Google’s Responsibility In George Bush’s America
These two articles below, one on the “imperial presidency” of George W. Bush and the other on China riding herd on the internet with the consent and cooperation of American businesses (in the usual pursuit of greed and the billions of Chinese dollars spent on the products of those corporations) demonstrate how very easily censorship can affect the use of computers and the keeping of web logs to communicate personal opinions to potentially vast numbers of readers.
All these tiny little web blog voices are the modern equivalent of Thomas Paine’s printing one pamphlet at a time and passing it hand-to-hand to garner public opinion and support for The American Revolution.
It’s very simple to control these voices—let the masses rail and rant about whatever subject is near and dear at the moment, and then once the whoop-tee-doo dies down, scrub any reference to that particular subject so that no record exists, and so history unrecorded merely repeats itself endlessly and nothing changes.
Just the perfect scenario for George Bush’s America—and the Chinese vision of ‘democracy’.
This writer has been fascinated by search engines and watched their expansion for years now and recognizes for the first time how massive a tool for freedom or censorship they can become. Google is the matriarch and most likely will remain so, and this writer, for one, trusts the folks at Google and their statement of mission. However, it would seem that at this point in the world’s history that the time is at hand for Google to provide, in their always inimitable style, a means for anonymous blogging that is easier than the methods currently available.
One only has to attempt to implement the complex methods for anonymous blogging currently available to see that the technology is difficult unless one is more astute than most of us are in the world of computers.
Google, for one, might also pursue some means of insuring that no government can, now or in the future—through any means—remove any information from search engines for any politically inspired reasons.
This writer believes in Google as a force for democracy and freedom and hopes that the ‘handwriting on the wall’ is duly noted.
If corporations are the ‘new world’ and the ‘new nations’, then it would seem that Google might step forward into the growing mess of today’s America and enforce the principles of freedom and democracy while it is still possible to do so.
Only a consortium of all the world’s search engines controlled by people devoted to liberty and freedom will suffice to turn the tide of what can become censorship of the highest magnitude in the hands of national governments.
Invisiblog
Electronic Frontier Foundation
_________________________________________________________________________________
January 15, 2006
Editorial
The Imperial Presidency at Work
You would think that Senators Carl Levin and John McCain would have learned by now that you cannot deal in good faith with a White House that does not act in good faith. Yet both men struck bargains intended to restore the rule of law to American prison camps. And President Bush tossed them aside at the first opportunity.
Mr. Bush made a grand show of inviting Mr. McCain into the Oval Office last month to announce his support for a bill to require humane treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and other prisons run by the American military and intelligence agencies. He seemed to have managed to get Vice President Dick Cheney to stop trying to kill the proposed Congressional ban on torture of prisoners.
The White House also endorsed a bargain between Mr. Levin and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, which tempered somewhat a noxious proposal by Mr. Graham to deny a court hearing to anyone the president declares to be an "unlawful enemy combatant." The bargain with Mr. Levin removed language that stripped away cases already before the courts, which would have been an egregious usurpation of power by one branch of government, and it made clear that those cases should remain in the courts.
Mr. Bush, however, seems to see no limit to his imperial presidency. First, he issued a constitutionally ludicrous "signing statement" on the McCain bill. The message: Whatever Congress intended the law to say, he intended to ignore it on the pretext the commander in chief is above the law. That twisted reasoning is what led to the legalized torture policies, not to mention the domestic spying program.
Then Mr. Bush went after the judiciary, scrapping the Levin-Graham bargain. The solicitor general informed the Supreme Court last week that it no longer had jurisdiction over detainee cases. It said the court should drop an existing case in which a Yemeni national is challenging the military tribunals invented by Mr. Bush's morally challenged lawyers after 9/11. The administration is seeking to eliminate all other lawsuits filed by some of the approximately 500 men at Gitmo, the vast majority of whom have not been shown to pose any threat.
Both of the offensive theories at work here - that a president's intent in signing a bill trumps the intent of Congress in writing it, and that a president can claim power without restriction or supervision by the courts or Congress - are pet theories of Judge Samuel Alito, the man Mr. Bush chose to tilt the Supreme Court to the right.
The administration's behavior shows how high and immediate the stakes are in the Alito nomination, and how urgent it is for Congress to curtail Mr. Bush's expansion of power. Nothing in the national consensus to combat terrorism after 9/11 envisioned the unilateral rewriting of more than 200 years of tradition and law by one president embarked on an ideological crusade.
Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
__________________________________________________________________
JANUARY 13, 2006
NEWSMAKER Q&A
By Bruce Einhorn
Einhorn is a correspondent in BusinessWeek's Hong Kong bureau
How China Controls the Internet
Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong explains, and he says U.S. companies need to take a stand against Beijing
The news that Microsoft (MSFT ) shut down a Chinese blogger's site at the request of Beijing officials is bringing a renewed focus on the role U.S. companies play in helping China control the Internet. It's no secret that Western businesses that want to enter the Internet market in China have to do some unsavory things. The Chinese government, determined to prevent dissidents from using the Net to promote taboo subjects such as the Falun Gong religious movement, formal independence for Taiwan, or an end to Communist Party rule, pressures providers to play by Chinese rules and control the content that's available for local Net surfers (see BW Online, 1/12/06, "The Great Firewall of China").
When companies do restrict what their Chinese users send or read on the Net, however, they face howls of criticism from activists, bloggers, and ordinary folks abroad who think that multinationals should not be helping Beijing police the Net. Nicholas Bequelin, the China research director for Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong, recently spoke with Bruce Einhorn of BusinessWeek's Hong Kong bureau about censorship and the Net in China. Edited excerpts follow:
How big a role do foreign companies play in helping China control the Net?
China would not have succeeded in censoring the Net without the support and cooperation of foreign IT companies. This is the inescapable truth. This is the problem that has to be addressed.
Yahoo! (YHOO ) got slammed last year for cooperating with a Chinese government investigation that led to the imprisonment of a journalist. Do you think Yahoo acted irresponsibly?
One of the main problems with the Internet debate in China is that people stretch their case too far and lose credibility. The whole Yahoo thing is objectionable on moral and ethical grounds, but nobody could say that it was improper for Yahoo to give the information about the user.
But couldn't Yahoo have refused to cooperate?
The idea that a company operating in China could say, "Oh well, I'm not giving you this information" is not sustainable in the end. The Yahoo case was a tragic illustration of the cost of doing business in China. We know abstractly that you have to make compromises when you operate in China, but this case showed what it means. People really end up in jail. But the vilification of companies for being complicit is self-defeating.
So do you think Western companies are doing anything wrong?
The fact is that foreign IT suppliers and companies are willingly, knowingly assisting the Chinese police in suppressing political dissent.
What should people concerned about human rights do about that?
The business interests are so large that you will never stop this. What do you say? Pull out of China? "If we don't sell, someone else will," that's what people respond. And in the case of IT, China is definitely going to get it because of their own companies and the nature of the IT industry.
Even if Yahoo is not there, they will have something else. Iif Google is not there, they will have something else. What is objectionable is the stonewalling that companies do. They don't take any responsibility, admit that there are certain grey areas and that their technology can be used for repression, or mitigate this.
On your last point, what could they do?
They could mitigate this first by being more open, by having a firmer commitment to their corporate responsibility charters and their codes of conduct, or by being willing to comply with things such as the U.N. global norms for businesses and the world summit for information systems. They could try to address this. If all companies did this, there would be nothing that China could do about it.
Back in the 1990s, when the Internet was first getting established in China, many people in the West thought that the Chinese wouldn't be able to control it. What happened?
The assumption was that the Internet is impossible to control and censor. [President] Clinton said that it's like trying to nail Jello to the wall. Well, they managed to nail the Jello pretty well. Year after year, we see that China is gaining control of Internet content.
How?
One thing that was totally overlooked by the optimistic talk in the U.S. is that the control of the Internet doesn't rest so much with technology, but with the classic methods of press and media control. The person who manages is the person who bears responsibility. The keystone of the censorship system in China is that basically ownership is censorship. If you own something -- Web site editor, newspaper editor, press group owner -- you are responsible for what is there.
There is no grey zone: If you operate this portal, this BBS, you are responsible for what is on it. The key thing is you make the decision. It's not the party that makes the decision. They are not going to scrutinize every BBS. You make the decision, they tell you. Companies responsible to shareholders and staff will, of course, err on the side of caution and self-censorship.
But there's no way to prevent people on bulletin boards and blogs from commenting on news when it happens, right? Weren't there lots of people who were writing about the benzene spill in China's northeast last month that contaminated the water supply of Harbin and other cities in northern China?
Reading the BBS during Harbin episode, you could find a lot of outright criticism of the party. But every single major incident is the same. For all these incidents you have a wave of Internet discussion, and it gives an impression that the party doesn't really control this anymore. But this is omitting a fundamental characteristic of how information works. Information is not only circulation. Archiving and retrieval is even more important. But none of the information stays.
Why not?
