Evolving Thoughts

The first casualty

The increasing intention of western and non-western governments to censor the internet is usually put in terms of “child protection”, although it is very unlikely to be affected by censorship, merely by using uncensorable techniques like Torrents. But one has to wonder if the real reason is more to do with preventing this sort of thing. It turns out that we have been lied to about civilian casualties and targeted assassinations in Afghanistan, two things that any civilised society should repudiate.

Aeschylus is supposed to have said that in war, truth is the first casualty. Governments and militaries who prosecute wars do so for their own reasons, which are almost never the reason they give to their populace. Controlling information is crucial. We went into Iran on a lie, and it looks like we are behaving in Afghanistan in ways that are contrary to what we are being told. This is not the fault of those on the ground, but it is the fault of governments. Without services like Wikilinks, we would never know these lies until it was too late to act on them. So, of course, governments wish to block access to information about the lies.

I note also that Wikileaks is providing a service for whistleblowers to notify the media securely. Whistleblowers are usually well motivated individuals with a civil conscience, and so they are usually the only ones blamed and punished for the things they blow the whistle on, despite supposed protection laws. This is a marvellous idea. Media outlets can put a form to notify them on their own websites, and Wikileaks will anonymise the posts.

Wikileaks is available from here. It’s under a heavy strain right now, for obvious reasons, but I wouldn’t put a DDoS attack out of the question either. In any even I expect that the Australian internet filter will include Wikileaks. If it does, I’ll post a way around it.

Think about why people are criticising Wikileaks: they are providing us, the people, with the truth about things that governments and vested interests do not want exposed. Why would anyone think that was wrong? Nobody who is open and honest could. Yes, I mean you Conroy, you weasel.

Censorship Freedom Politics Rant

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Comments (10)

  1. Raise your hand if you are surprised by any of this. Oh, look – nobody.

  3. Not only will the blacklist include Wikileaks, Wikileaks will continue to host the blacklist, which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space time continuum, and destroy the entire universe.

    Also of concern is #ozlog, which may well record the content of our browsing sessions for future grepping by… well, who knows?

    Of course, Conroy says, if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear! A claim which made me irony all over my keyboard when I saw the response to Ben Grubb’s FOI request…

  4. I don’t like the phrase “Internet filter will”. It sounds defeatist.

    I’ve got my vote pretty much figured, aside from details I won’t know until the candidate lists are published. Basically, Greens in both houses with preferences to Labor in the HoR (because an Abbot government is unthinkable) and to Liberal in the Senate (to block the filter, etc).

  5. When the proposal for internet filtering (against child pornography) was made in Germany, I was wondering about a radically different countermeasure to hiding/banning such sites by an automatic filter:

    What if the appropriate government agency, instead of banning the offending web address, made it public and invited comment on whether the published material is appropriate for a general audience? I’m tempted to think that the publishers would shy public scrutiny and shut the site down themselves. If not (say, the business model depended on ads and site hits), the government could institute a poll. Once a reasonable majority had agreed to shutting the site down, or banning it, this could be done with assent of the public (or a small part of it) rather than without.

    This type of procedure (inviting public scrutiny plus reaching of a quorum on censure) has problems of discrimination of minorities written over it, but at least the decision processes on what to ban would be visible, and open to control themselves.

  6. I have to play the devil’s advocate here, and object to a couple of assertions:

    “This is not the fault of those on the ground, but it is the fault of governments.”

    We can try to place the blame of the people at the top, but there is only one reason that these people are “at the top” — because others are willing to take orders from them.

    How can we just excuse the attitude that a person is behaving responsibly when he decides to uncritically accept orders from others, especially when there is reason to believe that the order-givers are liars/sociopaths.

    The idea that these problems can be fixed by just putting “the right people” at the top is foolish if not dangerous. Our electoral system regularly puts dangerous people into positions of power. Since it obviously is not capable of addressing this problem, and “those on the ground” are without blame, I suppose that the best we can hope for is a military coup.

    “they are providing us, the people, with the truth about things that governments and vested interests do not want exposed. Why would anyone think that was wrong? ”

    In this case, “the people” are all of the people of the world. Since the government is fighting some of “the people” (for good or bad reasons), it seeks to keep them disimpowered and uninformed–the rest of us are just collateral damage.

    1. I meant that it is not the fault of those fighting the wars. Obviously those in command, and those in the Pentagon and other military planning departments around the world are part of the problem, but I hardly think that the soldiers themselves are to blame.

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