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Internet censorship ahoy!

Posted by Ampersand | June 2nd, 2003

Weather head reports on a Pennsylvania law I hadn’t heard about. The law purports to be aimed at child porn websites - but the way it’s applied is horrifying.

You see, rather than aiming at child porn producers, the law targets internet service providers like AOL and Earthlink.

What it boils down to is, the state AG can issue secret orders for Internet providers to deny access to any web site; he doesn’t have to produce any evidence of kiddie porn (and after using this law 300 times, he hasn’t produced any—incredibly, the state argues that if they showed the pictures or even mentioned where they could be found, they’d be helping to distribute pornography), and there’s no judicial review. It’s a “voluntary” system, in the sense that if the providers comply, they won’t be hit with a court order. Apparently, everyone has chosen to comply.

It gets worse. There’s no way for internet providers to block access to just one URL, like www.filth.com. In order to comply with a government request to block access to filth.com, the ISP has to block access to filth.com’s entire IP address, which may include dozens or hundreds of websites that have nothing to do with filth.com, but just happen to pay the same company to host their webpage. Take my website, for instance; amptoons is hosted by jennworks.com, which in turn is hosted by successfulhosting.com. Successfulhosting hosts thousands of other websites; I have no idea what their websites are, or what their content is. But if Pennsylvania’s attorney general decides he doesn’t like just one of those websites, then all successfulhosting sites - including this one - will become unavailable in Pennsylvania.

As Weather head says: “Thus, for every (alleged) evil site that’s blocked, hundreds of others may be blocked as well, and the people affected by this have no recourse (they can’t even find out that they’ve been blocked); nor do any Net-surfers have a clue that the sites aren’t just out of order.”

Weather head goes on to make an interesting general argument about the Intenet; he thinks the internet is more susceptible to censorship than traditional media:

Recently I’ve been reading the ferociously pro-good-old-paper writings of underground publishers like Fred Woodworth and Violet Jones, who believe that the trend of more and more information being available only on the Net is a serious threat to free speech, and they’re right. Jones describes the Net as a highly centralized system subject to corporate control, and the first time I read that, I thought “Well, that’s a technical misunderstanding—it’s decentralized by design.” But most of the access points and nearly all of the infrastructure are now controlled by telecommunications companies of disturbing size (I mentioned MCI/WorldCom earlier, a particularly ambitious, corrupt, and politically connected bunch who are now making hay in Iraq), and typical Internet users rely on jobs, school, or libraries for access—venues that are already subject to censorship, with no way to tell what has been blocked or why. Books and newspapers, on the other hand, don’t require you to buy any hardware to read them; they don’t change their content retroactively; and if a bookstore owner can’t or won’t carry them, you have some idea who to complain to.

It’s an interesting point. On the other hand, old media is very susceptible to the informal censorship of wealth; it’s all very well to say that a newspaper can be read without hardware, but a newspaper can’t be printed and distributed without hardware. And even if you do print it, the distribution networks are virtually impossible to break into. And expensive as a printing press is, it’s nothing compared to how much money it takes to break into radio or TV broadcasting.

At least the hardware required to publish on the internet is affordable (relatively speaking).

I recommend reading Weather Head’s entire post - it’s interesting stuff.

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9 Responses to “Internet censorship ahoy!”

  1. Surfing the Tsunami (Kaiko'o) Writes:
    June 2nd, 2003 at 8:59 am

    Pennsylvannia Censorship
    The Center for Democracy and Technology has a chilling article here about a Pennsylvannia law restricting the Free speech of everyone on the internet. Seems that the PA. AG can unilaterally and secretly declare any web site as obscene (child pornograph…

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  2. Long story; short pier. Writes:
    June 2nd, 2003 at 10:55 am

    The samizdata fuck-off.
    The FCC, defying the will of 98% of the thousands upon thousands of American who wrote and faxed and emailed

    This comment was written by Long story; short pier..
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  3. Shakti Writes:
    June 2nd, 2003 at 1:04 pm

    Oh shit. I didn’t know about this. And the FCC just relaxed its regulations about media ownership too.

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  4. Eli Writes:
    June 2nd, 2003 at 2:48 pm

    Hi - thanks for the link. I was wondering if maybe I was the only one who hadn’t heard of this yet, but apparently not.

