Section 14

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One is not reading them.”
- Joseph Alexandrovitch Brodsky, exiled Russian-American poet.

Librarian Janet Yanoshko has done us all a great favour and compiled an extensive list of banned and “challenged” books at Forbidden Library.

Most of the usual suspects are there for most of the usual reasons along with a few oddities. James and the Giant Peach apparently promotes drug use.

If your bookshelves are looking for a bit more zing, head over and see what takes your fancy.

The German bid to spread its holocaust denial laws across the entire European union has gone a step further, although in a watered-down form. The new law will make it an offence to deny or trivialise the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, but only if the effect is to incite racial hatred or violence.

A Polish/Baltic attempt to have Stalin’s crimes covered was rejected as was, in a nod to candidate-hopeful Turkey, any mention of the Armenian genocide. Germany’s bid to ban Nazi iconography has also been dropped.

While it’s good that the law has been watered down, (my thoughts on the original proposal are here: German bid to spread fascism), it is still an entirely unwarranted limitation on freedom of speech. There are already laws against inciting violence and inciting hatred is nothing more than thoughtcrime.

On a related topic, Spiked has an essay (Turning society into Room 101) on the “pathologisation” of certain types of expression:

People are silenced because they are ‘in denial’ (of the Holocaust or climate change), or because they’re ‘phobic’ (whether Islamophobic or homophobic), or because they spread ‘hate speech’ (they’re consumed by irrational hatred). All of these new censorious categories – denial, phobia, hatefulness – speak to the pathologisation of certain ideas. Speech is increasingly depicted as a sickness, and censorship as the cure.

Hat tip: Kiwiblog.

Following Turkey’s lead, Thailand blocked access to YouTube over the weekend although it’s not clear why. It’s also not clear that the authorities knew what they were doing - access to “www.youtube.com” was blocked but just typing the address “youtube.com”, without the “www” part, got you through fine.

Hat tip: Boing Boing.

No Right Turn has the story of Ahmet Turk, co-leader of the Kurdish Democratic Society Party, who has been sent to prison for six months for referring to Kurdistan Workers Party leader Abdullah Öcalan as Mr Öcalan. Apparently “Mr” imples respect and hence Turk was found guilty of “supporting a criminal”.

But don’t think that you can stay out of jail just by disrespecting people out of habit. Oh no. Failing to respect the right people can get you into trouble as well.

Business Week reported yesterday that a Turkish court has ordered YouTube banned after a Greek YouTuber posted a video describing Kemal Atatürk and the Turkish people as homosexuals. Turk Telecom implemented the ban immediately. Boing Boing reports that somehow the ban only affected Internet Explorer users, Firefox could see the site without difficulty.

Boing Boing suggests that Tourism Turkey change their slogan. Perhaps, “Turkey welcomes you - as long as you keep your mouth shut.” They also provide a handy guide to getting round web censorship.

No Right Turn also reminds us that Turkey’s free speech record isn’t that hot in other areas either; for example, it’s illegal to mention the Armenian Genocide. If Turkey ever joins the EU they could have a tricky time working out which holocausts you must deny and which you must never.

UPDATE 10/03/07: The YouTube ban has been lifted.

Hat tips: No Right Turn and Boing Boing.

There have been a few stories about China on this blog - China and Google, China and Microsoft, Falun Gong - and it seems that they’ve noticed. China’s internet censoring technology, dubbed the Great Firewall of China, now blocks this site. You can test your own site at a “great firewall” test site. Are you as dangerous as a mongol horde?

Hat tip: Pacific Empire.

Cuba, one of the least connected countries in the world, where less than 2% of people have access to the Internet, on Monday blamed the United States embargo for its restrictive laws.

[Cuban Communications Minister Ramiro Valdes] defended Cuba’s “rational and efficient” use of the Internet, which puts computers in schools and government computer clubs while prohibiting home connections for most citizens and blocking many sites with anti-government material.

Valdes, clearly in two minds about the Internet, described it as “one of the tools for global extermination” but then said it was necessary to “advance down the path of development”.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) countered:

It would anyway have been astonishing if a country that has no independent radio or TV station or newspaper did allow unrestricted access to the Internet. We await the creation of a better Internet connection via Venezuela, as the minister announced, and we will then see if the government finally allows its citizens access to an uncensored Internet.

In its October report on the Internet in Cuba, RSF noted that

[The U.S. embargo] may indeed explain the slowness of the Cuban Internet and the endless lines outside Internet cafes. But in no way does it justify the system of control and surveillance that has been put in place by the authorities. In a country where the media are under the government’s thumb, preventing independent reports and information from circulating online has naturally become a priority.

The regime also ensures that there is no Internet access for its political opponents and independent journalists, for whom reaching news media abroad is an ordeal. The government also counts on self-censorship. In Cuba, you can get a 20-year prison sentence for writing a few “counter-revolutionary” articles for foreign websites, and a five-year one just for connecting with the Internet in an illegal manner. Few people dare to defy the state censorship and take such a risk.

