Why the "Right To Be Forgotten" is the Worst Kind of Censorship
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001119.html
Let's start from a foundational premise on which we hopefully can all
agree.
Our abilities to interpret and understand the world around us are
predicated on the availability of information.
In the far past, that information was usually entirely based on what we
could sense directly or were told by others. Later, written and the
printed materials vastly expanded our information reach, both in terms
of space and distance, in terms of time and history.
Today it's inarguable that the Internet is the key to our information
knowledge, and in the absence of a global catastrophe, it seems slated
to expand rapidly in that role.
I define censorship as attempts by governments to control the
dissemination of information by third parties, usually backed up with
civil and/or criminal sanctions.
Censorship (and attempts at censorship) have likely existed back to the
dawn of civilization, and it's been a preferred tool of control by
rulers and governments ever since.
In the early days of broad Internet expansion, there was a popular --
though I would assert rather naive -- view that the coming of the Net
would sweep away national governments and bring about a utopia of open
communications.
Of course that's not exactly what happened.
While domestic governments were generally slow on the uptake to
understand the power of the Internet, once it really showed up on their
radars many moved rapidly to muzzle that power into traditional
censorship realms, with China and Russia leading the way.
It is often said -- I've said it myself -- that's it's nearly impossible
to completely censor information on the Net, that the ease of mirroring
and the variety of bypass mechanisms available make total blockades
enormously difficult.
This is true. But there are provisos to that truth that aren't stated as
frequently.
One of these is that even if you can't completely censor particular
information, governments can often make it such a hassle -- or so
personally dangerous -- to pursue accessing that information as to
effectively terrify all but the bravest (or in some cases perhaps the
most foolhardy) of their population into submission.
So perhaps you can use a VPN to get at the webpage the government
doesn't want you to see. But if you're caught at it, are you willing to
risk having your entire family arrested, perhaps beaten, and then
spending the next 20 years shackled in a dungeon cell?
The traditional techniques of government oppression have definitely
maintained much of their power, even in the Internet age.
But at least in most of these cases you know that the forbidden
information exists. You are aware of what the government is trying to
block from you.
Which brings us to the second proviso from the truth about censorship.
In true Orwellian fashion, even better than blocking people from
information is preventing them from ever realizing that the
forbidden information exists in the first place.
And this is where the so-called "Right To Be Forgotten" (RTBF) comes
into play.
The key premise of RTBF is that if you can prevent your population from
realizing that particular data exists on the Web -- even if they could
easily access it given such knowledge -- you've achieved censorship
Valhalla.
This is why RTBF focuses its death ray on search engines. Governments
realize the typical impracticality of excising all copies of information
from all possible Internet sources. So they instead order the burning of
the search results "index cards" in a deeply disingenuous attempt to
fool their populations into not realizing the associated materials exist
at all.
Supporters of RTBF concepts bizarrely attempt to claim that RTBF is not
actually censorship, since usually the materials at issue still exist
somewhere out on the Web.
But this is deeply cynical and, yes, evil. It's like saying that a child
has been locked into a safe, and all you need to save them is to guess
the combination.
RTBF proponents also prefer to frame their arguments in terms of early
European Union RTBF efforts involving "ordinary" individuals.
But already we're seeing the steepness of the slippery slope of their
RTBF.
The EU has already made it clear that not only do they want to censor
the Net within their own borders, they want to be global censorship
czars. They've said that search engine results they've banned should be
removed from global indexes, not just from the localized versions that
the vast majority of their population uses.
In a particularly outlandish twist, there have even been EU suggestions
that search engines be required by law to specifically identify EU
citizens as they travel, so that EU censorship edicts can be applied to
them no matter where on the globe they may access the Net.
This isn't simply theoretical. France has already demanded that Google
apply French RTBF takedowns around the planet, giving France the ability
to control what users everywhere else in the world can see. Google is
quite appropriately resisting this horrific edict.
And that's just in Europe.
Elsewhere, democratic and totalitarian governments alike are lining up
to try impose their own RTBF censorship on the entire Earth. Putin's
Russia has already passed such legislation, even broader and more
dangerous than the awful EU variety.
Putin as a global censor? Chinese leaders as global censors?
It's bad enough when Western democracies fall into this trap, but the
rush to a lowest common denominator of "acceptable" information that
would be triggered by totalitarian leaders exerting such power would be
nightmarishly breathtaking to behold.
There is no practical way to proverbially "dip your toe" into RTBF
censorship, without ending up quickly and totally submerged and
drowning. It's like being "a little bit" pregnant, or setting a match to
a piece of flash paper.
Making it crystal clear to our legislatures and political leaders that
we will not accept these censorship regimes is absolutely crucial to our
civil liberties -- in fact, even to our knowledge going forward of what
civil liberties actually are!
This will be an enormously difficult battle, because censorship is very
much the natural ally of governments and of politicians.
But if we lose this battle, this war on our basic freedoms, it's very
possible that someday -- perhaps not in the very distant future at
all -- even these very words you're reading right now may be impossible to
ever find again.
--Lauren--
I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently doing so.
All opinions expressed here are mine alone.
- - -
Lauren Weinstein ([email protected]): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein
Twitter: http://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
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