Enrichment

“Internet Privacy & Censorship

In 2006, an organisation known as Reporters Without Borders (or Reporters sans frontieres), an independent Parisian organisation advocating the freedom of the press, published a list of countries who’s laws regarding the internet, and the rights of it’s users, are the most pervasive and repressive, and called this list Enemies of the Internet. This list is annually updated and has recorded an unsettling rise in the number of these countries from 13 in 2006 to 19 in 2014.

In 2013, the RWB published a special report on Internet surveillance include two new lists:

• State Enemies of the Internet, the countries whose governments are actively involved in the pervasive surveillance of news providers which results in grave violations of freedom of information and human rights.
• Corporate Enemies of the Internet, companies that sell products that are liable to be used by governments to violate human rights and freedom of information.

(see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surveillance_by_country & en.rsf.org)

Among the countries listed as Enemies of the Internet, the most obvious and extreme cases would include China, who’s surveillance is known to be extremely invasive and who’s censorship includes such restrictions as any possible reference to time-travel, and North Korea, an unparalleled example of a government that controls it’s population’s every medium of communication, using the internet and any other form of media as propaganda exclusively. However, the list also includes two nations that are, perhaps, less obvious, considering that they are both noted for stating that they are, in fact, democracies dedicated to the preservation and defence of the personal and civil rights and liberties of any and all of their citizens.

The United States was founded upon ideals that would later perfectly suit the needs of their citizens for unrestricted, private internet use, as the protection of the freedom of speech and of expression against federal, state, and local government censorship were written into the First Amendment of the United States Constitution (a constitution that, ironically, was meant to be rewritten to suit the political and social climate every decade, per Thomas Jefferson’s instruction). Yet, as recently as early 2013, the NSA, one of the US’s most recognised and respected intelligence agencies, was the cause of a major controversy that was first brought to light by computer professional Edward Snowden, having accumulated thousands of documents via their mass surveillance programs and breaching the confidence of internet users.

(see http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1933 and harvardnsj.org/2013/07/the-nsa-surveillance-controversy-how-the-ratchet-effect-can-impact-anti-terrorism-laws/)

Arguably, the British government makes greater emphasis on it’s dedication to the preservation of the civil rights and liberties of the British citizen than the US does for it’s own, making the fact that the NSA whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, considers the UK to be worse than the Americans in this respect either far more surprising, or considerably less so, depending on your experiences. The most prominent of the most recent examples of pervasive surveillance and censorship in British government may actually be their involvement with NSAs PRISM operation (as mentioned above), wherein an official statement specifies that only American citizens were exempt from the surveillance measures, meaning that the British government actually collaborated with a foreign power with the knowledge that the rights and freedoms of their own citizens were being violated by their own actions. This situation is somewhat reminiscent of an earlier recent scandal wherein the phones of hundreds were bugged by the efforts of News of the World editor, Clive Goodman, resulting in the unjust distress of dozens of innocent victims, the ruining of many careers, and the closing of one of the most successful newspaper companies in the country, the News of the World. It seems that the Information Age has provided new opportunities for otherwise respectable figures to exploit British citizens, as they have done for centuries.

The governments of the UK and the USA are not only partners in crime but also individually the greatest hypocrites of the modern age, democracies taking power out of their citizens’ hands and using the latest innovations to enforce their total control of the population, despite laws that have been put in place to prevent any such violations. However, Reporters Without Borders claims that they do not believe that the governments are strictly responsible:

“The mass surveillance methods employed in these three countries [the UK, the US and India – another new addition to the list] are all the more intolerable because they will be used and indeed are already being used by authoritarians countries such as Iran, China, Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to justify their own violations of freedom of information. How will so-called democratic countries will able to press for the protection of journalists if they adopt they very practices they are criticizing authoritarian regimes for?”

(see http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/uk-branded-an-enemy-of-the-internet-for-the-first-time-by-reporters-without-borders-9196571.html, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2337377/Britons-ARE-spied-surveillance-agencies-GCHQ-using-phone-records-online-data-gleaned-US-government-snoop-citizens.html and http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-431739/Ex-News-World-royal-editor-jailed-royal-phone-bug-plot.html)

On a personal note, I believe that if either government are intending on turning either country into anything even remotely similar to North Korea or the Peoples Republic of China, they should just tell the populations and see how they react.