After the crisis all of this will be wiped out. In two months, you won't find anything, because the censors will have gotten to it. The owners, the editors of the Web sites, receive instructions from the propaganda dept of the party. Everything is washed away.
Copyright 2006, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc.
All these tiny little web blog voices are the modern equivalent of Thomas Paine’s printing one pamphlet at a time and passing it hand-to-hand to garner public opinion and support for The American Revolution.
It’s very simple to control these voices—let the masses rail and rant about whatever subject is near and dear at the moment, and then once the whoop-tee-doo dies down, scrub any reference to that particular subject so that no record exists, and so history unrecorded merely repeats itself endlessly and nothing changes.
Just the perfect scenario for George Bush’s America—and the Chinese vision of ‘democracy’.
This writer has been fascinated by search engines and watched their expansion for years now and recognizes for the first time how massive a tool for freedom or censorship they can become. Google is the matriarch and most likely will remain so, and this writer, for one, trusts the folks at Google and their statement of mission. However, it would seem that at this point in the world’s history that the time is at hand for Google to provide, in their always inimitable style, a means for anonymous blogging that is easier than the methods currently available.
One only has to attempt to implement the complex methods for anonymous blogging currently available to see that the technology is difficult unless one is more astute than most of us are in the world of computers.
Google, for one, might also pursue some means of insuring that no government can, now or in the future—through any means—remove any information from search engines for any politically inspired reasons.
This writer believes in Google as a force for democracy and freedom and hopes that the ‘handwriting on the wall’ is duly noted.
If corporations are the ‘new world’ and the ‘new nations’, then it would seem that Google might step forward into the growing mess of today’s America and enforce the principles of freedom and democracy while it is still possible to do so.
Only a consortium of all the world’s search engines controlled by people devoted to liberty and freedom will suffice to turn the tide of what can become censorship of the highest magnitude in the hands of national governments.
Invisiblog
Electronic Frontier Foundation
_________________________________________________________________________________
January 15, 2006
Editorial
The Imperial Presidency at Work
You would think that Senators Carl Levin and John McCain would have learned by now that you cannot deal in good faith with a White House that does not act in good faith. Yet both men struck bargains intended to restore the rule of law to American prison camps. And President Bush tossed them aside at the first opportunity.
Mr. Bush made a grand show of inviting Mr. McCain into the Oval Office last month to announce his support for a bill to require humane treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and other prisons run by the American military and intelligence agencies. He seemed to have managed to get Vice President Dick Cheney to stop trying to kill the proposed Congressional ban on torture of prisoners.
The White House also endorsed a bargain between Mr. Levin and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, which tempered somewhat a noxious proposal by Mr. Graham to deny a court hearing to anyone the president declares to be an "unlawful enemy combatant." The bargain with Mr. Levin removed language that stripped away cases already before the courts, which would have been an egregious usurpation of power by one branch of government, and it made clear that those cases should remain in the courts.
Mr. Bush, however, seems to see no limit to his imperial presidency. First, he issued a constitutionally ludicrous "signing statement" on the McCain bill. The message: Whatever Congress intended the law to say, he intended to ignore it on the pretext the commander in chief is above the law. That twisted reasoning is what led to the legalized torture policies, not to mention the domestic spying program.
Then Mr. Bush went after the judiciary, scrapping the Levin-Graham bargain. The solicitor general informed the Supreme Court last week that it no longer had jurisdiction over detainee cases. It said the court should drop an existing case in which a Yemeni national is challenging the military tribunals invented by Mr. Bush's morally challenged lawyers after 9/11. The administration is seeking to eliminate all other lawsuits filed by some of the approximately 500 men at Gitmo, the vast majority of whom have not been shown to pose any threat.
Both of the offensive theories at work here - that a president's intent in signing a bill trumps the intent of Congress in writing it, and that a president can claim power without restriction or supervision by the courts or Congress - are pet theories of Judge Samuel Alito, the man Mr. Bush chose to tilt the Supreme Court to the right.
The administration's behavior shows how high and immediate the stakes are in the Alito nomination, and how urgent it is for Congress to curtail Mr. Bush's expansion of power. Nothing in the national consensus to combat terrorism after 9/11 envisioned the unilateral rewriting of more than 200 years of tradition and law by one president embarked on an ideological crusade.
Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
__________________________________________________________________
JANUARY 13, 2006
NEWSMAKER Q&A
By Bruce Einhorn
Einhorn is a correspondent in BusinessWeek's Hong Kong bureau
How China Controls the Internet
Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong explains, and he says U.S. companies need to take a stand against Beijing
The news that Microsoft (MSFT ) shut down a Chinese blogger's site at the request of Beijing officials is bringing a renewed focus on the role U.S. companies play in helping China control the Internet. It's no secret that Western businesses that want to enter the Internet market in China have to do some unsavory things. The Chinese government, determined to prevent dissidents from using the Net to promote taboo subjects such as the Falun Gong religious movement, formal independence for Taiwan, or an end to Communist Party rule, pressures providers to play by Chinese rules and control the content that's available for local Net surfers (see BW Online, 1/12/06, "The Great Firewall of China").
When companies do restrict what their Chinese users send or read on the Net, however, they face howls of criticism from activists, bloggers, and ordinary folks abroad who think that multinationals should not be helping Beijing police the Net. Nicholas Bequelin, the China research director for Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong, recently spoke with Bruce Einhorn of BusinessWeek's Hong Kong bureau about censorship and the Net in China. Edited excerpts follow:
How big a role do foreign companies play in helping China control the Net?
China would not have succeeded in censoring the Net without the support and cooperation of foreign IT companies. This is the inescapable truth. This is the problem that has to be addressed.
Yahoo! (YHOO ) got slammed last year for cooperating with a Chinese government investigation that led to the imprisonment of a journalist. Do you think Yahoo acted irresponsibly?
One of the main problems with the Internet debate in China is that people stretch their case too far and lose credibility. The whole Yahoo thing is objectionable on moral and ethical grounds, but nobody could say that it was improper for Yahoo to give the information about the user.
But couldn't Yahoo have refused to cooperate?
The idea that a company operating in China could say, "Oh well, I'm not giving you this information" is not sustainable in the end. The Yahoo case was a tragic illustration of the cost of doing business in China. We know abstractly that you have to make compromises when you operate in China, but this case showed what it means. People really end up in jail. But the vilification of companies for being complicit is self-defeating.
So do you think Western companies are doing anything wrong?
The fact is that foreign IT suppliers and companies are willingly, knowingly assisting the Chinese police in suppressing political dissent.
What should people concerned about human rights do about that?
The business interests are so large that you will never stop this. What do you say? Pull out of China? "If we don't sell, someone else will," that's what people respond. And in the case of IT, China is definitely going to get it because of their own companies and the nature of the IT industry.
Even if Yahoo is not there, they will have something else. Iif Google is not there, they will have something else. What is objectionable is the stonewalling that companies do. They don't take any responsibility, admit that there are certain grey areas and that their technology can be used for repression, or mitigate this.
On your last point, what could they do?
They could mitigate this first by being more open, by having a firmer commitment to their corporate responsibility charters and their codes of conduct, or by being willing to comply with things such as the U.N. global norms for businesses and the world summit for information systems. They could try to address this. If all companies did this, there would be nothing that China could do about it.
Back in the 1990s, when the Internet was first getting established in China, many people in the West thought that the Chinese wouldn't be able to control it. What happened?
The assumption was that the Internet is impossible to control and censor. [President] Clinton said that it's like trying to nail Jello to the wall. Well, they managed to nail the Jello pretty well. Year after year, we see that China is gaining control of Internet content.
How?
One thing that was totally overlooked by the optimistic talk in the U.S. is that the control of the Internet doesn't rest so much with technology, but with the classic methods of press and media control. The person who manages is the person who bears responsibility. The keystone of the censorship system in China is that basically ownership is censorship. If you own something -- Web site editor, newspaper editor, press group owner -- you are responsible for what is there.
There is no grey zone: If you operate this portal, this BBS, you are responsible for what is on it. The key thing is you make the decision. It's not the party that makes the decision. They are not going to scrutinize every BBS. You make the decision, they tell you. Companies responsible to shareholders and staff will, of course, err on the side of caution and self-censorship.
But there's no way to prevent people on bulletin boards and blogs from commenting on news when it happens, right? Weren't there lots of people who were writing about the benzene spill in China's northeast last month that contaminated the water supply of Harbin and other cities in northern China?
Reading the BBS during Harbin episode, you could find a lot of outright criticism of the party. But every single major incident is the same. For all these incidents you have a wave of Internet discussion, and it gives an impression that the party doesn't really control this anymore. But this is omitting a fundamental characteristic of how information works. Information is not only circulation. Archiving and retrieval is even more important. But none of the information stays.
Why not?
After the crisis all of this will be wiped out. In two months, you won't find anything, because the censors will have gotten to it. The owners, the editors of the Web sites, receive instructions from the propaganda dept of the party. Everything is washed away.
Copyright 2006, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc.
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