At 15:18 01/09/96 -0700, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh wrote:
Arun Mehta wrote:
and India will be too: the law here holds the ISPs responsible for ensuring that nothing objectionable and obscene is carried by them, and what simpler way to comply than to
FWIW: "There is no need to licence content providers; Internet service providers are not responsible for illegal content." R K Takkar, Indian Telecom Secretary (at the time of interview)
What Mr. Takkar says isn't law, plus he's gone. The law clearly holds ISPs responsible for content: when it suits the government it will pull it out. Doesn't even have to be the government: some headline-seeking opposition politician could take the government to task because the government-run ISPs aren't complying with the law. And please don't get lulled into complacency by a stupid law that isn't being enforced: in 1975, Indira Gandhi pulled out a host of them to *legally* impose dictatorship.
Ideally, I should be able to send via pgp and anonymous remailer a request for a page, which would soon come beamed down unencrypted via satellite. No more waiting hours for the latest version of Netscape to download
(!) you'll only have to wait hours for your anonymous-remailer-web-to-e-mail gateway, EVERY time you want a page.
every time I want a BANNED page -- I'd say it's worth it. In the process of accessing it, I also show it to everyone in Asia, thus giving the banned stuff much more publicity than it otherwise would get on the net.
governments will eventually see sense and stop censorship, if they're interested in making their countries rich. Singapore in every other field of work has shown its interest in deregulation; I would expect them to do so on the Net as well, when it becomes clear that there's rather more to it than porn and subversion.
Governments everywhere (see Declan's long list) seem to think they can separate out the porn and subversion from the "rather more". Just as in the German case, where the Zundel-site was mirrored so that Germans could access it, external measures to help Singaporeans access what they like would certainly help their government "see sense."
In the meanwhile, there's not much point trying to "help" them, apart from providing moral support.
Guess I'll risk being accused of indulging in cliches when I cite the famous Niemoeller quote once more which begins, " First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out, for I was not one"... and ends "And then they came for me. There was no one left to say anything..." Freedom is won and lost in inches, and you have to fight every single inch they try to take away. Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta@cpsr.org http://www.cerfnet.com/~amehta/ finger amehta@cerfnet.com for public key