Pixelated Semantics

A schizotypical inventory

No Pic of Bush for You, TV Model

An interesting report clearly highlights the pitfalls of censorship. The anti-censorship service offered to internet users in .CN and .IR is itself censored using a blunt-instrument approach - based on keywords - that in the end undermines the whole point of the exercise. As ZDnet reports:

"Technology used by the IBB [ who "invented a way to let people in China and Iran easily route around censorship by using a U.S.-based service to view banned sites" ] ... prevents [ users in .CN and .IR ] from visiting Web addresses that include a peculiar list of verboten keywords. The list includes "ass" (which inadvertently bans usembassy.state.gov), "breast" (breastcancer.com), "hot" (hotmail.com and hotels.com), "pic" (epic.noaa.gov) and "teen" (teens.drugabuse.gov)."

The problem with keywords is one of context - blanket denial based on the word alone will prevent a great deal of "legitimate" activity. And this is the same issue affecting Digital Rights and many other areas.

As the report states, this kind of activity is heading "down a path from which there's no clear endpoint" - indeed there is no clear endpoint to most of the current social engineering going on in the name of "anti-piracy", "fighting terrorism", etc. Escalating priveleges for the Recording Industry, increased surveillance of passive populations, security measures including forced use of identity cards, and many other campaigns which intrude on or remove the rights of ordinary people - all of these campaigns have no defined endpoint, or final objective. The language is adversarial, the issues often emotive, based on short-term gain.

The criteria for censorship is often arbitrary, such as the current case, which the report identifies as based on keyword filtering that "displays a conservative bias" - for instance, the list astonishingly includes "tv", "you", "model", and my personal favourite, "bush", (try reaching http://www.archives.gov/presidential_libraries/addresses/george_bush.html from China!) among less savoury terms and the usual sexual semantic suspects. It's more than a "sad irony" that the government agency charged with fighting Internet censorship is quietly censoring the Web itself, it's an indictment of today's truly doublespeak society: censorship in the name of freedom.

Item posted by AutoEditor at 10:38 am ::