The internet has upended journalism. It’s no longer limited to long-established press outlets known for printing physical newspapers and periodicals. It can be performed by anyone, using a vast amount of resources, including search engines, public records requests, and the occasional application of shoe leather.
The First Amendment provides protection to these endeavors. Except when it doesn’t. Well-meaning legislators seeking to protect journalists use older definitions of journalism to exclude bloggers and freelancers. Some judges make the same mistake as well, deciding the word “journalist” only covers people trafficking in ink and paper, rather than bits and pixels.
Nevada shield laws don’t protect online-only news sources unless the websites are members of the Nevada Press Association. That’s the view of First Judicial District Judge James Wilson, who determined yesterday that Sam Toll, editor of an online news site, must reveal his story sources to developer and brothel owner, Lance Gilman, whom Toll has criticized. […]
Wilson said that “because Toll does not print the Storey Teller, the Storey Teller is not a newspaper, and therefore the news media privilege is not available to Toll under the ‘reporter of a newspaper’ provision of (Nevada law).”
According to the court’s interpretation [PDF] of the law, Sam Toll is only shielded from discovery requests for anything that occurred past August 2017, which is when Toll became a member of the Nevada Press Association. Seeing as the Nevada Press Association was willing to extend credentials to Toll and his site, it would stand to reason his work prior to that date was recognized as journalism. Unfortunately, the court feels the outdated definition in the state’s shield law excludes Toll from prior coverage.
Toll publishes his articles on the internet and not in any other format. He does not print his articles. The Legislature did not define “Newspaper” in NRS 49.275 or elsewhere in Chapter 49. The Legislature has defined “newspaper” in several other chapters of the NRS. It appears that under all of the statutory definitions a newspaper must be printed. For example, NRS Chapter 238, which relates to legal notices and advertisements, in 238.020, defines daily, triweekly, semiweekly, weekly and semimonthly newspapers. All of the definitions in NRS 238.020, and apparently throughout the Nevada Revised Statutes, include that a newspaper is printed.
The shield law was enacted in 1969, when printing was the only means of distribution. Its only other update followed six years later. The Reporters Committee for Press Freedom has a comprehensive rundown of the law and its applications, but this appears to be the first time the shield law has been discussed in the context of an online-only publication.
This lack of precedent hurts Toll and others like him. The state offers protections to journalists and their sources, but hasn’t addressed the issue in more than 40 years. Digging around Nevada statutes to define “newspaper” is forest-for-the-trees thinking which results in the completely expected outcome: a newspaper is printed. But journalism isn’t limited to newspapers and it hasn’t been for a long time. The state also protects news broadcasters who don’t offer anything in print. The court’s failure to consider an online news source as the digital equivalent of either of the news sources is short-sighted and it’s going to keep causing problems until the state’s courts or legislators fix this.
Beijing – A country that turns grey before wealthy is the dilemma facing those who reside in the leadership compound of Zhongnanhai, just off Tiananmen Square.
A demographic timebomb is ticking and while it is primed to go off after the current leadership in China retires, it is a scenario that could undermine the economy and political stability long before the predicted detonation.
Despite the abolition of the one-child policy, in 2015, the birth rate last year was 10.94 per thousand, the lowest since 1949, when Mao Zedong took power. In 2017 it was 12.43 per thousand, data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed. The number of babies born in 2018 fell by two million to 15.23 million. In some areas the birth rate plunged. In Qingdao, a city in eastern Shandong province – one of China’s most populous regions – births between January and November decreased by 21 per cent to just over 81,000 compared to the previous year.
For decades most families were limited to one child to control population growth. This policy was often enforced with abortions and harsh financial penalties. A gender imbalance occurred. About 117 boys were born for every 100 girls in 2015 as parents believed males would better secure their welfare in old age.
But the onset of an ageing society and a shrinking workforce saw this policy relaxed in 2015 when couples were allowed two children. But his has not gone to plan. Rising and stratospheric education, health and housing costs make it difficult for couples to afford even one child, let alone two. Also living arrangements mean that many couples have to look after both sets of parents, often in small apartments.
Traditionally, care for the elderly is the responsibility of the children, particularly in a Confucian society where respect for elders is part of the social fabric. Not only is it part of tradition, it is the law. There is a legal requirement for children to look after their parents’ “spiritual and physical needs”. The rising numbers of those classified in the ranks of the elderly will put an unprecedented strain on the ties that hold society together.
China’s workforce – those aged between 16 and 59 – was 897.3 million last year, a 4.7 million drop from 2017. The workforce is on track to decline by as much as 23 per cent by 2050.
China is ageing more rapidly than almost any country in recent history, according to the United Nations. A serious labor shortage will be the consequence.
There were about 222 million people aged 60 years or older as of 2015, about 17 per cent of the nation’s entire population, currently 1.3 billion people. This is expected to peak at 1.4 billion in 2029. The decline will set in immediately after that according to a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences study released in January. The population decline means less domestic consumption, and thus rapidly slowing economic growth. Spending will have to be re-evaluated by new financial strains on the government. The consequences of this will be felt far beyond China’s borders. It was Chinese spending that helped the West avoid an even steeper downturn after the 2008-9 crash.
A baby boom under Mao was followed by more than three decades of a one-child policy, formally introduced in 1979, that created distortions in the economy. True, many poor people in the countryside, where the policy was less strictly enforced, had more than one child. The wealthy, traditionally in the cities, had one. These were the inheritors. That generation of first wealth was passed down to one child instead of dividing it up among siblings. Wealth was concentrated in the coastal areas. This created enormous distortions. Disparity between rich and poor is obvious. The richest 1 percent of households own 30 percent of China’s wealth, according to a Peking University study.
China has relied on government credit to boost its economy. As the population ages, the government will need to divert a good chunk of that funding to take care of the elderly.
In one sense, it is testament to the country’s growing prosperity and new opportunities for women they prioritize careers over raising children and shun traditional roles.
This is already apparent, though not in the government, still exclusively male. But women are outperforming men in education and the workplace. More women than men attend universities, despite the gender imbalance. At least 40 percent of Chinese GDP is attributable to women – the highest proportion in the world. Some 7 in 10 Chinese mothers work outside the home and 80 percent of all female self-made billionaires, globally, are Chinese.
A society undergoing such profound change is ripe for instability.
There are sleepless nights in Zhongnanhai.
Tom Clifford is a freelance journalist and can be reached at: cliffordtomsan@hotmail.com.
The U.S. State Department is offering to pay up to a million dollars each for two projects “that counter the rise of anti-Semitism” in Europe and Central Asia. The State Department uses a new definition of anti-Semitism that includes criticisms of Israel.
The projects will be funded through two State Department offices: the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor and the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. The anti-Semitism envoy position was created through 2004 legislation over the objection of the State Department. All four such envoys have been Israel partisans.
The objective of the new projects, according to the announcement of the program, is to address anti-Semitism abroad that is manifested in several ways, including “the use of hateful or inflammatory speech in public discourse, traditional media and online.” The announcement does not specify what language will be considered “hateful or inflammatory speech.” (In the U.S., the First Amendment prohibits the censorship of free speech.)
Special Anti-Semitism Envoy Hannah Rosenthal adopted the new Israel-centric definition of anti-Semitism in 2009. The formulation had been created by Israeli minister Natan Sharansky.
The new projects will “include training law enforcement to adequately and holistically respond to hate crimes from a legal, social, and community perspective; and to better equip police and prosecutors to engage effectively with local Jewish populations.”
The grants will be available to both nonprofit organizations and for-profit, commercial businesses. Organizations winning the grants may be allowed to keep aspects of their identity secret.
