Censorship on the internet

We all know about this, or at least most of the netizens, the censorship of the internet is big on the agenda of european governements. Be it the french idea of whitelists for free wifi acces[fr] by Christine Albanel or the germans various attempts at filtering internet traffic[de] pushed by Von der Leyen…

Those attemps have been well discussed, on other blogs[de] as well as by scientist. It’s very well known (by the politics as well[de]) that it won’t help the acknowledged goal of fighting child pornography. Not only are these not effective, but they have a high social cost, directly threatening freedom of speech and privacy rights as “collateral damage”.

If they didn’t know how to make us aware of that, they just managed to do it today:

There are various countries who are testing out such filtering software, one of them being Denmark. Obviously for the list of address to be effective, it has to be hidden. Something that doesn’t add to the transparency of the project. Such a listed leaked earlier in Sweden, with less that 1% of the sites having illegal content[en]. I can’t find the link again, but here is an amusing example of what is being filtered[en].

But the story that made me write this blog post is a different entirely. What Germany is now trying to censor is the actual reporting about those problems. I got the story from the law blog,[de] via twitter. I think the study of leaked filtering lists are very important, since they all tend to show how poor the selection is, making the argument for politics even more difficult. Well now one person linking to the list on wikileaks[de] has been searched by the german authorities and his material seized[de].

EDIT: i understood the story badly, it’s not for linking the list, it’s for linking a blog that links the list! Completement UBUÈSQUE!!

I can only cite the original blog post:

Bitte sehr: Gegen Sie zu http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Denmark:_3863_sites_on_censorship_list,_Feb_2008 , und klicken Sie mal 30 bis 40 Links aus der Liste an. Sie müssen ja nichts kaufen.

Wie bitte, Sie trauen sich nicht? Sie haben Angst, sich strafbar zu machen? Haben sie denn das Grundgesetz nicht gelesen? Artikel 5 “Jeder hat das Recht, seine Meinung in Wort, Schrift und Bild frei zu äußern und zu verbreiten und sich aus allgemein zugänglichen Quellen ungehindert zu unterrichten.

In this sense: La liberté d’expression ne s’use que si on ne s’en sert pas

Today once again, i am an angry citizen. I’m wondering when the politics who gouvern me will cease to fail me…

Ideas for a political blog

Parlement Europeen (Strasbourg)

Originally uploaded by PizzaDeBarr

I’m more and more concerned about the evolution of our democracy. It’s not like I believe there will be something awful that will happen anytime soon. It’s just that I am wondering how I, or any other citizen here, could use new media and possibilities to somehow make it better, one small step at a time.

thanks to 96dpi i stumbled upon this site and i was wondering if one could not push the idea further:

Create a blog (possibly with multiple authors).

For every measure that is taken either in your national parliament, or in the European parliament, that you feel you have a strong opinion on, write the delegate that is representing you an open letter that you post on that blog. In that open letter, explain the problem, if he took a stance on the problem (that is the one you also have) remind him of it. Ask him to vote in your sense for that motion/law/decision or to motivate why he will not. Ask him if you can publish that motivation, if he agrees publish it.

Then make a blog post about how the decision passed, and if the information is available, how your delegates did vote.

At the next election where he is presenting himself again, draw a balance of how much he respected his election promises. Ask him and any other candidate to take a clear stance on the matters.

The idea is to make elected persons more accountable for the decision they are taking. Do you think it would help? If yes anybody who would like to join me on such a project?