"Every idea is an incitement"
An essay
By G.F. Bird
My 1971 Encyclopedia Britannica's ten and a half page entry (written by M.R.K.) for “Censorship" begins with an Oliver Wendell Holmes quote, "Every idea is an incitement." The entry closes by noting that competing values remain and consensus on resolving the conflicts is still to be achieved.
Further evidence for censorship's intractability.
Current circumstances, with exponential expansions of data and speed of communications worldwide, and the ability of technologies used for the expansion to track use, allows for candid or circumspect expressions, that earlier would have been spoken off-handedly to trusted family or old friends, or confided to a diary or paper scrap, now to be durably digitized and identified for coercive censorship.
Corporations and their companies that provide Internet Service/Search Engine services each have standards, some of which are spelled out, some of which are proprietary, all in addition to industrial standards. Some may even be verbal. For instance, rather than simply provide a commercial software product with a registration number denoting that an individual copy is consistent with the product as advertised which may be purchased or not, a provider may, for purposes of operating in a governmental jurisdiction, enter into written contract agreements with secret sections which may provide that actions be triggered by verbal requests between principals to further obfuscate actions. Such contract provisions have very little chance of being known by everyday customers or general employees, let alone knowing the logs of actions under such provisions. The harm of open censorship is compounded when censorship is secret.
Within an organization's corporate structure, business methods, and contractual requirements is product code subject to being buggy. Thus buggy, data entered into a system, even accurately, may because of bugs be processed inaccurately. The inaccurate results may then cause actions which may include police arrest, and because of exceptionalistic policies purposely overreacting to the inability to stop the use of terror in political conflict in order to concentrate political power unto themselves, the arrest may not result in entry of the individual's case into an open justice system of rights. The person then has disappeared into a secret fate, the hallmark of tyranny. Evil is thus abetted by IS/SE providers.
In addition to injustices due to buggy code, there are structural problems of reliance on signals and data mining-type technology versus human resources. One of the major critiques of the lead up to the attacks of September 11, 2001 was that technology had become increasingly relied upon for intelligence to the detriment of on-the-ground sources that use filters of human judgment about the value of a source. Primary among these shortcomings were (and apparently still are) language translations. It should not be forgotten that the US Justice Department's budget request submitted just prior to 9/11 cut funds for some 70 Arabic language translators. Even with the complexities of "standard" Arabic and many other regional languages, there are dialects and local street slang not transparent to the office-bound translator or newly-arrived covert agent, in addition to any specialized pre-computer old-style manual coding and/or encryption for specific nefarious purposes.
Then there are individual prejudices and vindictiveness. The chain of command boss for signals guy 4-star Mike Hayden is the self-described "decider" who is vigorously seeking to do away with Constitutional standards of separation of powers' checks and balances on his "decisions" in the face of a thoroughly unreliable track record. Reliance on “deciding” based on slam-dunk technical "certainties" of signals-type technologies prejudices against other non-technical sources. Ideological "certainties" prejudice against "inconvenient" facts contradicting predetermined plans. Perceived as threats by “deciders”, contradictors are attacked, or censored, just because they are not on board with the plan.
(It all has a taint of what Gary Trudeau finally pointed out in a strip some months ago - that there is a history of hazing, mutilation, and pranks in the formative years of the current "decider" as chapter president of a fraternity nationally sanctioned for such misconduct. Facts don't count. Only getting away with it does.)
And even in the most repressive government regime’s efforts to enforce conformity, the timelessness of black markets exists and even relied upon in the face of planned economy market shortages. In the face of those phenomena for governments are cultural, tribal, regional, neighborhood, commercial, etc. practices which change according to such categories’ individual standards and traditions. Some are corporate and public, some proprietary, some within a private social club, some within an informal clique that operates underground and influences with great anonymity in those black markets.
Are smuggled hidden satellite dishes in a censoring country receiving the same product being uploaded to the geostationary repeater that we in the US have had all along? That, we have both been told by generations of politicians and consequently hold as an article of faith, is the spread of the American way of life. The question then may arise, is there a Baathist Channel being downloaded to Baghdad’s dishes, or not, as there is not a National Socialist channel available in Germany? Private companies, governments, and other associations are about making choices for their betterment and not choosing what will hurt business.
Does a censoring government have any real long-term chance of excluding a world of information technology changes that officials themselves find fascinating, even irresistible? One easily grasps the company tactic of cooperation limited to part - even the largest part - of the global market as a paving of the road to market payoffs from use of company products that inevitably bring political change to the censor. The government may justify practicing censorship in the course of using strong government force to hold together or break down the current borders of traditional regions and cultures in the face of vast increases in population in order to prevent very real threats to the government of perceived social chaos. But one must recognize efforts not only of inciters to change staid governments, but of governments, taking advantage of the market power of their population and the commercial demands of IS/SE providers for access to “their” markets, to seek to assert controls to change those they censor. Efforts to influence behavior go both ways and a scorecard is needed to make a judgment about who is winning and what is working. It’s a big bet on the ability of the US/North America to re-invent itself in the face of the success of US efforts to change our adversaries by sharing our culture and encouraging them into our markets where they will inevitably be changed by money. Does anyone have that scorecard, and will IS/SE providers include their data for the calculation?
Algorithms, whether proprietary or published, may be used to sustain a business model, but they do not exclude fine-tuning algorithms that block, or censor, particularly hurtful - in the view of someone with the power to execute the censoring - sites or emails. Censorship enforcement actions by IS/SE are a departure from the stated ideals of their own companies because they result in evil consequences being visited on free thinkers – including quickie trial and execution with a shot to the back of the head.
While the internet is robust in its ability to allow access (as seen by the inability to shut down Qaeda sites), private companies providing access services to the internet have the choice to be less access-robust as they control their portal, even, as we have long seen, to providing enforcement services to governments that do not have the traditions, eroded as they have recently been in the United States, of judicial and legislative oversight, separation of powers, two-party system, and checks and balances. Individual skill levels have allowed use of the internet for many years prior to IS/SE providers, and will at some level continue.
And as a sort of mea culpa, without choosing to identify the service providers and censoring countries by name, I censor for the general reader who has not been following the issue.
May we all have good luck traversing this sticky business.