Internet censorship is the ultimate curtain call for freedom

Tuesday February 23, 2010

The current drive towards internet censorship, emanating from governments across the world, must be resisted if we are truly to be classed as ‘free’, argues Martin Cullip

In December 2008, former culture secretary Andy Burnham floated the idea of government-approved age ratings for internet sites. The justification was to protect children from offensive or inappropriate material, a motivation with which it is difficult to argue.

However, there was something vaguely sinister about his assertion that “If you look back at the people who created the internet, they talked very deliberately about creating a space that governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now.”.

His comments followed just a month after communities secretary of the time, Hazel Blears, had railed against “vicious nihilism” in the blogosphere. Could this have been a veiled starter gun for a war against online dissent?

Attack

Just over a year ago, one would have been termed a conspiracy theorist for coming to that conclusion, but what we have since witnessed is an attack on internet licence of global proportion.

In Australia, a government website was recently hacked in response to a government blacklist which includes online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.

The first antipodean salvo, though, was directed exclusively at bloggers and commenters on political matters. South Australia’s Attorney General complained that opponents were able to offer dissent anonymously and that just wouldn’t do, so they prohibited any submissions which weren’t accompanied by a name and post code.

Approved

Most recently, a Microsoft executive speaking at the Davos Economic Forum hinted at a ‘driver’s licence’ for bloggers before their content can be approved for publication. If Barack Obama, who criticized China for their internet censorship in September, believes this idea is against the principles of his ‘land of the free’, he has been very slow in a public dismissal.

Increasingly, the public is being afforded a voice in politics by the internet. Bloggers are challenging the cosy bubble of the state and often pricking it beyond repair. The ‘Climategate’ revelations, for example, would not have reached any significant readership if it weren’t for dogged ferreting by those who refused to believe their respective state’s line on climate change.

Subsequent revelations have proven their efforts to have been valuable in revealing lackadaisical practices and glaring errors which were extremely inconvenient to advocates of big, and unaccountable, government.

Eroded

The comfortable buffer between the public and the state, studiously bolstered over a couple of decades, has been eroded by the accessibility of the internet to such an extent that gainsayers truly can, In Andy Burnham’s parlance, operate in a space that governments can’t reach. And politicians, it would seem, don’t like that one little bit.

There are many freedoms in life which can be assaulted by illiberal governments, many of which you will read about on these pages. Freedom of uncensored speech, though, is the most fundamental of all in a free society. Once that liberty is erased, all others are solely, and irrevocably, subject to government diktat.

As such, the current fashionable drive towards internet censorship, emanating from governments in a variety of continents, must be vehemently resisted at all costs if we are truly to be classed as ‘free’.