Freedom of speech campaigners hit back as a recent poll reveals an increasing appetite among US adults for banning books and restricting children’s access to ‘inappropriate’ library books
This combination of traditional and innovative methods has created a more varied menu of censorship than ever before. Stealth censorship appeals to authoritarian governments that want to appear like democracies—or at least not like old-style dictatorships. In illiberal democracies, of which there are a growing number, the government aims to keep a grip on the news media while concealing its fingerprints. A global survey of attacks on the press today shows governments mixing direct and indirect pressures as part of a booming emerging market in information control.
“We cannot hope to record all the possible censorship-triggering events, so our understanding of what is or isn’t acceptable to the censor will only ever be partial. And of course it’s risky, even outright illegal, to probe the censor’s limits within countries with strict censorship and surveillance programs.
This is why the leak of 600GB of logs from hardware appliances used to filter internet traffic in and out of Syria is a unique opportunity to examine the workings of a real-world internet censorship apparatus….
At the recent ACM Internet Measurement Conference we presented ou rpaper detailing the relatively stealthy but targeted censorship system that we’d found from examining the logs.
Internet traffic in Syria was filtered in several ways. IP addresses (the unique addresses of web servers on the internet) and domain names (the URL typed into the address bar) were filtered to block single websites such as badoo.com or amazon.com, entire network regions (including a few Israeli subnets), or keywords to target specific content. Instant messaging, tools such as Skype, and content-sharing sites such as Metacafe or Reddit were heavily censored. Social media censoring was limited to specific content and pages, such as the “Syrian Revolution†facebook page.”
“Sauropod specialist Mike Taylor notes growing concern among scientists about the heavy-handed takedown practices of academic publishing company Elsevier, including serving DMCA notices on contributing authors who also self-publish their papers.
This year marks the 10-year anniversary of the enforcement of the Children’s Internet Protection Act, CIPA, which brought new levels of Internet censorship to libraries across the country. The law is supposed to encourage public libraries and schools to filter child pornography and obscene or “harmful to minors†images from the library’s Internet connection in exchange for continued federal funding. Unfortunately, as Deborah Caldwell-Stone explains in Filtering and the First Amendment, aggressive interpretations of this law have resulted in extensive and unnecessary censorship in libraries, often because libraries go beyond the legal requirements of CIPA when implementing content filters. As a result, students and library patrons across the country are routinely and unnecessarily blocked from accessing constitutionally protected websites.