The current Anti-Semitism Envoy is Elan Carr, who ran for Congress in 2014 with the promise that he would be “a reliable vote for Israel.” Carr, who was backed by billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, said he visits Israel every year.
Russia is not seeking to erect a Chinese-style “great firewall” with new legislation on the ‘sovereign internet’ or otherwise regulate the web, Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev has said.
The bill, introduced to the State Duma in December, envisions a set of measures to allow the ‘Runet’ – the Russian part of the internet – to operate autonomously in case of a global web shutdown or a cut-off of Russian IP addresses from it.
The legislation prompted speculation that the Russian government was seeking to regulate and censor the web – or even create a secluded one of its own. Such fears are unsubstantiated and the goal of the bill is entirely different, Medvedev said on Friday while speaking to users of Vkontakte online.
“Certainly, we won’t have Chinese-style regulations. And I’ll tell you more, even in China, such regulation does not often yield the results it was designed for,” Medvedev said. “Moreover, we are not even seeking regulation. No firewall will emerge here.”
The optimum scenario regarding internet regulation is to have an international mechanism of sorts, Medvedev believes, but the emergence of such a system – or a convention at least – appears to belong to the future.
“The overwhelming majority of the keys to regulate [the internet] is located at one single country – the United States of America,” Medvedev stated. “The technology, which has become universal, which is used by billions of people, is largely regulated by a single country. That’s not very good actually.”
The legislation was initially drafted in response to a new US cyber strategy that accuses Russia, along with China, Iran, and North Korea, of using the web to “undermine” its ‘democracy’ and economy. The strategy also threatens a strong response against those who dare to conduct cyber activities against the US.
“We must protect our interests, not to switch off anything ourselves, but to prevent us from getting cut off. That is quite possible,” the prime minister stated.
“The power of the communists, wherever that power flourishes, depends upon their ability to suppress and destroy the free institutions that stand against them. They pick them off one by one: the political parties, the trade unions, the churches, the schools, the universities, the trade associations, even the sporting clubs and the kindergartens. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is meant to be a declaration to the world that this kind of conquest from within will not in the future take place amongst us.” — March 28, 1949, Lester Pearson, External Affairs Minister, House of Commons
With NATO turning 70 next week it’s a good occasion to revisit the creation of a military alliance operating under the stated principle that an “attack against one ally is considered as an attack against all allies.” Now encompassing 29 member states, the north Atlantic alliance was instigated by US, British and Canadian officials.
Formally, NATO was the West’s response to an aggressive Soviet Union, but the notion that the US, or even Western Europe, was threatened by the Soviet Union after World War II is laughable. Twenty-five million people in the Soviet Union lost their lives in the war while the US came out of WWII much stronger than when they entered it. After the destruction of WWII, the Soviets were not interested in fighting the US and its allies, which Canadian and US officials admitted privately. In April 1945 Canada’s ambassador to Russia, Dana Wilgress, concluded that “the interests of the Soviet privileged class are bound up with the maintenance of a long period of peace.” The Soviet elite, the ambassador continued in an internal memo, was “fearful of the possibility of attack from abroad” and “obsessed with problems of security.” Wilgress believed the Soviets wanted a post-war alliance with the UK to guarantee peace in Europe (with a Soviet sphere in the East and a UK-led West.) Internally, US officials came to similar conclusions.
Rather than a defence against possible Russian attack, NATO was partly conceived as a reaction to growing socialist sentiment in Western Europe. During WWII self-described communists opposed Mussolini in Italy, fought the fascists in Greece and resisted the Nazi occupation of France. As a result, they had a great deal of prestige after the war, unlike the wealth-holders and church officials who backed the fascists. If not for US/British interference, communists, without Moscow’s support, would probably have taken power in Greece and won the 1948 election in Italy. In France the Communist Party won 30 percent of the first post-war vote, filling a number of ministries in a coalition government.
At the time of Italy’s first post-war election, prominent Canadian diplomat Escott Reid, explained that “the whole game of the Russians is obviously to conquer without armed attack.” For his part, Pearson decried an “attempt at a complete Russian conquest of Italy by constitutional or extra-constitutional means” and described class struggle by workers as a “new and sinister kind of danger, indirect aggression.”
US officials were equally concerned. George Kennan, the top US government policy planner at the time of NATO’s formation, considered “the communist danger in its most threatening form as an internal problem that is of western society.” For his part NATO commander Dwight D. Eisenhower explained: “One of the great and immediate uses of the [NATO] military forces we are developing is to convey a feeling of confidence to exposed populations, a confidence which will make them sturdier, politically, in their opposition to Communist inroads.”
NATO planners feared a weakening of self-confidence among Western Europe’s elite and the widely held belief that communism was the wave of the future. Tens of thousands of North American troops were stationed in Western Europe to strengthen the Western European elite’s confidence to face growing left-wing parties and movements. Apparently, “Secret anti-Communist NATO protocols” committed alliance countries’ intelligence agencies to preventing communist parties from gaining power. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, information surfaced regarding groups the CIA and MI6 organized to “stay-behind” in case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. No invasion took place, of course. Instead, NATO’s Secret Armies notes: “The real and present danger in the eyes of the secret war strategists in Washington and London were the at-times numerically strong Communist parties in the democracies of Western Europe. Hence the network in the total absence of a Soviet invasion took up arms in numerous countries and fought a secret war against the political forces of the left. The secret armies… were involved in a whole series of terrorist operations and human rights violations that they wrongly blamed on the Communists in order to discredit the left at the polls.”
Informally known as “Operation Gladio”, these right- wing “stay behind” groups were overseen by NATO’s Office of Security. A Spanish paper reported, in November 1990, “The Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe (SHAPE), directing organ of NATO’s military apparatus, coordinated the actions of Gladio, according to the revelations of Gladio Secretary General Manfred Wörner during a reunion with the NATO ambassadors of the 16 allied nations.” At the time the European Parliament condemned Operation Gladio and requested an investigation, which hasn’t been undertaken.
Canada was one of two NATO countries omitted from Daniele Ganser’s NATO’s Secret Armies (Iceland was the other). No researcher has tied the two together, but the year after NATO was established the RCMP began a highly secretive espionage operation and internment plan known as PROFUNC (PROminent FUNCtionaries of the Communist Party). In October 2010 CBC’s Fifth Estate and Radio-Canada’s Enquête aired shows on “this secret contingency plan, called PROFUNC, [which] allowed police to round up and indefinitely detain Canadians believed to be Communist sympathizers.” In case of a “national security” threat up to 16,000 suspected communists and 50,000 sympathizers were to be apprehended and interned in one of eight camps across the country. Initiated by RCMP Commissioner Stuart Taylor Wood in 1950, the plan continued until 1983.
Blunting the European Left was an important part of the establishment of NATO. As odes to the organization ring across the dominant media during this week’s 70thcelebrations, it’s important to remember that NATO was birthed with an elitist, anti-democratic intent. Its reason for creation was to manage “democracy” so that existing elites maintained their status.
The EU’s new, comprehensive new Copyright Directive passed the European Parliament ensuring the way we use the Internet will change in the future.
And not for the better.
The controversial parts are Articles 11 and 13, the “link tax” and the “upload filter” requirements. For a good run down of how terrible these new rules are look anywhere on the internet but this article at Gizmodo (who I hope doesn’t charge me a link tax for doing so!) will do.
I would also watch this video from Dave Cullen, a resident of Ireland, i.e. the EU, as to what he thinks this means.
Dave makes a number of fantastic points about the ramifications of Articles 11 and 13 which I will not dispute.
The arrogance and pig-headedness of EU MEPs to push this through without even listening to arguments for Amendments speaks volumes as to how much this legislation was bought and paid for.
