idea that one adult can tell another adult what to do in his private life.
Just as bad as all the innocents in prison
is that the drug laws,
just as alcohol prohibition did,
have created a vast, violent underworld which would vanish if drugs were legal.
Think of all the muggings and burglaries that would stop
if the poor could afford their habits.
History will judge
the
War on Drugs as both the great denial of civil liberties
in the West in our age
and simultaneously the major unnecessary cause of crime.
Note that I do not take drugs myself, except alcohol.
In fact, I live a very abstemious life.
But any supporter of liberal democracy
must oppose the drug war,
whatever their personal lifestyle.
The book
Tricameral Sinsemilla
by Mick Marlow
is banned in the UK,
and the author has been jailed for writing the book.
With the banning of books now, what more evidence do we need that the War on Drugs
is an offence against liberty and civilized democracy?
Anyone who has any respect for civil liberties and other people
will oppose malicious hacking against innocents, and virus writing.
It is a symptom of the immaturity of the information age
that people exist who still think these things are clever.
I once found myself with the ability to destroy my entire university year's projects,
but what would doing so have proved except that I was a jerk.
We've all been there.
It's not interesting any more.
Still for every destructive jerk, there's plenty of creative and constructive hackers,
often giving the world new tools that governments may prefer they did not have.
Hacking
can be a friend of civil liberties in oppressive societies,
especially in disabling or working around the censorship mechanisms.
Anonymous remailers are like banks. The
Penet remailer
was the only one I really trusted, purely because of its owner Helsingius,
a sober friend of civil liberties
(I couldn't trust a teenager, or a "cypherpunk").
The Penet remailer was in effect shut down by the
Church of Scientology.
Can be used (as sometimes happens) when local DNS servers are having problems
but remote ones are working ok.
Sometimes my local client can't find a site
even though
remote proxies can see it exists.
Anonymous web publishing:
The world of blogs
shows how it is now possible to reach a global audience
while still remaining anonymous.
Some anonymous blog authors have millions of readers,
yet no one knows who they are,
or where they are.
And your website can be hosted in another country (as mine is).
In many cases this gives real protection from your country's laws.
For example, American courts will not co-operate with demands from Iran to shut down
pro-democracy dissident websites.
Carl Kadie
suggested that one could anonymously post web pages to usenet
which refer to each other via message-id,
thereby creating an anonymous "floating" web server within
Google Groups.
PICS
is the solution to how you can co-operate with others to filter sites,
without bothering anyone who wants to see the site,
or the site owner.
Of course, I will never actually provide PICS ratings for my pages.
That's the whole point of PICS.
You're the one with the problem, you're the one who has to do all the work.
You don't need me to cooperate (and I won't).
See this essay.
I am completely in support of personal, voluntary filters,
and much more technology is needed in this area.
People do want some control over what they see.
For example, I would set up my TV to filter out
all soaps,
celebrities, the royal family, reality TV,
religion, astrology, and anything New Age,
the lottery,
music and sport.
Then I could TV surf more happily.
You could set up your machine to filter out pornography, say, if that's the kind of thing that bothers you.
So long as I'm not forced to use your machine, I don't care.
OK, being forced to use someone else's machine can happen.
Like a machine in a public library, perhaps.
In which case you either don't use the library, complain,
or if all else fails you could do a bit of impromptu hacking
if you really can't wait to get home to your uncensored web:
The Eternity Service
by Ross Anderson
discusses the fragility of the web model, where a document's persistence depends on the author's survival.
In practice, not much of interest on the web really vanishes without eventually turning up somewhere else.
But the constantly-changing URLs, and the need to often return to search engines to re-find something,
mean documents can be lost in practice, even if they still exist in theory somewhere out there.
What we need are permanent URLs,
that we can be confident will still be around in 10 years time, or even 50 years.
Yahoo
provides this sense of permanence for indices of documents
(or so I used to think),
but who is going to provide the documents themselves on a permanent basis?
It is the job of large
libraries of course.
When are libraries throughout the world going to wake up and offer free, regularly-archived, mirror services for web publications?
With multiple distributed, permanently-available, permanent-URL mirror sites.
After all, what is a library for?
Gnutella
- To connect, you connect to any 1 person on the network.
Often you can't connect, so you need a list of IP addresses to try in rotation
(local friends, public servers, IRC chat sources).
The Internet Archive (archive.org)
re-creates the Web of any period from 1996 onwards.
It converts the links to point to an archive.org
copy if possible,
so that links take you to the page you would have seen back then.
Then you can travel round the Web as if it was 1996 all over again.
But the 1993 Web is gone forever.
Just like the 1980s BITNET
is gone forever.
I signed the
Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
when it came out, and I have a lot of sympathy for it.
When a group of people have constructed a new world,
as we did,
it is shocking when government,
once it finds out about that world,
threatens to destroy it,
as government and media did once they discovered
the Internet around 1995.
But things have worked out differently.
Instead of destroying our world,
they have joined it.
And it is changing them.
by Richard M. Salsman, 17 Sept 2001.
by Ross Anderson
discusses the fragility of the web model, where a document's persistence depends on the author's survival.
In practice, not much of interest on the web really vanishes without eventually turning up somewhere else.
But the constantly-changing URLs, and the need to often return to search engines to re-find something,
mean documents can be lost in practice, even if they still exist in theory somewhere out there.
Since 1995.
