A worrying development
I was concerned when I read this, as it seems as though the Government is finally about to step across a very important threshold if it chooses to do this. Setting aside the technical arguments as to whether this kind of initiative is actually possible, we need to be asking ourselves whether it is healthy for a democratic society to allow the Government to be allowed to claim the authority to filter what people can read, post and consume on the Internet.
Obviously I’m taking a libertarian stance, but the arguments put forward by Jackie Smith earlier in the week were either naive or disingenuous. On one hand she proposes engaging with Islamic groups and attempting to challenge the ideology of terrorist groups, whilst on the other hand setting laws in place to persecute people expressing those ideologies in public and “banning them from the Internet”. If history repeatedly tells us anything it is that authority attempts to ban ideology (no matter how unpalatable they may be to most people) will always fail. Indeed if anything idealists such as these view the Government’s attempts to quash them as justification that that they are right (and that the Government is the enemy) and as such it energises them.
But what really concerns me is that it appears as though Jackie Smith and the Government are finally preparing to park their tanks on the internet’s lawn. The mechanisms which Smith would like to see introduced into the infrastructure of our ISPs would enable Government monitoring and particularly control of internet content for the very first time. As a libertarian that concerns me, as (once again) we see extreme and minority case justifications used to introduce new laws and mechanisms which affect the rest of us.
In her interviews Smith made it clear that she was determined to stamp out Terrorism, Paedophilia and extreme Islamic views from the Internet and who can argue with that? But she also hinted that the Government was looking to bring the illicit use of the internet for other “crimes” under control as well. As always the Government strategy is to implement a policy using a justification from an extreme, but subsequently use that policy as a Trojan for other, opaque and less popular changes and applications.
When one connects these announcements with the legislative framework created to prosecute terrorism the dangers of these proposals to freedom of expression, consumption and communication debate online become very worrying indeed. The Government has already laws which define terms such as “terrorist”, “extremist”, “promoting” and even “activity” in such ambiguous terms that they could conceivably be applied to cover almost anything. Already we have seen laws intended to prosecute “terrorists” used widely against Walter Wolfgang, anti-war, arms trade and airport protestors. Are we now to allow the Government to patrol and prosecute with the same latitude based on what they can trawl in cyberspace? One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter – are we prepared to retain that right to determine which is which or should we trust the Government to do all of our thinking for us and make these important distinctions for us?
With the mainstream media controlled by conglomerates and our democratic political processes strangled the internet is now almost the only mechanism left where people can express their views easily and communicate with the like-minded. Some of those views are absolutely unpalatable, but the counterstrike should be to engage these arguments in their native domain, online, rather than seek to start controlling the one area of free speech we have left. Nothing would suit the ruling classes them more… are we prepared to hand it over to them to control?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
