[PiN-diskusjon] [Doctorow] Censorship is surveillance, vacy is a public health problem (fwd)

[Thomas Gramstad]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2012 12:50:55 +0000
From: Cory Doctorow <doctorow at craphound.com>
Subject: [Doctorow] Censorship is surveillance,
    and privacy is a public health problem

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My latest Guardian column is "Censorship is inseparable from
surveillance," which discusses the fact that network censorship entails
surveillance, and how this exacerbates the public health problem caused
by our difficulty in evaluating privacy trade-offs.

> There was a time when you could censor without spying. When
> Britain banned the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses in the
> 1920s and 1930s, the ban took the form on a prohibition on the sale
> of copies of the books. Theoretically, this entailed opening some
> imported parcels, and it certainly imposed a constraint on
> publishers and booksellers. It was undoubtedly awful. But we've got
> it worse today.
> 
> Jump forward 80 years. Imagine that you want to ban 
> www.jamesjoycesulysses.com due to a copyright claim from the Joyce 
> estate. Thanks to the Digital Economy Act and the provision it
> makes for a national British copyright firewall, we're headed for a
> system where entertainment companies can specify URLs that have
> "infringing" websites, and a national censorwall will block
> everyone in the country from visiting those sites.
> 
> In order to stop you from visiting www.jamesjoycesulysses.com, the 
> national censorwall must intercept all your outgoing internet 
> requests and examine them to determine whether they are for the 
> banned website. That's the difference between the old days of 
> censorship and our new digital censorship world. Today, censorship
> is inseparable from surveillance.

Censorship is inseparable from surveillance:
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/mar/02/censorship-inseperable-from-surveillance>

- --

Cory Doctorow
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