And you know who was doing the buying. The same folks currently behind destroying Brexit — The Davos Crowd. I don’t want to put too fine a point on this now, since I’ve covered all this recently (here) and in the past (here ).
Controlling The Wire
But there are very valid reasons why this push for control of information flow from the EU is yet another example of their desperations to keep control of what I’ve in the past called The Wire:
In short, The Wire is the main conduit through which we communicate with each other. Even money is The Wire. What are prices if not information about what we are willing to part with our money in exchange for?
Without The Wire modern society fails. So, government can’t shut it down but neither can it allow unrestrained access to it.
Electricity, commerce, communications, everything, goes over The Wire.
This isn’t a radical concept but like all important ideas, once it is presented to you you can’t unsee it.
Control of The Wire is the only fight that matters or has ever mattered in society. The Internet is The Wire writ large. Therefore, it only makes sense that control of it is paramount to maintaining any control over society at large.
The corporate oligarchs are in fear for their projects. They want desperately to maintain control. They’ve worked for decades to evolve the nation-state into the new shiny transnational superstate the EU exemplifies.
The new Copyright Directive is designed to erect barriers-to-entry and shut down opposition speech by outsourcing the enforcement to the platforms hosting the material.
And those platforms are only too happy to do this because they get to crowd out any potential competition. So, while their costs increase slightly, they are now immune to the competition which would grind out their margins to zero over time, as any unfettered market would.
Remember, that in all human endeavors profit is an ever-elusive thing. With incentives properly aligned someone is always attracted to the profit someone else is achieving and will figure out a way to build a better mousetrap, as it were, grinding out that profit.
If you can short-circuit this process via control of The Wire then you can guarantee a profit for your past work for far longer than you would otherwise.
This is known as rent.
Fake Property, False Choices
This is why the music and film industry want their IP protected from ‘fair use’ policies. They see the plummeting margins and want to continue charging on a per use/listen/view basis things they retain the copyright to far beyond the public’s willingness to pay them.
It’s too expensive for these companies to go after us individually. That doesn’t work except in very limited ways. Yes, they can de-platform Alex Jones or Sargon of Akkad ad hoc but with predictable backlash against it.
Enshrining it in law takes this, however, to another level. And it is a yet another Hobson’s Choice put before people to either accept regulation of these companies as public utilities — ensuring their monopoly status — or render the internet unusable.
This Directive is pure protectionism of legacy media producers be it news, music, film, etc. whose business models haven’t just collapsed they’re literally now subsidized by other profitable industries, i.e. the Washington Post is, effectively, an Amazon company.
So, in effect, Article 11 and 13 are just typical corporatist honey pots, at least in theory.
But it is all bad? Is the future to be this and more laws and controls like this?
Likely not.
IP Deflation
Let’s look specifically at the link tax. To do this we have to look at a worst-case scenario where the EU disregards all cross-border treaty and tax-enforcement issues and our governments go along with this nonsense.
So, I want to link to an article in Der Speigel to make some point about Angela Merkel.
To do so now, under Article 13, I have to get a license to link from them and pay a fee. Let’s call that fee €100. Instead of paying that fee my natural reaction would be to not link to it and just make reference to it.
I’ll quote it and not put in a link.
If that doesn’t work and WordPress takes my post down, I’ll screencap the relevant section of the article (4chan-style) and then not link to it. This requires a more sophisticated sniffer to figure out what I did.
And in the worst case if they figure that out, I’ll simply not even quote them anymore. And I’ll write the article in such a way that I don’t need to. They don’t get the traffic anymore. They never got the license fee.
The result is they fall in the Google search rankings.
And I get to keep my traffic up and my audience happy.
Who wins here? Me or them?
Me.
Especially if I keep my link license fee set for my content at what it’s worth, zero.
To me a link is free advertising. I know that each one is a gift that pays huge dividends. I cherish people who contact me for permission to scrape my work.
The whole point of what I do is to reach as wide an audience as possible. Why would I put up barriers to that?
You have to put this in perspective. Ninety five percent of the news you read is a restatement of a government or corporate press release. If you think someone can’t reprint government or corporate press releases for less than €100 a head you are crazy.
Just like it is in retail sales. Amazon is killing local retailers because easily cross-shopped items are simply more efficiently delivered without a brick and mortar storefront. The costs of maintaining it and people going to the central location is a waste of scarce, precious capital.
It’s an old model without a future.
News organizations that don’t add anything but only disseminate the same stuff but with a slightly different spin on it won’t be able to charge a dime for links. Functionally, for 95% of news, is there any difference between Yahoo!, MSN, CNN or FOX?
No.
If you produce something that is value-added people will figure out a way to justify to themselves paying for it. Advertising covers some of that cost. If they don’t it isn’t lost revenue, it was revenue you never had in the first place at that price.
In the Internet business eyeballs are everything. Losing eyeballs for link taxes is just bad business.
The Last War
So the EU just gave these sclerotic, dying industries everything they’ve ever wanted. But, in the long run, it will be their undoing as it will incentivize an entire generation of citizen journalists to fill in the niches and do primary research.
Moreover, it will be unenforceable at any practical level, as Dave Cullen points out. The EU will itself cause a cratering of traffic to and from its IP ranges.
As the cost of The Wire drops on a per megabyte basis, think 5G, so too does the cost to resist control of it. Lower bandwidth costs makes possible peer-to-peer networking and decentralized autonomous organizations that even the most hardened crypto-enthusiast haven’t conceived of yet.
And once there are no middle men to go after and turn into the copyright police, we’re back to them going after individuals again. At that point it’s game over.
That’s a long way off at this point and the present will be difficult, at best, to navigate. But we’re not flat-footed here. I do feel for guys like Dave Cullen who build great content and now are looking at real constraints.
I don’t envy them in the slightest.
But to me this feels like just another desperation move by old men fighting the last war to hold onto The Wire that’s slipping out of their fingers, writing laws out of date before they are even implemented.
The European Union parliament has just rubber-stamped new copyright legislation that will have a stifling effect on digital freedom of speech. Opposition to the proposals have seen big American tech companies including Google, online activists, world-wide-web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Paul McCartney and online star PewDiePie unite against the new draconian measures that will now need to be integrated into the corpus of national law throughout every EU member state. This process is expected to take around two years.
The worrying proposals
The most novel and therefore controversial aspects of the new EU copyright directive are contained in Articles 11 and 13 of the proposals. According to Article 11, any time a digital publisher links to or otherwise publishes even a small portion of copyrighted material, the owner of the outlet in question will have to pay a statutory rate (aka a tax) for the privilege of so doing.
Article 13 will force major online platforms, including and especially social media platforms to implement an automated vetting algorithm that will instantly censor any attempts at posting copyrighted material, without providing for any kind of reasonable appeal by the poster.
Arguments for the new proposals
The arguments in favour of the new legislation suggest that such mechanisms are needed to prevent the unauthorised exploitation of copyrighted material without the owner receiving rapid remuneration. The arguments against the new proposals however are far more lengthy and manifold which is itself is a cautionary warning sign against legislation that may prima facie be overly broad and consequently do more harm than good.
Arguments against the new proposals
–Stifling effect on the freedom of speech and artistic expression
While no legal system encourages the violation of copyright, most legal systems allow for something that in the United States is known as fair use. According to the fair use doctrine, copyrighted material may be typically used without remuneration or permission from the copyright owner if the copyrighted work is used in the services of journalism, information decimation vital to the public good, critique/review/criticism/journalistic analysis, certain forms of advertising (e.g. a cinema displaying an image of a film that is now playing or coming soon) and last but not least, parody (e.g. memes that show a copyrighted image of Kermit The Frog to illustrate a humorous or satirical message).
