Over the last decade, technology and science has made
voicing your opinions and thoughts to the world easier than ever before. Websites like Blogger, social-networking
sites like Facebook and Twitter, YouTube…the list goes on. Phrases like “Breaking News!” and “Did you
see that?” simply sound ridiculous when as soon as you’ve finished saying them,
a few hundred thousand people probably broke the news first or saw it seconds
before you. With this never-ending
galaxy of data we call the Internet, we can write, tweet, post, and blog
whatever we want because of the First Amendment’s “Freedom of Speech” clause,
right? As people from the United Kingdom
would learn, apparently there exists a grey area that is constantly watched
carefully by the government, who feels that in the event of a threat to
National Security, it has the power to remove or block any information on the
World Wide Web.
In 2011, British authorities ordered YouTube to remove
135 videos because of “a perceived threat to national security”
(Halliday). According to a story by The
Guardian, YouTube reported a “71% rise in content removal requests from the UK
government…and the request that almost 200 YouTube videos be taken down
following complaints about privacy, security, or hate speech.” This questionable move by the UK government
affected almost 1500 users and accounts, leading users in the United States
(myself included) to wonder if the US would ever consider following the lead of
Egypt and completely shutting down access to the Internet, a clear threat to
our right of free speech. Robert Niles
of the Online Journalism Review writes in his article about the topic that a
proposed federal legislation would “allow the government to shut down parts of
(or completely) the Internet in a ‘national emergency’.” Called the “Internet Kill Switch,”
controversy arose that this proposition would give the United States Government
the authority to cut us off from the Internet like President Mubarak of
Egypt. A similar report stated that the
President would only turn off access “where necessary” which could lead to
granting him more power to censor the Internet as he chooses. Maybe this is just me, but I feel as though
the ability to create blogs and statuses and tweets implied that we now had an
easier way to express our feelings, opinions, and beliefs to a large audience
in a quicker amount of time: most of all, that we could utilize our right of
free speech. I like Obama, but he is not
going to delete my Facebook because I chose to post “Obama looks like a camel
lol” on a friend’s wall. However, I
stand by the proposed bill 100% if it means censoring the Internet ONLY in the
event that a site or blog poses a true threat to the security of this country.
In an interview at the 2011 Personal Democracy Forum
Conference in New York City, Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
asserts that national security cannot become “a guise for censoring the
Internet.” York discusses Amazon’s ban
of WikiLeaks, and how that may have opened a new can of worms that would lead
to Internet censorship happening to anyone.
She, too, brings up the example of Egypt and how accounts and posts were
deactivated and removed due to possible examples of “hate speech.” The full 4-minute interview can be see here,
but the first 90 seconds remain the most crucial to this topic. As far as granting the government more power
to censor the Internet, I stand by my aforementioned opinion that only in the
event of censoring for the protection of the country would this idea come to
fruition. Oh, and to all the highly educated
veteran officials of the Supreme Court, Congress, etc.: in case you didn’t
know, once something is posted on the Internet, you have a zero percent chance
at completely removing it forever. Wanna
bet your government salary on those odds?...
I believe this is a breach of our national right to privacy and our right to freedom of speech. While I beleive writing something like Im going to kill the president should definitely be monitered and taken down. but a post that does not threaten anyone should not be taken down.
ReplyDeleteThis is a well-reseached article. People should be careful what they write and always re-read their own text before hitting the "enter" key.
ReplyDelete