Foreign Policy Blogs

The Good Guys Are The Bad Guys

Australia: Worst of the Free Filterers

Australia: Worst of the Free Filterers

We pick a lot on authoritarians around here – try it, it’s fun!

*poke poke* *GROWL* *ARGH MY ARM IS GONE!!!!*

However, there’s a lot of unexpected players acting like bad guys in terms of internet censorship these days. Australia has draconian filtering laws. South Korea does everything possible to suppress anonymity online. (Care to comment on this blog? I’ll need your social security number.) Italy proposed the aggressive blocking of sites that could be thought to promote a crime.

This of course always has a legal justification, typically grounded in morality, which often boils down to “Think of the children!” There’s always a market to protect against what Bruce Schnier refers to as the Four Horsemen: Terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers.  In Europe, thanks to their history, neo-Nazis can also go for a ride.

This topic came up again at the Foreign Policy Initiative’s event on Internet Activists vs Authoritarian Regimes. Whenever the “good guys” do this, the usual suspects can point and say “hey, you’re doing it to!” To make sure they are on top of best practices in this field, China went on a listening tour, learning from 70 nations how they go about government internet controls.

This may be true in your own backyard, too. It is not an accident that the Internet is a largely open, free, and anonymous space; we lose that wonderful gift at great cost. Keep your eyes open and let your elected officials know you care about an Internet free of censorship and government-mandated identification.