According to current EU copyright law, most of the fair use exceptions which have long been established in US law and most other Common Law countries also apply. However, many European judges take a narrower view of the concept of fair use than do most American judges.
Both Article 11 and Article 13 of the new EU copyright laws effectively end anything remotely related to the fair use doctrine. This would not only have a chilling effect on the ability of both small and large publishers who rely on fair use in order to produce the content that all readers, viewers and listeners now expect, but it will also vastly limit the freedom of expression of social media users who do not not even stand a chance of profiting from their creation and/or sharing of memes or short parody videos. This in and of itself will have a chilling effect on some of the main forms of free expression that makes the internet worthwhile to millions.
—Stifling effect on the freedom of information
Journalists rely on quoting from a variety of sources in order to accurately convey information to their audience. For example, if I were to link someone else’s analysis of the present situation under the new laws, just this simple link would cost Eurasia Future money according to the proposed reforms. The result would be that most outlets would simply not bother to link or quote important sources which itself could expose publishers to allegations of spreading “fake news”, even if this was not the case. This could set off a dangerous chain reaction which could see media outlets deprived of the profits they would have otherwise legitimately earned for providing a much valued service in the private sector.
It is noteworthy that Article 11 will not only apply to websites that copy and paste entire stories or articles without remuneration or permission (a practice I personally find troubling), but it will effectively tax publishers for even quoting and crediting a small portion of a source that helps to bolster one’s argument. If lawyers for example had to pay other lawyers or judges whose legal precedent they were citing in a court of law – one could imagine how awkward the tasks of the legal profession would become.
In an internet age where both true and false information is ubiquitous, the job of publishers is as important as that of lawyers and to this end, both require similar tools in order to effectively execute their job.
–Major enforcement problems
Because of the overreaching characteristics of the proposals, one must enquire as to weather the EU will soon chase down violators of these new laws outside of Europe in order to enforce its laws on publishers whose material on the world wide web can be viewed and in many cases likely will be viewed in the EU. Not only would this be costly but in many cases it would be fruitless as most countries outside of the EU will not likely comply with a foreign organisation effectively harassing their citizens. An example of a related concept was when in 2010 the US President specifically signed a law stating that US courts would not enforce foreign libel judgements on US citizens if the foreign country’s libel standards are more severe towards the defendant than those in the US. Due to the fact that the outcry against the EU’s new legislation has been louder in America than in much of Europe, one might reasonably expect something similar from Washington in respect of the new EU copyright law. This is true especially given the currently poor status of EU-US relations on the all important matter of trade.
Then there are the technical issues of enforcement. How could an as of yet unknown algorithm designed to censor the posting of copyrighted content on social media determine whether or not the person posting a copyrighted image is the owner of the copyright? Would one have to post all of his or her original art pieces for example into a mega data-base even if they are only sharing their original drawing with a small number of Facebook friends? Furthermore, who would own such a data-base and could the copyright holder’s right to exploit his material be trusted in the hands which every private or public entity controls this date-base? This could well be the road to a repeat of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in more ways than one. Lastly, if one is posting copyrighted material with the full permission of the copyright owner, how is the algorithm going to determine this?
Furthermore, when it comes to Article 11, it is not entirely clear who would collect the link tax and how? Take for example an 18 year old with no income or savings who runs a small website and posts copyrighted images or links to other websites. How much money is the EU prepared to spend on chasing such an individual down only to find that he is judgement proof? There’s a reason that the existing private sector doesn’t chase down judgement proof individuals and its called logic.
–Outlandish burden shifting
As it stands, copyright is almost always a civil rather than a criminal issue. As such, it is up to the copyright holder to discover that his or her work has been used without permission or remuneration and to then decide whether he or she will reach a settlement over the matter or take the infringing party to court. Realistically, copyright holders will not waste time and money on small matters. If a website nobody reads decides to publish entire copyrighted pieces with no permission, the publisher of the original piece – Eurasia Future for example, would likely ignore the matter. However, if the New York Times copied an entire article from Eurasia Future without permission or remuneration and if furthermore it could not be justified in any way by fair use – the matter would be raised in the appropriate way.
Under the new laws the EU will force third parties like Facebook and Twitter to automatically enforce copyright rules, thus shifting the burden of enforcement of copyright from the copyright owner to social media owners, search-engine owners and other website owners. This approach is entirely impractical as it invokes the power of law to force third parties to take a greater interest in protecting the use of copyrighted material than many copyright holders themselves have ever taken or care to take.
The same is true of the link-tax. Why should a public or private body collect taxation via statute when existing laws, however flawed one might argue they are, are still less burdensome on the entire public and private sector than the new proposals?
Geopolitical policy hypocrisy
The EU itself is a frequent critic of alleged internet censorship in China and Russia, even though the laws in China and Russia cannot be compared to the new EU proposals. In China, the only materials censored online are those which are deemed to be provocative in respect of the civil order, those which threaten the public peace and those which violate the social norms of the People’s Republic of China. In other words, China’s internet regulations are derived from a desire to protect China’s internal peace and cultural characteristics, rather than a cynical ploy to pit those with lots of money against those with little. Even an article critical of China’s internet policy accurately described the nature of internet regulation in the country, in spite of its overly cynical editorial overtones. It should also be noted that while western states criticise China for its policies, many western governments are trying to randomly censor free speech under the guise that it is “hate speech”, even though strongly worded and aggressive speech has traditionally been protected in the US and much of Europe so long as it doesn’t contain a specific criminal threat. This is in fact the very essence of the US First Amendment which has long been admired throughout Europe.
Russia has some laws which also seek to prohibit the posting of anti-social material online. But in reality, unlike China, Russia rarely tries to enforce any internet regulations and when it tries, it usually fails miserably. Thus, the internet in Russia is actually incredibly free in terms of an absolutist view of free speech.
Because of the new laws, the EU risks becoming a laughing stock in multiple countries including the United States – a country that clearly values fair use, in Russia – a country which realistically doesn’t censor anything on the internet and in China – a country where measures taken to protect people from being needlessly provoked are prioritised over protecting huge corporations from small social media users who aren’t seeking to make a profit from the memes they post online. Of course notably absent from the wider debates about the new EU laws were any commentary from the governments of China or Russia. If the tables were turned, one could imagine the chorus of excoriation against the eastern superpowers coming from both Brussels and Washington.
Brexit takes on a new importance
Of course, if the United Kingdom successfully exits the European Union, none of these new draconian measures will apply to Britain, just as they don’t apply to the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand or other countries in the English speaking world with similar domestic legal systems to that in Britain.
Furthermore, while Brexit has often been portrayed as a policy favoured by older British voters, because the new EU legislation will disproportionately impact young people whose business and leisure is largely centred around the internet, it is now crucial for young people in the UK who are opposed to the EU’s anti-free speech laws to rally behind a full Brexit that does not reduce the process to a series of halfway measures.
Only by remaining fully out of the EU Single Market and Customs Union can it be guaranteed that this regressive, repressive and oppressive legislation is kept away from British publishers and ordinary people who are active online.
Conclusion
The EU has made some powerful new enemies including the world’s largest tech firms. While the lights of free speech are dimming in Europe, at least for one European country, there is a clear path to the sunlit uplands of freedom. That path is called Brexit.
Even if you think you know all about the Chagos story – an entire population forcibly removed from their island homeland at British gunpoint to make way for a US Air Force nuclear base, the people dumped destitute over a thousand miles away, their domestic animals gassed by the British army, their homes fired and demolished – then I beg you still to read this.
