Governments and the Internet

A cyber-friend of mine mentioned that I was curiously quiet on this blog about the recent events between Google in China and and the evil hoard of malicious hackers seemingly putting political pressure via cyber-attacks.

The short story is that Google has been working with the Chinese government to censor google results which the Chinese Government doesn't want their citizens to see. In perhaps what was a moment of Liberty-Clarity, Google recently came out with a statement that they were going to stop censoring these results. To the best of my knowledge, they haven't actually implemented this change in policy - but they said they were going to.

After releasing their statement, they came under cyber-attack.

In other news, a law-firm that is representing an American company that is suing the state of China also came under cyber-attack.

Within the last few evenings, I saw Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton giving a long speech about "Internet Freedom".

Of all of the events noted above, listening to Secretary Clinton talk about the importance of a Free Internet caused me the most concern. I have a hard time believing that she has had a change in what I perceive to be her core beliefs. In order to understand why this of all things concerns me the most, you should probably do a google search on clinton, gore, PMRC, and the v-chip. ((if you don't get any interesting results - none of this will matter any more. ;) ))

My memory lumps all of these things together in a time when: Phil Zimmerman was being put on trial by the US Government for making his free encryption program (PGP) available on servers that were connected to the Internet, the Clinton Administration was ensuring that the v-chip would be put into every television in America, and Tipper Gore and Hillary Clinton were dabbling in their own game of PMRC censorship, while I was the sysop (system operator) of the CIA (Central Information Agency) BBS trying to raise awareness about the decline of Liberty in America.

My judgement is that our Secretary of State is just fine with censorship, as long as she is in a position of decision. I further judge that she is no friend to true Internet Freedom; and, prefers the perception of freedom to the real thing. I am willing to be wrong about this, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject.

I'm waiting to see all of the legislation that will follow, to ensure the "Freedom (R)" of the Internet.

Sensei Metajunkie