Given that it’s the excuse that’s used for everything that’s wrong with Cuba, I would love to see the U.S. lift the embargo and accelerate the Cuban dictatorship’s collision with the open world.

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It’s started.

After two weeks of “working 24/7 to get the site shut down” the Ministry of Social Development has convinced Google to remove (as far as I know) a single post from CYFSWatch. The censored post accuses named Child, Youth and Family staff of murdering a child, contrary to a coroner’s finding that is disputed by the parents.
With the threat of censorship, an insurance policy has appeared in the form of Watching CYFS - a repost of a swag of CYFSWatch material with a different blogging host.

With the cost of publishing down to zero, government censors could work 24/7 for eternity and still achieve nothing.

The CYFSWatch affair and the Ministry of Social Development’s flailing around trying to decide how to deal with the threat of people expressing themselves with a new technology (and the Prime Minister’s frothing last year about “right-wing bloggers”) brings to mind an earlier time when authorities grappled with a new technology in a similarly ham-fisted manner.

Rodney A. Smolla describes what happened in his book Free Speech in an Open Society (ch.11):

Censorship was logistically simple for the Roman censors and Church until Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1450. Handwritten books were laboriously produced by a small number of persons under the strict control of authority; there was no opportunity for the mass distribution of printed material challenging the orthodoxy.

It is no accident that shortly after Gutenberg invented the printing press, official authorities invented the first censorship bureau. In 1485, only thirty-five years after Gutenberg made mass dissemination of the written word a technological possibility, the archbishop of Mainz - the city where Gutenberg lived - created an office of the censor. The precedent took hold.

In 1493 the Venice Inquisition issued the first list of banned books; in 1559 the Church established the Librorum Prohibitorum, or Index of Banned Books, binding on Roman Catholics (and thus virtually the entire population of Europe). The Index was administered by the Office of the Inquisition, which continued to operate in France as late as 1774 and in Spain as late as 1834. (Today there is no Inquisition, but there is still an Index, though the Church now regards it as advisory only.)

Governments around the world reacted similarly to Gutenberg’s new technology. Censorship was instituted in Germany in 1529. The British monarch in 1559 chartered the Stationers’ Company and limited the right to print to the Stationers’ Guild, thereby hoping to check seditious and heretical speech. A series of British licensing laws were passed on the Stationers’ model, provoking John Milton to write his famous tract on free expression, the Areopagitica.

Governments and the Church burned books and heretics alike, but to no avail. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment followed. Smolla continues:

It is futile and foolish to enact our fears into law; law cannot and should not attempt to hold back the enormous tides of technical creativity that are altering the world around us. But we are challenged to manage these changes; to take into account how technologies alter the way in which we communicate, and thus necessarily affect our rules of freedom of speech; to understand how technologies may alter even the relationship of the individual to the state, and thus affect our thinking about how to ensure basic protection for civil liberties.

To repeat a Karl Marx quote I was reminded of today: History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. So, come on, just try and stop this new technology. I’ll be watching. And laughing.

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, has admitted that bowing to Chinese requests to censor search results was a mistake.

Google, whose motto is famously “Don’t be evil”, colluded with the Chinese Government in their construction of “The Great Firewall of China” by filtering Google’s search results to remove references to topics such as Falun Gong and the Tianenmen Square massacre.

Brin, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, said that he regretted the decision to censor because the company’s reputation had suffered in America and Europe.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch notes,

I’m glad that these remarks were made somewhat informally and without massaging from Google PR. It is a rare glimpse into the heart of an organization struggling with coming to terms with its own power, still only a few years old. But if Google wants to stay in the good graces of the smug western crowds, they need to say they regret working with the Chinese government because that government is evil, not because it turned out to be “a net negative” business decision.

Ministry of Social Development (of which Child, Youth and Family - CYF - is a part) CEO Peter Hughes’ decision to try and censor the CYFSWatch blog has badly backfired.

As of Friday afternoon, the site is still up and running. Google has so far stood firm - talking to the NZ Herald, Google spokeswoman Victoria Grand said,

We only remove content from a blog if it expressly violates the terms of service or if ordered to do so by a court order.

And public interest is huge. No one would ever have heard of this site if Hughes hadn’t launched his doomed censorship campaign.

As an indicator of how much interest there is in this now, traffic to this blog has more than doubled since I posted on the topic on Wednesday lunchtime. The top ten search queries landing here at the moment are:

1. cyfswatch
2. cyfs blog
3. cyf blog
4. cyf name and shame
5. cyfs watch
6. cyfswatch blog
7. name and shame
8. cyf
9. cyf watch
10. cyfswatch new zealand

and so on into at least the top thirty.