This analysis shows there could be no more startling illustration of the operation of the brutal and ruthless British Establishment in an undisguisedly Imperialist cause, involving actions which all reasonable people can see are simply evil. It points out that many of the key immoralities were perpetrated by Labour governments, and that the notion that either Westminster democracy or the British “justice” system provides any protection against the most ruthless authoritarianism by the British state, is utterly baseless.
Finally of course, there is the point that this is not only an historic injustice, but the injustice continues to the current day and continues to be actively promoted by the British state, to the extent that it is willing to take massive damage to its international standing and reputation in order to continue this heartless policy. This analysis is squarely based on the recent Opinion of the International Court of Justice.
Others have done an excellent job of chronicling the human stories and the heartache of the Islanders deported into penury far away across the sea. I will take that human aspect as read, although this account of one of the major forced transportations is worth reading to set the tone. The islanders were shipped out in inhuman conditions to deportation, starved for six days and covered in faeces and urine. This was not the 19th century, this was 1972.
The MV Nordvaer was already loaded with Chagossians, horses, and coconuts when it arrived at Peros Banhos. Approximately one hundred people were ultimately forced onto the ship. Ms. Mein, her husband, and their eight children shared a small, cramped cabin on the ship. The cabin was extremely hot; they could not open the portholes because the water level rose above them under the great weight of the overloaded boat. Many of the other passengers were not as fortunate as Ms. Mein and shared the cargo compartment with horses, tortoises, and coconuts. Ms. Mein remembers that the cargo hold was covered with urine and horse manure. The horses were loaded below deck while many human passengers were forced to endure the elements above deck for the entirety of the six-day journey in rough seas. The voyage was extremely harsh and many passengers became very sick. The rough conditions forced the captain to jettison a large number of coconuts in order to prevent the overloaded boat from sinking. Meanwhile, the horses were fed, but no food was provided for the Chagossians.
Rather than the human story of the victims, I intend to concentrate here, based squarely on the ICJ judgement, on the human story of the perpetrators. In doing so I hope to show that this is not just an historic injustice, but a number of prominent and still active pillars of the British Establishment, like Jack Straw, David Miliband, Jeremy Hunt and many senior British judges, are utterly depraved and devoid of the basic feelings of humanity.
There is also a vitally important lesson to be learnt about the position of the British Crown and the utter myth that continuing British Imperialism is in any sense based on altruism towards its remaining colonies.
Before reading the ICJ Opinion, I had not fully realised the blatant and vicious manner in which the Westminster government had blackmailed the Mauritian government into ceding the Chagos Islands as a condition of Independence. That blackmail was carried out by Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. The court documentation makes plain that the United States was ordering the British Government on how to conduct the entire process, and that Harold Wilson deliberately “frightened” Mauritius into conceding the Chagos Islands. This is an excerpt from the ICJ Opinion:
104. On 20 September 1965, during a meeting on defence matters chaired by the United Kingdom Secretary of State, the Premier of Mauritius again stated that “the Mauritius Government was not interested in the excision of the islands and would stand out for a 99-year lease”. As an alternative, the Premier of Mauritius proposed that the United Kingdom first concede independence to Mauritius and thereafter allow the Mauritian Government to negotiate with the Governments of the United Kingdom and the United States on the question of Diego Garcia. During those discussions, the Secretary of State indicated that a lease would not be acceptable to the United States and that the Chagos Archipelago would have to be made available on the basis of its detachment.
105. On 22 September 1965, a Note was prepared by Sir Oliver Wright, Private Secretary to the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister, Sir Harold Wilson. It read: “Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam is coming to see you at 10:00 tomorrow morning. The object is to frighten him with hope: hope that he might get independence; Fright lest he might not unless he is sensible about the detachment of the Chagos Archipelago. I attach a brief prepared by the Colonial Office, with which the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office are on the whole content. The key sentence in the brief is the last sentence of it on page three.”
106. The key last sentence referred to above read: “The Prime Minister may therefore wish to make some oblique reference to the fact that H.M.G. have the legal right to detach Chagos by Order in Council, without Mauritius consent but this would be a grave step.” (Emphasis in the original.)
107. On 23 September 1965 two events took place. The first event was a meeting in the morning of 23 September 1965 between Prime Minister Wilson and Premier Ramgoolam. Sir Oliver Wright’s Report on the meeting indicated that Prime Minister Wilson told Premier Ramgoolam that “in theory there were a number of possibilities. The Premier and his colleagues could return to Mauritius either with Independence or without it. On the Defence point, Diego Garcia could either be detached by order in Council or with the agreement of the Premier and his colleagues….”
I have to confess this has caused me personally radically to revise my opinion of Harold Wilson. The ICJ at paras 94-97 make plain that the agreement to lease Diego Garcia to the USA as a military base precedes and motivates the rough handling of the Mauritian government.
Against this compelling argument, Britain nevertheless continued to argue before the court that the Chagos Islands had been entirely voluntarily ceded by Mauritius. The ICJ disposed of this fairly comprehensively:
172. … In the Court’s view, it is not possible to talk of an international agreement, when one of the parties to it, Mauritius, which is said to have ceded the territory to the United Kingdom, was under the authority of the latter. The Court is of the view that heightened scrutiny should be given to the issue of consent in a situation where a part of a non-self-governing territory is separated to create a new colony. Having reviewed the circumstances in which the Council of Ministers of the colony of Mauritius agreed in principle to the detachment of the Chagos Archipelago on the basis of the Lancaster House agreement, the Court considers that this detachment was not based on the free and genuine expression of the will of the people concerned.
A number of the individual judges’ Opinions put his rather more bluntly, of which Judge Robinson gives perhaps the best account in a supporting Opinion which is well worth reading:
93. … The intent was to use power to frighten the Premier into submission. It is wholly unreasonable to seek to explain the conduct of the United Kingdom on the basis that it was involved in a negotiation and was simply employing ordinary negotiation strategies. After all, this was a relationship between the Premier of a colony and its administering Power. Years later, speaking about the so-called consent to the detachment of the Chagos Archipelago Sir Seewoosagur is reported to have told the Mauritian Parliament, “we had no choice”42It is also reported that Sir Seewoosagur told a news organization, the Christian Science Monitor that: “There was a nook around my neck. I could not say no. I had to say yes, otherwise the [noose] could have tightened.” It is little wonder then that, in 1982, the Mauritian Legislative Assembly’s Select Committee on the Excision of the Archipelago concluded that the attitude of the United Kingdom in that meeting could “not fall outside the most elementary definition of blackmailing”.
The International Court of Justice equally dismissed the British argument that the islanders had signed releases renouncing any claims or right to resettle, in return for small sums of “compensation” received from the British government. Plainly having been forcibly removed and left destitute, they were in a desperate situation and in no position to assert or to defend their rights.
At paragraphs 121-3 the ICJ judgement recounts the brief period where the British government behaved in a legal and conscionable manner towards the islanders. In 2000 a Chagos resident, Louis Olivier Bancoult, won a judgement in the High Court in London that the islanders had the right to return, as the colonial authority had an obligation to govern in their interest. Robin Cook was then Foreign Secretary and declared that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office would not be appealing against the judgement.
Robin Cook went further. He accepted before the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva that the UK had acted unlawfully in its treatment of the Chagos Islanders. And he repealed the Order in Council that de facto banned all occupation of the islands other than by the US military. Cook commissioned work on a plan to facilitate the return of the islanders.
It seemed finally the British Government was going to act in a reasonably humanitarian fashion towards the islanders. But then disaster happened. The George W Bush administration was infuriated at the idea of a return of population to their most secret base area, and complained bitterly to Blair. This was one of the factors, added to Cook’s opposition to arms sales to dictatorships and insistence on criticising human rights abuses by Saudi Arabia, that caused Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell to remove Robin Cook as Foreign Secretary.
