Will The Web We Wove Protect Us From Evil? - Page 3

In the late '80s, I was photographing a lecture at Bard College by a political scientist from a prestigious, Boston university. He spoke of the coming break-up of the Soviet Union that would, if it happened, be caused by global communication systems. The fall of that wall was no more surprising than will be the fall of the Bush Wall on our Southern border. The Soviet Union was pulled like Lenin from its' pedestals by more than just the emerging PC and the phone and fax but by its' own incompetence. Higher technology communications just got the word out better.

The Guardian provides an example in the story of a 2002 promise in writing by Yahoo to the Chinese to follow "self-regulation," declaring it would not allow the Internet publishing of "pernicious information that may jeopardize state security". In 2005, Google admitted to not allowing links to banned materials by their servers in China. The writers of messages including the words "liberty," "democracy," or "human rights" receive a warning that their message contains "forbidden language," which they must delete.

In the wake of the Tianaman Square massacre in Beijing in '89, the focus word of the demonstration was "democracy". They even sculpted a make-shift Statue of Liberty (while America considers melting the real one into border walls). Many said without access to copy machines, PCs, and, especially, fax services, the democratic movement and the world's knowledge of its violent end would not have been possible. My photograph here is from a Chinese-American demonstration in a Hudson River city in memorial to the slain and imprisoned demonstrators staged during the days of, and surrounding, the episode.

A second Internet weakness is what the OpenNet Initiative published recently. They showed that the Chinese government is succeeding in censoring the Internet. They control the companies that control the routers and, with filtering systems — which they are reporting now as increasingly sophisticated in China and in Viet Nam — messages containing certain words can be blocked. "We had the dream that the Internet would free the world, that all the dictatorships would collapse," opined Julien Pain of Reporters Without Borders. "We see it was just a dream."

Article Author: Howard Dratch

Howard writes on science, books, movies and news for Blogcritics and on his own blogs from the border of North and Central America.

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