Timothy C. May wrote:

The point is to make clear to them that the Usenet and similar Web sites are global in nature, not subject to censorship without a very high local cost. If discussions of Lee Kwan Yew's dynasty are considered illegal, then Singaporans will have to choose not to carry the various newsgroups into which *I* post such messages!

If the govt. of Singapore wish to keep their people in ignorance of their corruption it is going to be harder than banning a few newsgroups. I would expect the opposition to be scanning USEnet and like fora for email addresses ending with .sg and spamming appropriately. The irony of censorship is that its rarely effective and almost always superfluous. The people of singapore are aware that their government is corrupt. They vote it back in because they expect the alternative to be at least as corrupt. Its much like the US where there is a choice between the rightwing authoritarian Republican Party and the authoritarian, rightwing Democrats.

(This was done by many of us during the Karla Homulka and Teale trial in Canada a couple of years ago: Canada imposed press restrictions on discussion of the trial and the grisly evidence...and then was chagrinned to find that the global Net did not adhere to their notions of what should and could be discussed. They even seized copies of "Wired" at the border, very much akin to Singapore's stone age policies.)

There is a big difference between the Canada situation and the Singapore situation. In Canada the restrictions are temporary and stem from making the right to a fair trial a higher priority than the right to free speech. It is a conflict of two competing individual liberties. No observer of the OJ Simpson trial could state that the media coverage did not affect the outcome. The arguments that Mill advances for freedom of speech in On Liberty do not apply in the context of a temporary judicial injunction, they are utilitarian (suprise) and applying his general principle of "interests" would favour the temporary restriction. The situation in Sigapore is simply a corrupt government trying to supress legitimate democratic discussion. The intention is not to protect an individuals right to a fair trial, the intention is to restrict argument permanently. It is important that in an international forum people don't start imagining that their local customs are universally accepted as superior. The difference between Canadian and US law is a minor one and relates to different interpretations of a common principle. There is a vast gulf between the Singapore position and that of either the US or Canada. This is not simply a difference of local interpretation. Phill