Robin Cook was replaced by the infinitely biddable Jack Straw. There was never any chance that Straw – who received large donations to his office and campaign funds from British Aerospace – would stand against the interests of the arms industry or of the USA, particularly in favour of a few dispossessed islanders who would never be a source of personal donations.
Straw immediately threw Cook’s policy into reverse. Resettling the islanders was now declared “too expensive” an option. The repealed Order in Council was replaced by a new one banning all immigration to, or even landing on, the islands on security grounds. This “coincided” with the use of Diego Garcia, the Chagos island on which the US base is situate, as a black site for torture and extraordinary rendition.
Straw was therefore implicated not just in extending the agony of the deported island community, but doing so in order to ensure the secrecy of torture operations. I don’t have the vocabulary to describe the depths of Straw’s evil. This was New Labour in action.
The estimable Mr Bancoult did not give up. He took the British Government again to the High Court to test the legality of the new Order in Council barring the islanders, which was cast on “National security” grounds. On 11 May 2006, Bancoult won again in the High Court, and the judgement was splendidly expressed by Lord Hooper in a statement of decency and common sense with which you would hope it was impossible to disagree:
“The power to legislate for the “peace order and good government” of a territory has never been used to exile a whole population. The suggestion that a minister can, through the means of an Order in Council, exile a whole population from a British Overseas Territory and claim that he is doing this for the “peace, order and good government” of the Territory is, to us, repugnant.” (Para 142)
The judgement did not address the sovereignty of the islands.
Unlike Robin Cook, Jack Straw did appeal against the judgement, and the FCO’s appeal was resoundingly and unanimously rebuffed by the Court of Appeal. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office then appealed again to the House of Lords, and to general astonishment the Law Lords found in favour of the British government and against the islanders, by a 3-2 judgement.
The general astonishment was compounded by the fact that a panel of only 5 Law Lords had sat on the case, rather than the 7 you would normally expect for a case of this magnitude. It was very widely remarked among the legal fraternity that the 3 majority judges were the only Law Lords who might possibly have found for the government, and on any possible combination of 7 judges the government would have lost. That view was given weight by the fact that the minority of 2 who supported the islanders included the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Bingham.
The decision to empanel only 5 judges, and the selection of the UK’s three most right wing Law Lords for the panel, was taken by the Lord Chancellor’s office. And the Lord Chancellor was now – Jack Straw. The timing is such that it is conceivable that the decision was taken under Straw’s predecessor, Lord Falconer, but as he was Blair’s great friend and ex-flatmate and also close to Straw, it makes no difference to the Establishment stitch-up.
If your blood is not now sufficiently boiling, consider this. The Law Lords found against the islanders on the grounds that no restraint can be placed on the authority of the British Crown over its colonies. The majority opinion was best expressed by Lord Hoffman. Lord Hoffman’s judgement is a stunning assertion of British Imperial power. He states in terms that the British Crown exercises its authority in the interests of the UK and not in the interest of the colony concerned:
49. Her Majesty in Council is therefore entitled to legislate for a colony in the interests of the United Kingdom. No doubt she is also required to take into account the interests of the colony (in the absence of any previous case of judicial review of prerogative colonial legislation, there is of course no authority on the point) but there seems to me no doubt that in the event of a conflict of interest, she is entitled, on the advice of Her United Kingdom ministers, to prefer the interests of the United Kingdom. I would therefore entirely reject the reasoning of the Divisional Court which held the Constitution Order invalid because it was not in the interests of the Chagossians.
It is quite incredible to read that quote, and then to remember that the British government has just argued before the International Court of Justice that the ICJ does not have jurisdiction because the question is nothing to do with decolonisation but rather a bilateral dispute. Thankfully, the ICJ found this quite incredible too.
You may think that by the time it fixed this House of Lords judgement the British government had exhausted the wells of depravity on this particular issue. But no, David Miliband felt that he had to outdo his predecessors by being not only totally immoral, but awfully clever with it too. Under Miliband, the FCO dreamed up the idea of pretending that the exclusion of all inhabitants from around the USA leased nuclear weapon and torture site, was for environmental purposes.
The propagation of the Chagos Marine Reserve in 2010 banned all fishing within 200 nautical miles of the islands and, as the islanders are primarily a fishing community, was specifically designed to prevent the islanders from being able to return, while at the same time garnering strong applause from a number of famous, and very gullible, environmentalists.
The sheer cynicism of this effort by Miliband to dress up genocide as environmentalism is simply breathtaking. If we were really concerned about the environment of Diego Garcia we would not have built a massive airbase and harbour on a fragile coral atoll and filled it with nuclear weapons.
In retrospect I am quite proud of that turn of phrase. David Miliband was dressing up genocide as environmentalism. I stand by that.
While the ruse was obvious to anyone half awake, it does not need speculation to know the British government’s motives because, thanks to Wikileaks release of US diplomatic cables, we know that British FCO and MOD officials together specifically briefed US diplomats that the purpose was to make the return of the islanders impossible.
7. (C/NF) Roberts acknowledged that “we need to find a way to get through the various Chagossian lobbies.” He admitted that HMG is “under pressure” from the Chagossians and their advocates to permit resettlement of the “outer islands” of the BIOT. He noted, without providing details, that “there are proposals (for a marine park) that could provide the Chagossians warden jobs” within the BIOT. However, Roberts stated that, according to the HGM,s current thinking on a reserve, there would be “no human footprints” or “Man Fridays” on the BIOT’s uninhabited islands. He asserted that establishing a marine park would, in effect, put paid to resettlement claims of the archipelago’s former residents. Responding to Polcouns’ observation that the advocates of Chagossian resettlement continue to vigorously press their case, Roberts opined that the UK’s “environmental lobby is far more powerful than the Chagossians’ advocates.” (Note: One group of Chagossian litigants is appealing to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) the decision of Britain’s highest court to deny “resettlement rights” to the islands’ former inhabitants. See below at paragraph 13 and reftel. End Note.)
Incredible to say, that is still not the end of the ignominy of the British Establishment. As the irrepressible Chagossians continued their legal challenges, now to the “Marine reserve”, the UK’s new Supreme Court shamelessly refused to accept the US diplomatic cable in evidence, on the grounds it was a privileged communication under the Vienna Convention. This was a ridiculous decision which would only have been valid if there were evidence that the communication were obtained by another State, rather than leaked to the public by a national of the state that produced it. For a court to choose to ignore a salient fact is an abhorrent thing, but it allowed the British Establishment yet another “victory”. It was short lived, however.
Mauritius challenged the UK to arbitration before a panel constituted under Article 287 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, a Convention I am happy to say I was directly involved in bringing into force, by negotiating and helping draft the Protocol. Mauritius argued that the UK could not ban fishing rights which it enjoyed both traditionally, and specifically as part of the agreement to cede the Chagos Islands. The UK brought four separate challenges to the jurisdiction of the panel, and lost every one, and then lost the main judgement. It is pleasant to note that acting for the Chagos Islands was Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the FCO Legal Adviser who had resigned her position, telling Jack Straw that the attack on Iraq constituted an illegal war of aggression.
Which brings us up to the present Opinion by the International Court of Justice after the government of Mauritius finally took resolute action to assert sovereignty over the islands. Astonishingly, having repudiated the decision of the Arbitration Panel on the Law of the Sea, very much a British-inspired creation, Jeremy Hunt has now decided to strike at the very heart of international law itself by repudiating the International Court of Justice itself, something for which there is no precedent at all in British history. I discuss the radical implications of this here with Alex Salmond.
