Lawyers and governments battle over free speech on the internet

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: GLIGOR1 () aol com [GLIGOR1 () aol com]
Sent: Friday, March 07, 2008 12:39 AM
To: David Farber
Subject: Lawyers and governments battle over free speech on the internet

Leaks and lawsuits
Mar 6th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Lawyers and governments battle over free speech on the internet

BEFORE they were leaked onto the internet, the activities in the
Cayman Islands of Bank Julius Baer, and how far they may or may not
have been approved by the tax authorities in the bank's native
Switzerland, were strictly confidential. Even after a disgruntled
senior executive posted some rum-sounding details to Wikileaks, a
website specialising in information provided by whistle-blowers, they
would have remained obscure. But the bank's attempts to have Wikileaks
shut down have brought exactly the sort of scrutiny that it had shunned.

The bank now says it is considering its position. But the legal
battles in California have highlighted both the legal limbo in
cyberspace, and the way that the evolution of the web is widening the
gap between those that want to share information (even illegally) and
lawyers and governments that may want to control it.

Wikileaks appears to have been founded by an Australian living in
Kenya. It boasts a distinguished advisory board, featuring both
cryptographers and pro-democracy activists from such places as China.
It offers "military-strength" encryption for those wanting to upload
files anonymously. Material is reviewed by journalists and lawyers and
then put on the web for public discussion. Big recent scoops have
included an operating manual for guards at the American internment
camp at Guantánamo, a document relating to the British government's
expensive rescue of Northern Rock, a troubled bank, and material
relating to official corruption in Kenya.

Working out where to sue it is tricky. Wikileaks has no offices or
legal presence. Its servers are in Sweden and Belgium: countries, its
website says, that offer strong legal protection. An initial American
court ruling removed wikileaks.org from the internet domain registry,
making it harder to find. But on February 29th the same judge reversed
his ruling, to the delight of a bevy of free-speech advocates.

Websites that can be edited by anybody anywhere, part of what is often
termed Web 2.0, are a powerful tool for political and social protest.
In Colombia, protesters against FARC, a guerrilla group, used Facebook
to organise a 4m-strong demonstration. Google Maps allowed a few
bright Kenyan bloggers to display the incidence of post-election
violence reported by text message. Russian bloggers have mobilised on
LiveJournal to expose corruption at a pharmaceutical company.

But the golden age of cyberactivism may be coming to an end. China
restricts access to anything with a Tibetan or pro-democracy flavour.
Turkey blocked access to sites on Wordpress, a popular blogging
platform, because it hosted material critical of Kemal Ataturk, the
revered founder of the secular republic. Muslim countries, worried
about the way in which the internet undermines conservative social
mores on nudity and mingling, are twitchy too. Sites such as YouTube
or even Craigslist, which offers an online dating service among a
myriad of innocuous free-of-charge classified advertisements, are
often banned in whole or in part.

Filtering out specific content from such sites is the subtlest but
most expensive means of maintaining control. A simpler but more
controversial approach is to block an entire domain. Inexpert official
intervention can easily backfire. In Pakistan earlier this year the
authorities (inadvertently, they claim) briefly made YouTube, a
popular video-sharing site, inaccessible even for users abroad. A big
fan of the site is none other than the country's president, Pervez
Musharraf. According to Techcrunch, a technology blog, he was a
conspicuously frequent visitor to a facility at Davos, a plutocratic
Swiss shindig, where summit-goers could answer questions posed by
YouTube users.

Ethan Zuckerman, a Harvard internet guru, says that authoritarian
regimes find it harder to block such general sites as YouTube than to
block those run by a specific group (Human Rights Watch, for example).
The second lot appeals solely to dissidents, whereas the first are
useful to many more internet users who are interested in apolitical
subjects.

But Michael Anti, a Chinese free-speech advocate, fears that state and
commercial interests are colluding to produce Web 2.0 products that
are apolitical but attractive. The convenience of China's Tudou and
Baidu makes them strong competitors to foreign rivals like YouTube and
Google. That makes an outright ban on the foreign sites less thorny.

To counter this, Chinese activists are returning to older,
decentralised, internet services such as e-mail and chat rooms. These
may be safer, but they have little reach outside the dissenting elite.
Maybe netizens are too busy enjoying the new social and cultural
freedoms offered by the internet to care about politics.




________________________________
It's Tax Time! Get tips, forms and advice on AOL Money & Finance.<http://money.aol.com/tax?NCID=aolprf00030000000001>

-------------------------------------------
Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com