    I should clarify one part of my post. It’s not necessarily true that a gag order on one web site will knock out *all* the sites hosted by the same company, as in your successfulhosting.com example; even a medium-small hosting company will have maybe a half-dozen IP addresses, each corresponding to one server; how many sites are run from each server depends on how much capacity they require. Blah, blah, blah… the basic problem with the law is still as stated, though.

    Also, I should have pointed out more clearly that if your site were targeted, it would probably be inaccessible from many points outside Pennsylvania too. The AG is sending these orders not just to small local ISPs, but to big companies like WorldCom, which have never had any reason to divide up their networks along state borders… so it would be difficult to impossible for them to only block viewers in PA; in order to comply with state law they have to either reconfigure their whole operation, or apply the block to large areas of the country. (This is all as per the CDT report, I’m just summarizing– I’m a programmer but not a telecom expert.)

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  5. PinkDreamPoppies Writes:
    June 2nd, 2003 at 3:56 pm

    I didn’t know about the Pennsylvania thing, but I’ve always thought that the Internet was very vulnerable to censorship, perhaps moreso than print media.

    Most everyone who’s read “1984″ remembers the scene in which O’Brian drops the infamous picture of the politicians down a memory hole while he’s torturing our protagonist (whose name has slipped down my own private memory hole). This scene always bothered me because it seemed inconceivable to me that the government could delete that piece of information considering that it had been printed on a newspaper and distributed to people. There was too much margin of error that a single newspaper might survive somewhere and be seized on by the Resistance.

    On the other hand, with the internet such obliteration is simple. All of those New York Times articles on the web are fully editable at any moment, making revisionism quite simple.

    I’m not meaning to sound like a conspiracy theorist or an alarmist, but the ability of information on the internet to change or disappear entirely with a few keypresses is worrisome.

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  6. Eli Writes:
    June 2nd, 2003 at 4:03 pm

    Also - re: your comments on barriers to publishing. Yes, distribution is a nasty bottleneck in the print world (as cartoonists probably know better than anyone), both financially and in terms of the potential for abuse - as witness the 1963 case where the state did exactly the same thing they’re doing now on the Net, by asking distributors to “voluntarily” enforce a blacklist. This was ruled unconstitutional, but the legal challenge to the Net case may not be as straightforward — the Web does raise serious questions about jurisdiction in obscenity, libel, etc. and judges may not want to open those worm cans.

    The way distribution has been homogenized through the ISBN system should also be a cause for concern (this is *the* big issue for the zine publishers I mentioned): it’s basically impossible to get distribution without an ISBN (though, ironically, with computers it would be fairly easy for distributors to track inventory just by title and author), and these numbers are issued through a single authority — a private firm under government contract — whose policies are not open to public inquiry or debate. Unfortunately, say anything bad about bar-codes and you get lumped in with the “Satan’s putting 666 on my driver’s license” crowd.

    Distribution via the Net is certainly more convenient. I don’t think it’s that simple, though. The vast majority of people putting content online are relying on someone else’s hosting service, either rented or free; that’s a lot different than paying a printer to print your magazine, because a printer can’t make the content disappear after it’s published. Setting up a truly independent server requires a considerable hardware investment, and the people controlling the network backbone can still shut you down. In those ways, electronic “publishing” really has more in common with broadcast than print.

    But the issue isn’t really whether computers themselves make everything worse. It’s that there’s a trend in many areas toward streamlining and automation, in ways that often eliminate transparency. And the potential for abuse in a system is often directly proportional to its perceived convenience.

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  7. Daran Writes:
    June 29th, 2006 at 9:18 am

    The above comment (#7) looks like spam. It quotes a previous post in this thread, without comment. A bot could easily be programmed to do that. The link is to a violent porn site

    If the poster really is human, then they should say so, and make a substantive point. Though I can’t speak on behalf of Ampersand, I’d be very surprised if he would be willing to have this kind of link on his site.

    [The comment Daran refers to has been deleted. Thanks, Daran! --Amp]

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  8. Daran Writes:
    June 29th, 2006 at 9:21 am

    …whose name has slipped down my own private memory hole…

    Winston Smith.

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  9. RonF Writes:
    July 3rd, 2006 at 10:05 am

    On the other hand, old media is very susceptible to the informal censorship of wealth; it’s all very well to say that a newspaper can be read without hardware, but a newspaper can’t be printed and distributed without hardware.

    H. L. Mencken said it best: “Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.”

    This comment was written by RonF.
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