This is apposite as throughout the 21st Century developments listed here in this continued horror story, the Chagossians’ cause was championed in the House of Commons by two pariah MPs outside the consensus of the British Establishment. The Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on the Chagos Islands was Jeremy Corbyn MP. His Deputy was Alex Salmond MP.
Chagos really is a touchstone issue, a key litmus test of whether people are in or out of the British Establishment. The attacks on Jeremy Corbyn, the manufactured witch-hunt on anti-semitism, all are designed to return the Labour Party to a leadership which will continue the illegal occupation of the Chagos Islands; the acid test of reliable pro-USA neo-conservative policy. The SNP, at least under Salmmond, was an open challenge to British imperialism and hopefully will remain so.
Chagos is a fundamental test of decency in British public life. If you know where a politician – or judge – stands on Chagos, most other questions are answered.
The controversial copyright law facing a final vote in the EU parliament is less about copyright than it is about hammering a final nail in the coffin of the freedoms the internet once promised. Yes, Article 13 is that bad.
Most laws address themselves toward tangible, human-sized problems. Article 13, the sweeping European copyright legislation that proposes to filter all content on its way to the web to ensure no rights are being violated, isn’t interested in such prosaic stuff. It seeks to defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Physics? In my internet? The web operates according to the laws of entropy. It trends toward decentralization – of ideas, of social groups, but most importantly of power. Authority looks at this delightful disorder and sees only malevolent chaos that needs to be reined in. Legislators and the corporations that run their countries have spent a lot of time brainstorming on how to put the cat back in the bag, and Article 13 is the result.
This is not just a European problem. Like a catastrophic nuclear meltdown, there is no containing the fallout from this kind of measure, designed to effectively destroy the internet as we know it. Companies and platforms may start by leaving Europe, or refusing to serve European customers, but the internet has no borders, and the big platforms will embrace whatever filters are required to maintain their hold on their users – no matter what country they inhabit. One need only witness the absurdity when Canadian, American and Australian Twitter users are sanctioned for violating Pakistani blasphemy laws to understand the willingness of these platforms to cater to the most oppressive common denominator.
It’s almost surprising that the EU isn’t trying to sell this law as the killer weapon in the ongoing War on Fake News, given its member countries’ use of that trendy adversary to justify increasingly draconian speech restrictions – from the proposed end of anonymity in France to criminal charges for platforms that don’t take down “problematic” speech quickly enough in the UK. But then, EU leaders aren’t actually elected, so they don’t have to sell the people anything. Like the monopolies Article 13 enables, the EU gives its users no choice – accept this degraded, deliberately-hobbled, entropically-eviscerated parody of the internet, or stay offline (by the time they’re done with it, you’ll hardly be able to tell the difference, anyway).
Google spent $100 million to develop a filter capable of screening uploaded content in real time in order to prevent wrong-think from seeping into YouTube livestreams. There are few feelings as unsettling as livestreaming to an audience only to find one’s mic cut after broaching a topic that has been declared off-limits. For now, those who would resist the jackbooted march of “progress” can join another platform, but under Article 13’s restrictions, will that other platform be able to afford a $100 million content filter of its own?
Algorithms are dumb – dumber than even the most clueless human forum moderator – and automated filters cannot tell the difference between fair use, parody, and straight-up rip-offs any more than they can tell the difference between real and fake news. Collateral censorship will tear a hole in casual communication – forget memes and similar forms of humor. AI doesn’t laugh.
To their credit, many of the early architects of the internet see this legislation for the threat that it is and have spoken passionately against it. They understand the threat posed to innovation and the free exchange of ideas, but they naively believe those who wrote the legislation do not. “Indeed, if Article 13 had been in place when the Internet’s core protocols and applications were developed, it is unlikely that it would exist today as we know it,” warned a letter signed by 70 web pioneers in opposition to the law.
The way the web developed the first time was not ideal for centralized power structures. Only a nuclear option like Article 13 could ever hope to rein in the human potential unleashed by the web and give them a second chance to get it right.
Article 13, the internet’s founding fathers warn, means the “transformation of the Internet from an open platform for sharing and innovation, into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users.” That’s a feature, not a bug. Keeping out small platforms that could challenge the monopolies that have shown they’re willing to work with governments certainly makes life easier for those governments. The internet once held the promise to liberate humanity. The European Parliament believes that’s too big a risk to take.
Everywhere one looks these days, the world seems to be moving away from debate on contentious subjects and toward demands that those who have unpopular opinions — or even just ask impertinent questions — be forcibly silenced.
“You will never hear me mention his name,” prime minister Jacinda Ardern said of Brenton Tarrant, the sole suspect in two deadly attacks on mosques in Christchurch. “He may have sought notoriety but here in New Zealand we will give him nothing — not even his name.”
That’s fine as a personal decision, I guess, but not as a top-down decision for her fellow New Zealanders. Even as Ardern spoke, police working for her government were arresting at least two people for sharing the shooter’s live-streamed video of the attacks on social media.
Across the Tasman Sea, Australian prime minister Scott Morrison is calling on the governments of G20 countries to implement measures “including appropriate filtering, detecting and removing of content by actors who encourage, normalise, recruit, facilitate or commit terrorist and violent atrocities.”
Let’s be clear about what Morrison, other “world leaders,” and significant segments of activist communities and even the general public, are demanding (and to a frightful degree already implementing): Internet censorship.
This isn’t really a new development. The mosque attacks are merely the latest incident weaponized by politicians and activists in service to a long-running campaign against public discussion and debate that requires them to make arguments and persuade instead of just bark orders and compel.
The fictional “memory hole” of the IngSoc regime in George Orwell’s 1984 stood for more than half a century as an oft-cited and wisely acknowledged warning. Now that hole is opening up beneath us for real and threatening to suck us down into a new Dark Age of “thoughtcrime” and “unpersons.”
The threat is content-independent. Renaming climate change skeptics “deniers” and demanding “investigations” of them, or pressuring media to ban discussions of policy on vaccines, is just as evil as suing Alex Jones for promulgating bizarre theories about the Sandy Hook massacre.
The only appropriate response to “bad” speech — that is, speech one disagrees with — is “better” speech.
Attempting to shut down your opponents’ ability to participate in an argument isn’t itself a winning argument. Forbidding your opponents to speak to a problem doesn’t solve that problem.
In fact, those tactics are tantamount to admitting that your arguments are less persuasive and that your solutions can’t withstand scrutiny.
Freedom of thought and expression are primary, foundational rights. They make it possible for us to hash out issues and solve problems peaceably instead of by force. Any attempt to suppress them is itself a call for totalitarianism and the alternative to those liberties is social and political death.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org).
Emmanuel Macron has ordered the closure of four organizations accused by officials of promoting jihad and anti-Semitism. Earlier, the French president pledged to fight an unprecedented surge of anti-Semitism in the country.
The move comes at the request of Interior Minister Christophe Castaner, who said the groups “foment hatred, call for discrimination and justify violence,” and must be closed.
The ministry separately said the groups advocated armed jihad and indoctrinating young people. They also promoted organizations like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah – all listed as terrorist organizations by the EU, the ministry stressed.
French government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux labeled the groups as “openly anti-Semitic and dangerous associations” during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday.
The development comes a month after Macron pledged to the Jewish community to fight against what he called a “resurgence of anti-Semitism unseen since World War II.” He said France will redefine anti-Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism in line with the preferences of pro-Israel groups. The decision was welcomed by the government of Israel.
