---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 6 May 2000 12:07:51 -0700 (PDT)
From: Franklin Wayne Poley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [BCPolitics] FC: Asian governments are scrambling to control
the Net --Sydney MH (fwd)
This is why the recent exchange between Jose and Dr. Jones on BCPOLITICS
is so important. Even if Jones is a phoney as Jose says, his message may
not be. Jones is saying that his computer technology is advanced far
beyond what we think is attainable now. He posted last year that he had
used a CONVERSATIONAL PROGRAM on list discussions on occasion. If that
isn't possible now, it soon will be. Kurzweil (1999) says it will take
about 20 years until such programs are available. Even so, what does it do
to EDD (Electronic Direct Democracy) to have "Chatterbots" working away on
the net disguised as real people?!!
FWP.
On Fri, 5 May 2000, Party of Citizens wrote:
> Whoever controls the internet of the near future will control world
> governments as well. Internet is the blank slate on which the new
> constitutions of the nations will be written.
> Zandu Goldbar
>
> * Party of Citizens is dedicated to leading the new CITIZENS' ASSEMBLY
> which will hold the reins of power over the Victoria Parliament in
> B.C. within 5-10 years *
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Fri, 05 May 2000 14:39:53 -0500
> From: Declan McCullagh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: FC: Asian governments are scrambling to control the Net --Sydney MH
>
> *******
>
> Date: Wed, 03 May 2000 09:08:14 -0700
> From: Debbie Roth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: Declan McCullagh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Sydney Morning Herald: Web of Intrigue
>
> [...]
>
> Web of Intrigue
> by Louise Williams
> Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
> 29th April 2000
>
> Asian governments are scrambling to control cyberspace, where rebels can say
> whatever they like,writes Louise Williams.
>
> INFORMATION is power, or so the enduring dictators of history have
> understood. The authoritarian, or quasi-authoritarian regimes, of the
> post-colonial era in Asia have understood well the relationship between
> control over information and political power. In so many of Asia's capitals
> - from Beijing to Jakarta, from Rangoon to Hanoi, the scene was much the
> same. In obscure back rooms, rows of desks were lined up, their surfaces
> rubbed smooth by years of diligent effort, as the faceless agents of
> authoritarian states dutifully pored over newspapers and magazines.
>
> Carefully, the swarms of censors cut out "subversive" articles from abroad,
> one by one, or bent low over "offensive" captions and photographs and
> blacked them out by hand. They laboured over their newspapers, too, erasing
> hints of rebellion and allusion to unpalatable truths tucked within the
> reams of propaganda which served as their societies' only sources of
> information.
>
> When the Soeharto regime came to power in Indonesia in the mid-1960s it
> shipped 10,000 of its artists, writers, unionists and activists off to a
> barren, isolated island called Buru where it imposed total censorship.
> Inmates, many of whom spent more than a decade eking out a living from the
> poor soil, were denied reading material and access to the tools of writing -
> pens, pencils, paper, typewriters - so that they would be unable to transmit
> their ideas even among themselves.
>
> Take a leap forward three decades to last May when the IT Security Unit of
> Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs quietly wandered into the files of
> 200,000 private computers in what was later explained as an effort to trace
> a damaging virus.
>
> The breach was detected by a private computer enthusiast, forcing the
> Government to announce that SingNet, the Internet arm of the largely
> state-owned telecommunications giant, SingTel, had been "wrong" to use the
> state security apparatus to conduct the scan without first seeking
> permission from individual users. Better security was promised in the
> future.
>
> But for the citizens of a nation accustomed to government intervention in
> almost every aspect of their daily lives, the scanning scare had already
> aptly demonstrated the potential for any one of their business or home
> computers to be externally monitored without their knowledge.
>
> Similarly, in 1994 an overzealous technocrat had instructed another local
> Internet provider to scan 80,000 email accounts of university researchers,
> an unlikely group to be specifically targeted in a remote hunt for
> pornographic material. Within the high-rise towers of Singapore's economic
> success sit hundreds of thousands of computers in one of the world's most
> technologically advanced nations. Recent government statistics claim 42 per
> cent of Singaporean households are linked to the Internet, and 59 per cent
> have home computers, the highest participation rate in Asia. In Australia 22
> per cent of homes have Internet access (47 per cent of them with home
> computers) and in Japan 13 per cent (42 per cent with home computers).
>
> Just completed is a nationwide broadband Internet system, Singapore One,
> delivering bedazzling at-home services such as immediate access to traffic
> speeds on any street, thanks to global positioning systems set in all the
> nation's taxis, online schools, movies on demand and live news which the
> system "remembers" and can be rewound.
>
> Conventional narrow-band Internet connections, such as the ones most of us
> use, are free, various government agencies, libraries and private companies
> offer banks of PCs to anyone who walks in off the street and regular
> community education programs are held to encourage
>
> Singaporeans to embrace the IT age.
>
> For decades Singapore has fascinated political observers with its apparently
> contradictory mix of free-wheeling market capitalism and political controls,
> with information controls to match. Tough press licensing regulations,
> internal security provisions and the use of punitive defamation laws have
> fashioned a local media which often looks and sounds like a government
> mouthpiece, and a society built around the smooth swoosh of escalators
> within expansive shopping
> malls, not the abrasive clamour of public debate.
>
> At present, the Singapore Government blocks 100 Internet sites, but admits
> this is only a token, and highly ineffective, effort to control a technology
> which is the equivalent of information chaos.
>
> The Internet is clearly the most profound challenge yet for national
> governments which have used information control as one of the key pillars to
> maintaining political power.
>
> And now, as Singapore gears up to transform its economy into one of the
> world's key IT hubs, it is proving a crucial test case for other like-minded
> regimes in the region - China, Vietnam and Malaysia, for example - as to how
> governments might handle the threat from cyberspace.
>
> Has information technology - which has taken the control of communication
> outside borders and thrown it into an anarchic global arena - effectively
> defeated censorship? As such, will the power of the remaining governments of
> the region which continue to use censorship as an important political tool
> inevitably be eroded?
>
> Or will governments be able to limit the impact of the Internet by using
> "national security" laws, building higher and higher "firewalls" or turning
> the technology back on its users, employing it as a giant surveillance
> device?
>
> Already one regional government has fallen with the help of the Internet as
> a mobilising tool for student demonstrations and a source of daily
> information: the Soeharto Government of Indonesia in May 1998.
>
> In Malaysia, opposition opinions speed across the Net; sites such as
> freeMalaysia.com offer the juiciest rumours on corrupt business deals with
> personal scandals to match.
>
> From the United States, China is bombarded with anti-Beijing propaganda on
> the Net; senior politburo members feature on mailing lists just to
> demonstrate that the tables are being turned
> on a regime which has itself specialised in propaganda. Vietnam is busy
> trying to screen all incoming and outgoing email through a central censor.
> Hanoi has bought "firewalls" designed in the US for corporate use and
> installed them across the national network. Yet in cybercafes, groups of
> computer geeks have discovered they can occasionally breach them by simply
> hitting cancel over and over again.
>
> The hermit state of Burma has responded by banning the Internet altogether,
> choosing autarchy for its already impoverished citizens over the risk
> information technology poses to the military regime.
>
> In Communist Party-controlled Laos, the official local newspaper recently
> made a serious tactical error in the battle for its readers' minds. A group
> of Lao dissidents in the US had "borrowed" the newspaper's masthead and set
> up an opposition version of the daily news, posting it on the Web. The
> Vientiane Times disowned the copycat with outraged announcements in its own
> pages, merely sending more and more curious readers off to the Internet.
>
> [...]
>
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