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. . .Compared to those happy early
days, most of what I read is fearful and/or angry. As a Russian
commentator observed back when, the Internet did indeed threaten tyrants,
because it provided internal challengers with information that both exposed the
malefactions of the regime and also enabled the opposition to plan their
actions. If you talk to Iranian anti-regime activists and ask them what
they most need, they will usually reply that they need secure communications
with one another, along with access to detailed, reliable reporting on their
own country.
However, as that smart Russian
commentator observed, the same Internet that threatened the tyrants could also
be used to suppress the promised wide-open exchange of facts and ideas. And so
it has. The world’s most effective oppressors, those in places like Iran,
Russia, North Korea, China and Cuba, have all developed technology to isolate
their citizens from the Net, and to inundate their cyberspace with the regime’s
own disinformation. No doubt they have helped each other, as free and
open communication threatens them all.
. . .
All that is part of the ongoing war
against America, but that’s only a part of what disturbs us, what has changed
our feelings about the Internet. Our current upset has more to do with
the spying on us by our own government, and by our own corporations. We
unaccountably continue to cherish privacy, even though there hasn’t been any
for a long time. Some of us have not assimilated the unpleasant fact that our
emails, even those we believe to have been “encrypted,” are public documents,
available to anyone with the requisite skills to read them. And there are
lots of people with the requisite skills, ranging from broadcasters to
blackmailers. Is there a remedy? I don’t think so. I think we
simply need to shut up, until the day comes when a tough-minded judge slaps the
snoopers with hefty fines and maybe even prison time.
It doesn’t seem to me that that day
will come very soon. It seems instead that freedom of speech protects the
bad guys along with the good, and it is up to us to protect ourselves as best
we can.
Meanwhile, we must use the Internet
as the weapon it has always been, and count on the bad guys’ entirely justified
fear of it. They’ve got more to fear than we do.
Read the rest here.
And then there are ongoing issues with Facebook; here’s the latest on “privacy lapses."
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