Dear Friends,
I am back again - so I try to respond to Izumi's plea to get more responses.
My effort to understand leads me to try to move beyond "fundamental
statements" while trying to understand practically what this or that statement may
mean/
Izumi says he understands PatchA's effort, but does not share its content.
> I appreciate PatchA's persistent effort.
> Unfortunately, to make the long story short, I cannot agree with your
> final suggestion:
>
> >"Values of human rights, democracy, privacy and freedom of expression
> >should never be
> >threatened and infringed by any kind of surveillance and censorship."
> >
> >or
> >
> >"Values of human rights, democracy, privacy and freedom of expression
> >should never be
> >violated and infringed by any kind of surveillance and censorship."
>
>
> "never" as an absolute term is not acceptable and I tried to explain the
> reason.
> The ones you suggested made things even more difficult for me to accept.
>
> The only solution I thought was to change "threatened" to "compromised".
I hope that we all can agree: we do not suspect that Izumi is trying to
handle human rights, democracy, privacy and freedom of expression cheaply.
So let me come in with a discussion from my German background. In Germany,
we have legislation which is basically against hate language in relation with
our terrible past of the Nazi era. It is illegal, for example, to deny that
the atrocities during that period happened, and it is illegal to trade in
certain symbols of naziism, like the swastika flag etc.
Now in the time of the internet, ultra-right wing political groups have
their web sites in the US, and when a court ordered that - I think it was - Yahoo
had to remove the trade in certain Nazi literature or be blocked in Germany.
There were big protests in the US, citing the First Amendment of the US
constitution (against censorship) etc. In Germany, the court ruling stood, and
there were some changes in the incriminated web site.
Why all this? Unfortunately, during the last 10 or so years,
ultra-right-wing groups have grown. Not so many people are involved, their efforts to create
political parties were not successful so far - they get only very few votes.
But they have attacked, and even killed people walking on the streets who
look foreign - Asian or African - and put fire to houses where foreigners live,
and whole families died. Censorship has not prevented these terrible crimes.
But so far the majority opinion in Germany seems to support such censorship,
as it at least restricts the spreading of hate propaganda.
I know - in a different country in Europe - an NGO-ISP, one of the very
early ones in the 1980ies. He was excluded from the association of ISPs in his
country, because he blocked the access to paedophile and child porn sites. He
did this, suffering to be expelled, as his wife had been abused when she was a
child.
These stories do not, of course, solve the difficult issue of censorship -
but forme they make it understandable why some people - me too - have
difficulties with the word "never" in this context.
Norbert
--
Norbert Klein
Open Forum of Cambodia
Phnom Penh/Cambodia