The French government reported a 74-percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in 2018 in the country compared to previous year. The pledge from Macron came after thousands of people, including two former French presidents, rallied across the country to condemn anti-Semitism in response to the desecration of a Jewish cemetery in the Strasbourg area.
The banned organizations are the Zahra Center France, the Shia Federation of France, the Anti-Zionist Party and France Marianne TV. Center Zahra France was targeted by an anti-terrorist raid in October, and was followed by the seizure of assets for six months. The French authorities accused the group, which is based in northern France, of being a vehicle for propagating radical Shiite Islam. The three others organizations are reportedly working under the center’s umbrella.
The man behind the Zahra Center and Anti-Zionist Party is Yahia Gouasmi. He is a Lebanese-born Shia Muslim, who has been living in France since the 1960s. An avowed critic of Zionism and Israel, his stated goal is to oppose the Israeli lobby in France and hold the Jewish state accountable for crimes against Palestinians and other nations. He launched the party in 2009 after the Israeli bombings of the Gaza Strip during Operation Cast Lead.
There is a saying attributed to the French banker Nathan Rothschild that “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws.” Conservative opinion in the United States has long suspected that Rothschild was right and there have been frequent calls to audit the Federal Reserve Bank based on the presumption that it has not always acted in support of the actual interests of the American people. That such an assessment is almost certainly correct might be presumed based on the 2008 economic crash in which the government bailed out the banks, which had through their malfeasance caused the disaster, and left individual Americans who had lost everything to face the consequences.
Be that as it may, if there were a modern version of the Rothschild comment it might go something like this: “Give me control of the internet and no one will ever more know what is true.” The internet, which was originally conceived of as a platform for the free interchange of information and opinions, is instead inexorably becoming a managed medium that is increasingly controlled by corporate and government interests. Those interests are in no way answerable to the vast majority of the consumers who actually use the sites in a reasonable and non-threatening fashion to communicate and share different points of view.
The United States Congress started the regulation ball rolling when it summoned the chief executives of the leading social media sites in the wake of the 2016 election. It sought explanations regarding why and how the Russians had allegedly been able to interfere in the election through the use of fraudulent accounts to spread information that might have influenced some voters. In spite of the sound and fury, however, all Congress succeeded in doing was demonstrating that the case against Moscow was flimsy at best while at the same time creating a rationale for an increased role in censoring the internet backed by the threat of government regulation.
Given that background, the recent shootings at a synagogue in Pittsburgh and at mosques in Christchurch New Zealand have inevitably produced strident demands that something must be done about the internet, with the presumption that the media both encouraged and enabled the attacks by the gunmen, demented individuals who were immediately labeled as “white supremacists.” One critic puts it this way, “Let’s be clear, social media is the lifeblood of the far-right. The fact that a terror attack was livestreamed should tell us that this is a unique form for violence made for the digital era. The infrastructure of social media giants is not merely ancillary to the operations of terrorists — it is central to it [and] social media giants assume a huge responsibility to prevent and stop hate speech proliferating on the internet. It’s clear the internet giants cannot manage this alone; we urgently need a renewed conversation on internet regulation… It is time for counter-terrorism specialists to move into the offices of social media giants.”
It’s the wrong thing to do, in part because intelligence and police services already spend a great deal of time monitoring chat on the internet. And the premise that most terrorists who use the social media can be characterized as the enemy du jour “white supremacists” is also patently untrue. Using the national security argument to place knuckle dragging “counter-terrorism specialists” in private sector offices would be the last thing that anyone would reasonably want to do. If one were to turn the internet into a government regulated service it would mean that what comes out at the other end would be something like propaganda intended to make the public think in ways that do not challenge the authority of the bureaucrats and politicians. In the US, it might amount to nothing less than exposure to commentary approved by Mike Pompeo and John Bolton if one wished to learn what is going on in the world.
Currently I and many other internet users appreciate and rely on the alternative media to provide viewpoints that are either suppressed by government or corporate interests or even contrary to prevailing fraudulent news accounts. And the fact is that the internet is already subject to heavy handed censorship by the service providers, which one friend has described as “Soviet era” in its intensity, who are themselves implementing their increasingly disruptive actions to find false personas and to ban as “hate speech” anything that is objected to by influential constituencies.
Blocking information is also already implemented by various countries through a cooperative arrangement whereby governments can ask search engines to remove material. Google actually documents the practice in an annual Transparency Report which reveals that government requests to remove information have increased from less than 1,000 per year in 2010 to nearly 30,000 per year currently. Not surprisingly, Israel and the United States lead the pack when it comes to requests for deletions. Since 2009 the US has asked for 7,964 deletions totaling 109,936 items while Israel has sought 1,436 deletions totally 10,648 items. Roughly two thirds of Israeli and US requests were granted.
And there is more happening behind the scenes. Since 2016, Facebook representatives have also been regularly meeting with the Israeli government to delete Facebook accounts of Palestinians that the Israelis claim constitute “incitement.” Israel had threatened Facebook that non-compliance with Israeli deletion orders would “result in the enactment of laws requiring Facebook to do so, upon pain of being severely fined or even blocked in the country.” Facebook chose compliance and, since that time, Israeli officials have been “publicly boasting about how obedient Facebook is when it comes to Israeli censorship orders.” It should be noted that Facebook postings calling for the murder of Palestinians have not been censored.
And censorship also operates as well at other levels unseen, to include deletion of millions of old postings and videos to change the historical record and rewrite the past. To alter the current narrative, Microsoft, Google, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook all have been pressured to cooperate with pro-Israel private groups in the United States, to include the powerful Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL is working with social media “to engineer new solutions to stop cyberhate” by blocking “hate language,” which includes any criticism of Israel that might be construed as anti-Semitism by the new expanded definition that is being widely promoted by the US Congress and the Trump Administration.
Censorship of information also increasingly operates in the publishing world. With the demise of actual bookstores, most readers buy their books from media online giant Amazon, which had a policy of offering every book in print. On February 19, 2019, it was revealed that Amazon would no longer sell books that it considered too controversial.
Government regulation combined with corporate social media self-censorship means that the user of the service will not know what he or she is missing because it will not be there. And once the freedom to share information without restraint is gone it will never return. On balance, free speech is intrinsically far more important than any satisfaction that might come from government intrusion to make the internet less an enabler of violence. If history teaches us anything, it is that the diminishment of one basic right will rapidly lead to the loss of others and there is no freedom more fundamental than the ability to say or write whatever one chooses, wherever and whenever one seeks to do so.
By Mark Curtis | MintPress News | November 16, 2022
There is a myth the UK did not support Washington’s war against Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, Labour and Conservative governments backed every phase of US military escalation and played secret roles in the conflict, declassified files show.
UK sent SAS team to Vietnam in 1962, flew secret RAF missions to deliver arms, and provided intelligence to US
UK governments lied to parliament they were not providing military advice to South Vietnam’s brutal regime
Labour government secretly gave arms to US for use in Vietnam, stressing need for “no publicity”
It also connived with Washington to deceive UK public over its support for US
UK governments knew of atrocities against civilians but backed US war aims
Whitehall only started to advocate a peaceful solution, on US terms, once the war became unwinnable
During its war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s the US dropped more bombs than in the whole of World War Two, in a conflict that killed over two million people. The wholesale destruction of villages and killing of innocent people was a permanent feature of the US war from the beginning, along with widespread indiscriminate bombing.
Britain’s role in the war has been largely buried and must be almost completely unknown to the public. When the UK media mentions the war now, reports often simply reference the refusal by Harold Wilson’s government to agree to US requests to openly deploy British troops.
Although this was certainly a public rebuff to Washington, Britain did virtually everything else to back the US war over more than a decade, the declassified documents show. … continue
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