I would refer Hughes to my previous post on Scarcity and ‘psychological reactance’, which pointed out that censorship not only makes people far more interested in the information under threat, but also makes them more inclined to believe it.

Lindsay Mitchell is reporting (UPDATE: So is NZPA and the NZ Herald) that Ministry of Social Development CEO Peter Hughes has “instructed lawyers to work 24/7 doing whatever they have to, to shut down the CYFS Watch blogsite.”

CYFSWatch is a controversial new blog that is attempting to hold Child, Youth and Family staff accountable for their allegedly destructive actions by publishing ‘name-and-shame’ articles about the individuals involved in various cases.

CYF is likely to be under pressure from the PSA, its staff’s union, to do something about the site (UPDATE: PSA press release), which is threatening to publish the personal details of CYF staff including photographs and home addresses.

If the allegations made on the site are true then the authors have every right to publish them, however “robust” you might find their methods. If not, the answer is not for an arm of the government to shut down the site but to sue the authors for libel although, given their anonymity, that could prove difficult.

It will be interesting to see what CYF does here and, if it comes down to it, whether Google (Blogger’s owner) will do the government’s dirty work and censor the site. Given the nature of the Internet, any information that is censored will no doubt just pop up somewhere else.

UPDATE: Around the blogs:
Not PC: When bureaucrats attack
Kiwiblog: The CYFSWATCH Blog
No Right Turn: No freedom to criticise CYFS

In Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion there’s an interesting discussion of people’s reactions to censorship.

The chapter on scarcity talks about how a perception of scarcity makes something more desirable. It covers how “compliance professionals” (i.e. salespeople, advertisers, con-artists, etc.) use scarcity to push people into making buying decisions and how being told that we can’t have something makes us want it more (”psychological reactance”).

In the case of censorship, being told that we’re not allowed to read or view something makes us all the more eager to do so. Moreover,

The intriguing thing about the effects of censoring information is not that audience members want to have the information more than they did before; that seems natural. Rather, it is that they come to believe in the information more, even though they haven’t received it. For example, when University of North Carolina students learned that a speech opposing coed dorms on campus would be banned, they became more opposed to the idea of coed dorms. Thus, without ever hearing the speech, they became more sympathetic to its argument.

This raises the worrisome possibility that especially clever individuals holding a weak or unpopular position can get us to agree with that position by arranging to have their message restricted. The irony is that for such people - members of fringe political groups, for example - the most effective strategy may not be to publicize their unpopular views, but to get those views officially censored and then to publicize the censorship.

Perhaps the authors of [the United States’] Constitution were acting as much as sophisticated social psychologists as staunch civil libertarians when they wrote the remarkably permissive free-speech provision of the First Amendment. By refusing to restrain free speech, they may have been attempting to minimize the chance that new political notions would win support via the irrational cause of psychological reactance.

Former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra is still having an influence on the country’s politics despite not having been back to Thailand since the coup that removed him in September.

The military government is unhappy about this and has attempted to block interviews with him from being shown. This week an interview he did while visiting Singapore was broadcast on CNN, which was blocked both on-air and online.

Thanks to YouTube you can see both sides (and with the speed that technology moves, the people of Thailand should be able to see both sides as well, no matter how many web-sites the government blocks).

Here’s what the rest of the world saw:

And here’s what was broadcast in Thailand:

Ironically, one of the original complaints that the military made against Shinawatra when deposing him was that he used his position to compromise freedom of the press. Plus ça change…

Hat tip: Boing Boing.

The German government is intending to use its presidency of the Council of the European Union to introduce a Europe-wide ban on holocaust denial and the display of the swastika. See the work programme, p19 (PDF).

The Presidency plans to resume the stalled negotiations on drafting a framework decision on combating racism and xenophobia and to drive the project forward. The goal must be to achieve a minimum level of harmonization in the penal provisions of the EU Member States, particularly with regard to criminal liability for disseminating racist and xenophobic ideas.

This mouthful of bureaucratese bullshit means that they intend to spread the holocaust-denial ban that operates in nine EU countries (and possibly the Germany-only Nazi insignia ban) across the rest of the Union. A similar ban was rejected two years ago.

The original ban ran into trouble on a number of fronts - from Eastern European nations saying that if the swastika was to be banned then so should the hammer-and-sickle insignia, others saying that the swastika is an ancient good luck symbol in Hindu and Buddhist tradition, and even from Britain and Italy noting that the ban would curtail freedom of speech.

As I’ve said before, the best way to deal with holocaust denial is to discuss it openly:

If bad ideas are going to be defeated it must be with better ideas. Imprisoning a person for the ideas they express does nothing to defeat the idea. It is by evidence and debate that we must come to the truth.

No doubt many Germans are ashamed of their country’s history but the way to atone for Germany’s past is not to become president of the whole continent and then pass laws telling people what they’re allowed to think and say.