Mudslinger's Corner

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DailyTech – 2009: The Year of the Thought Criminal

Give those in power an inch, and they’ll take a mile

Barely a week in, 2009 is shaping up to be an interesting – if somewhat depressing – year for opponents of internet censorship and overpowered copyright enforcement. These last few weeks we’ve seen a number of troubling initiatives from India, Australia, the U.K., and New Zealand, among others, which seek to curtail the delightfully double-edged freedom of information that makes our Internet so great.

While diverse in purpose, each of these initiatives bear a common thread: increased government control in things that it lacks the business, the discipline, and the authority to regulate. Whether it’s heightening the reign of censorship in Australia, disconnecting the internet of anyone even remotely suspected of file sharing in New Zealand, or the increase in police cybersnooping powers in India and the U.K., it appears that many of this world’s governments have had enough of the open internet and now intend to take over and regulate.

The reasons why these developments are a genuinely Bad Thing™ should be both multitude and obvious. The internet gives us, as a people, an almost unthinkably powerful weapon – a weapon of minds, of expression, and of intellectual freedom – that we are free to wield against ourselves, each other, and those who govern over us. In no other time have we had such a power, and yet under the guise of fear – excuses range everywhere from “protecting public morality” to “saving the children” – we allow lawmakers to siphon it away from us.

Clearly, our governments are envious.

The range between these initiatives, in terms of simple power, is wide: while the “Constable HaX0r” police-hacker scare in the U.K. seems largely the result of media hysteria – British police have had the ability to remotely investigate suspects’ computers for quite some time, as Ars Technica’s Julian Sanchez points out – a two-year-old Indian bill, which was finally approved last month, gives Indian authorities a sudden and substantial increase in their ability regulate the private lives of Indian citizens.

“Any email you send, any message you text [is] now open to the prying eyes of the government,” writes Indian blogger Binu Karunakaran, as is “the contents of your computer you surfed in the privacy of your home.”

Binu writes of the Information Technology (Amendment) Bill of 2006, which passed Indian parliament late last month. It grants authorities practically unrestricted authority to monitor all electronic communication, the ability to block any website at will, and the authority to break into someone’s home and inspect their computer – in addition to imposing “Victorian” moral sensibilities on an already conservative culture. Banned activities include e-mailing anything (even jokes) that might be considered offensive or false, surfing celebrity “Bollywood” news, or watching porn.

Meanwhile, bloggers’ christening of the “Great Firewall of Australia” seems to have gained additional relevance, after the Australian government announced intentions to introduce worldwide, ISP-level internet filtering upon its inhabitants. Labor party minister Stephen Conroy writes – in an open-comment blog post, paradoxically – that the move is necessary to maximize the “participation of Australian businesses and individuals in the digital economy,” so that they conduct themselves online as they do offline. Open censorship isn’t an attack on free speech, he writes, because the government doesn’t acknowledge it as such; censors are ordered to avoid blocking any forms of “political speech” while little is said about any of the other kinds.

More troubling, however, is how quickly we’re sleepwalking into the arms of a Big Brother-esque surveillance state. Indian citizens may have had little debate over their Big Brother bill, but voters in the U.K., Australia, the United States, and elsewhere have – and yet we continually ignore the warning signs: Warrantless wiretapping in the U.S. continues to gather indifference from most of the voting public, and most of the lukewarm attempts to slow the rampant spread of traffic, speed, and public surveillance cameras in the U.S. and U.K. have thus far failed. Most people I’ve talked to seem to shrug their shoulders and say that they have nothing to hide – and then go on with their business. Nobody seems to care.

(There’s an excellent counterpoint to the “nothing to hide” argument, by the way, and if that’s your mantra then I demand that you read this.)

It is for these reasons that I wish to tentatively declare 2009 as the Year of the Thought Criminal, because these people will be the only ones worth placing any hope on. They are the people sneaking past the censors, foiling government inspectors, and reporting all things hidden. They are the hackers, reporters, intellectuals, and gatekeepers who safeguard our minds so that we may use them to wander in whatever direction we see fit. They are anyone who actually gives a damn.

There’s a story floating around that says a frog will allow itself to be boiled alive if it is put in a pot of cold water slowly heated. If it’s dropped in a boiling pot, it will jump out. A clichéd slippery slope argument, for sure, but there exists no better imagery to illustrate my point.

My question to you is this: are we the unsuspecting frog? Could you comfortably stand naked before the eyes of your government?

That future might be nearer than we think.