One Step Forward for Internet Censorship, A Step Backwards for Israel
Usually, I don't write about or get into political views on my blog, but this issue concerns me as a blogger and as citizen in a country such as Israel.
To make a long story short: More than a year and a half ago, Parliament member, Amnon Cohen suggested that all internet service providers should filter internet content for anyone who does not identify themselves as adults. The process was meant to be done via biometric identification and at the server level.
Now the proposal is due in Parliament after it received support from the government and passed the preliminary vote (out of three). According to this proposal, all internet users will either have to install filter software or use service-side filtering unless they identify themselves as adults willing to consume adult content (this is the place where the Minister of Telecommunications may decide how to identify users).
If this proposal is approved and gets full support from the government at the end of process of three votes, these will be the consequences as the result of this matter:
- Blogs, Forums and other group discussions could be blocked by default;
- Censorship is to be activated on News sites (pictures, videos, etc.,) and they will lose their freedom of expression;
- LGBT communities will be probably blocked as well;
- Israeli companies that contain user-generated content are at a major risk because surely this kind of content will be hard to monitor.
If you familiar with the web 2.0, you must know then that there is an enormous growth when it's come to Israel's Internet Industry, a step like this will hurt lots of companies.
Frankly, I can't believe that in an advanced country like Israel, the government itself would have a hand in bringing down its own economy. Moreover, I can't even imagine a situation where content from my blog or worse, my whole blog is being censored. It's sounds nightmarish and like the plot of a doomsday sci fi story.
However, this is just one side of a bigger issue which seems to be more and more a matter of political power and control over Israeli civilians. In a democratic country, an undemocratic law that gains support by the government, may open the doors for other unreasonable similar low blows that could endanger more of our freedoms on the future.
What's scares me is that most of the population naively sees this action as something that will protect their children from being exposed to inappropriate content and do not fear its ramifications on all of us as a whole. If a parent wants to, and they should protect their kids, it's his/her personal decision to place a filter that will block access to adult content on their computer. It's their choice as an individual and that simple.
Please take a minute to read the full story on this blog and feel free to spread the word because your help is needed! Don't allow our rights to slowly slip away. Let's move toward progress!
You can also show your support in the Coalition against Internet Censorship group (via Facebook).
3 Comments:
we really need to organize some kind of rally to protest this.
the main problem right now is that the big partys like kadima and avoda sold their voters and voted for the censorship in order to keep the coalition.
we need to show them that this will be their last coalition if they do this again!
3 points to consider here:
1. Israel is not a democratic country at the moment, by any fundamental means. As time goes by more and more such rulings will be executed. I'm not surprised.
2. The politicians who voted for this ruling belong to older generation, so they don't understand how un-applicable it is. If they had any sense of relevancy to the current reality, they would laugh at themselves for foolishness.
3. I also think they actually don't understand the relationship between filtering the WWW and human rights, since many of them are not very smart. I know that since I saw them talking on TV.
We, in Greece, have a same problem with the goverment.
After an eleged extorsion case by one of the administrators of a news orientent blog called press-gr, rumors (and newspaper articles) start to talk about blogs, and ways to stop "crimes commited through them" - the biggest in mind goes up to extorsion.
The measures that they have in mind are making the blogger legaly responcible for all the comments writen in his blog, and forcing all bloggers writing there real names at the blog (!) - just to know who is legaly responsible for any blog (and any comment).
As you may understand this brought a small crisis in the greek blogoshpere.
The law was not officially presented as we speak.
My point of view is that politicians in general, work with subjects that don't fully understand - ussualy they have experts doing all the thinking. But if they don't ask them (the experts), they (the politicians) can make crusual mistakes of judgement.
Any expert can tell you that is impossible to put any barriers in the web, without hurting the fundumental right of the freedom of speece.
And the internet is not a small and easy playground - as it grows it effects the lifes of many people, more that we can imagine.
PS: you are at my RSS list for a long time now, keep up the good work.
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