These pages are based in the United States
and are protected by the
1st Amendment.
Anti-censorship page
by Mark Humphrys.
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 on Censorship
(also here
and here
and here)
- Index is not a neutral anti-censorship publication,
opposing censorship wherever it is found.
It is a predominantly left-wing, anti-American, anti-Israeli publication.
It is for leftists, not for libertarians.
Just look at their
back issues
to see the standard trendy left-wing,
anti-American, anti-Israeli party line.
-
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.
- Ayaan Hirsi Ali
- Theo van Gogh
-
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.
And the Associate Editor of Index,
Rohan Jayasekera,
makes excuses for the killing,
and even
laughs about it.
-
"Take that article down.
In Index it's disgraceful"
by Frank Fisher
- "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."
-
Index on Censorship Has a Fox in its Henhouse
-
Censor and sensibility
by Nick Cohen:
"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."
Banned books
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.
An illegal number
I won't tell you why this number is illegal,
or what you can do with it.
I just want to focus on the claim that a number can be made illegal.
Illegal image,
with illegal filename.
From illegal URL.
Spoof of
300.
That is, censorship by nice, well-meaning people,
who may even call themselves liberals.
Academia
- politically-correct censorship on campus
- Evan Coyne Maloney
- Michelle Malkin's
conservative commencement address:
-
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."
-
Daniel Pipes describes American and Canadian universities as:
"Islands of Repression in a Sea of Freedom".
- Capitalism magazine
- The modern left
and their support for the west's enemies.
- Dr. Gary Hull's web site
was shut down by Duke University for opposing the
Islamic fascist attack on America.
- "Why Do They Hate Us?"
by Robert Tracinski.
-
The campus "diversity" fraud
(or here)
by Jeff Jacoby.
-
Dissident Arab Gets the Treatment
by Ahmad Al-Qloushi
- 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.
- Chris Brand
was sacked by the
University of Edinburgh
in what seems like simple censorship.
Much political and social discussion
takes place in the absence of statistics,
and is driven by ideology (what we want to be true)
instead of statistics (what is true).
Even the fundamental difference between anecdote and statistics
is not grasped by many people.
- Many statistics are little known because they do not fit in
with the prevailing ideology.
We wish these things weren't true,
so we ignore them.
A few major examples are:
-
Child abuse, rape, and violence against women
are statistically far more common outside marriage than within marriage.
See figures.
- Step-fathers are
(statistically) far more likely to abuse than natural fathers.
- Even
unmarried natural fathers are
statistically far more likely to abuse than
married natural fathers.
- Does Divorce Make People Happy?
- For unhappy marriages,
getting divorced is statistically a bad idea.
It will (statistically) make everyone more unhappy than staying together.
See commentary.
- Children of divorce have (statistically)
more problems of all types,
and are statistically more likely to divorce themselves.
This could lead to the heartless (yet objectively true) advice to your child
that if you want your marriage to last,
pick someone from a stable background
- someone whose parents have stayed together.
- While we're at it, married men are richer, live longer
and have more and better sex than single men.
Why are all these statistics so shocking
and contrary to the pious politically-correct
ideas we were taught growing up?
- Fatherhood
- The Marriage Movement
-
Why Marriage Matters: Twenty One Conclusions from the Social Sciences
summarises the statistical findings:
- Marriage increases the likelihood that fathers have good relationships with their children.
- Divorce and unmarried childbearing increase poverty for both children and mothers.
- Married couples seem to build more wealth on average than singles or cohabiting couples.
- Married men earn more money than do single men with similar education and job histories.
- Married people, especially married men, have longer life expectancies than do otherwise similar singles.
- Marriage is associated with better health and lower rates of injury, illness, and disability for both men and women.
- Divorce appears significantly to increase the risk of suicide.
- Married women appear to have a lower risk of experiencing domestic violence than do cohabiting or dating women.
- Parental marriage is associated with a sharply lower risk of infant mortality.
- Growing up outside an intact marriage increases the likelihood that children will themselves divorce or become unwed parents.
- Parental divorce (or failure to marry) appears to increase children's risk of school failure.
- Parental divorce reduces the likelihood that children will graduate from college and achieve high-status jobs.
- Children who live with their own two married parents enjoy better physical health, on average, than do children in other family forms.
- Children whose parents divorce have higher rates of psychological distress and mental illness.
- A child who is not living with his or her own two married parents is at greater risk of child abuse.
- There are many other statistics that make sense under an
evolutionary-biology or a conservative view, but that don't make
any sense under a PC view.
These statistics make conservatism look like it is based on reason
(so long as it doesn't go too far,
like actually banning sex outside marriage, etc.
like it did in the past).
And these statistics make PC ideas look like pure ideology,
hostile to reason and evidence.
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.
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 this obsession with 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 impose your beliefs on your kids.
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.
Read the specification of
PICS
to understand how 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.
- Robin Whittle
- The difference between the net and the old broadcast media (such as TV)
in a handy chart.
- The entire Internet censorship debate summed up in a
handy chart.
- 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?
This crap about kids being more technologically advanced than parents
is not merely just another excuse, it's a pretty desperate one.
If he's smart enough to do all those things,
I think the days of your parenthood power-trip may be coming to an end.
"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
(also here)
replying to pro-censorship campaigner
Catharine A. MacKinnon.
End the vicious drug prohibition.
Release the users and sellers.
This is the No.1 civil liberties issue in the West.
Drugs
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.
Support freedom of speech and publication on the Internet.
The Internet
Security
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.
- Privacy
- Anonymous Internet use
- Anonymous remailers
- 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.
- Anonymous usenet posting
-
Anonymous proxy web browsing
(and search)
- youhide.com
- proxify.com
- anonymizer.com
- Can be used to get around local censorship.
- 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.
- Free web publishing services
mean that even the website host may not know who you 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.
Accessing information on the Internet
-
Content Filtering
- 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:
- Another way of getting around these restrictions is simply to
install a second, secret browser.
- And the ultimate fallback of course will always be to write your own browser:
-
Gateways
- How to receive banned newsgroups:
- Before the Web, it was a big thing if your site blocked some
usenet groups.
Now it makes no difference if your site even gets a usenet feed or not.
- You can read them all at
Google Groups.
The Internet liberating other media
- 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?
- Cryptome
- Wikileaks
- free
email and
web pages
-
Forwarding - the same web and email address for life
- remote backup services
(also here)
- digital libraries
- distributed file sharing
(also here)
- 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).
-
offshore hosting and data havens
(also
here)
The Internet Archive
- Internet history
- Internet archives
- 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.
- The Internet Archive
- The Wayback machine
- archive since 1996
Close
- A few essays I like,
from the exciting moment when the Internet exploded:
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.
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