Those Who Say “No” to Web 2.0

On May 10, Google shareholders rejected a proposal that would censor the Chinese edition of their search engine. This was heralded as a great triumph for freedom of speech, particularly by Patrick Doherty, a representative of the New York City Pension Fund, which submitted the resolution.¹ Doherty was greeted with applause by several hundred shareholders when he made the case for standing up to authoritarian regimes like China. Afterwards he called it “a moral victory.”²

And why shouldn’t he have? Why should one of America’s most successful and innovative corporate giants be allowed to facilitate China’s Orwellian control over information, such as the Golden Shield Project (note: China actually calls the people they hire to censor information Big mamas). This isn’t your typical brute-force censorship either, like those videos of book burnings in Stalinist Russia. This is something wholly different:

Old style censorship is being replaced with a massive, ubiquitous architecture of surveillance: the Golden Shield. Ultimately, the aim is to integrate a gigantic online database with an all-encompassing surveillance network – incorporating speech and face recognition, closed-circuit television, smart cards, credit records, and Internet surveillance technologies.³

So yes, I suppose Google should be applauded for being such audacious mavericks in deciding to not censor their search engine in China. Probably just as much as Teddy Roosevelt deserved to be the inspiration for the Teddy Bear, after deciding to not shoot a confined bear at a “photo opportunity” hunt.

In spite of the celebrations and ballyhoo over Google’s supposed championing of civil liberties, their decision to ban YouTube videos that allegedly insulted the Thai King three days later went virtually unnoticed. Perhaps the irony was lost on them or, more likely, Google simply doesn’t give a shit about free speech. Though, to be fair, they did decide to not take down two other videos that had angered Thailand’s military government. Google is evidently big fans of Montesquieu.

So where is Americuh in all of this? You might say that journalistic freedom was but a mere illusion after the media ever so willingly became the Colmes to the military’s Hannity during the 2003 Iraq invasion or when the media was complicit in supporting the Bush administration’s claims of WMDs in Iraq—and you’d mostly be right.

Today, though, I read an article in The New York Times’ The Lede titled Pentagon Blocks MySpace and YouTube. In R. L. Stine fashion, if your reaction to this was, “They hadn’t already?,” you can stop reading this article since there probably won’t be any new revelations for you. If, however, you’re filled with a creeping sense of suspicion and outright indignation (as I was), then continue!

Apparently, the Defense Department has decided to block thirteen websites from its network, which it dubs NIPRNet, because use of those sites “impacts [their] official DoD network and bandwidth ability, while posing a significant operational security challenge.” The pdf copy of this celebrates the blandly titled “Restricted Access to Internet Entertainment Sites Across DoD Networks” with a beautiful purple arrow labeled “FREEDOM’S FRONTIER!”

The full list of banned websites includes these web addresses: youtube.com, 1.fm, pandora.com, photobucket.com, myspace.com, live365.com, hi5.com, metacafe.com, mtv.com, ifilm.com, blackplanet.com, stupidvideos.com and filecabi.com.

This isn’t the first time the DoD has targetted soldiers’ Internet rights, though. Last month they initiated a new policy, Regulation 530-1, that requires soldiers to consult with a commanding officer before posting information in a public forum. Now, in addition to censoring soldiers’ rights to freely blog and post on forums as they choose, the DoD is also focusing on Web 2.0-oriented websites—websites built on community-based content creation. Instead of letting soldiers post about, oh, I don’t know, what’s actually hapenning, since our own news media refuses to do so, the US military is building up its own channel on YouTube to release “official” videos of the Iraq war.

The US military has continued to justify all its decisions based on “operational security concerns.” From a far-right standpoint, I can understand what the argument is: “If you let soldiers post videos and blog freely, it can potentially threaten their security if confidential information happens to be revealed.” This argument is also ludicrous. For some reason, I have a suspicion that if the insurgency had Internet, they probably wouldn’t be browsing YouTube or Blogger, but I have been wrong on occasion.

But how is that argument any different from China’s? Obviously, China’s censorship is far more egregious—no one is saying it isn’t—but China’s Communist Party needs its Great Firewall to ensure its own “operational security” (ironically, Marxist websites are banned from their Internet)—or so they claim. Before the firewall was put in place, Chinese protesters were using instant messaging and forums to coordinate plans for future protests. Imagine if a big enough protest threatened the stability of the government? The Chinese economy would collapse overnight and it would be sheer pandemonium.

Some will try and make the case that the big difference is military, rather than civil, censorship. But when military censorship inherently promotes civil censorship, especially given that the US media has already been co-opted by the military (and aside from just anti-Bush examples, NATO did this as well during the Serbian and Kosovo wars). The only other reliable source for first-hand news in Iraq are the soldiers and what better way to promote their journalistic power (and the journalistic power of civilians, too) than through Web 2.0? It’s no wonder then that the US military is focusing specifically on Web 2.0-esque sites as their censorship target—they’re the ones that carry the greatest potential to threaten a codified “message” to send back home about the war, which is why the US military is now taking over the task via YouTube.

The fact of the matter is, our military was designed to be a civilian military. Now, I don’t mean this to suggest that our military should be like the Minute Men (the ones during the Revolution or the psychopaths now a days), what I mean is that, at the top of the military system is not a General, but a civilian, our Commander in Chief (albeit a retarded one). When the President forgets that he’s not a soldier—and we can all recall that from the hilariously disastrous Mission Accomplished photo op—the danger of military censorship poses an even greater threat: the threat that it will creep up into civil censorship (as it already has with US media self-censorship). Moreover, what kind of message does it send to the rest of the world, and particularly the people whose freedom we’re allegedly fighting for, when we’re actively censoring our own soldiers’ right to free speech?

An ironic one, not unlike Google’s, but I think it’s lost on both.

1. Google shareholders vote down proposal on censorship, New York Times, May 10, 2007 ↩
2. Out of Chaos, Order. Or So Google Says., New York Times, May 11, 2007 ↩
3. China’s Golden Shield: Corporations and the Development of Surveillance Technology in the People’s Republic of China, Oct 2001 ↩