One of the easiest tools for disinformation is to exchange the words written below a photograph. The entire meaning of the picture can be varied like this:
- The visit of a school-group at a former international camp can change into a camp, where children are imprisoned (which happened in the Russian city of Petroskoy in 1944).
- Victims of war can change nationality. The picture of the brutal German soldier in World War II that was shown in many newspapers to demonstrate the so-called typical face of a murderer, turned out to be French and a victim in other newspapers.
- In 1976 a picture of children in a day-nursery in the GDR is taken: The children, coming out of the shower, were dressed up in terry cloth suits with stripes. The same year the photograph with the happily laughing boys and girls wins the contest "a beautiful picture". Two years later a small part of the photograph can be seen in a Christian magazine in West-Germany, supposedly showing children from a concentration camp in the USSR. The smiling faces now seem to scream. (source: Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ed.): Bilder, die lügen. Begleitbuch zur Ausstellung im Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Bonn 1998, p. 79)
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The magic word is credibility.
Disinformation can mean leaving out important informations. Telling lies is not the only method of disinformation. The not telling also creates thoughts and delegates them into certain directions, whereas other models of thinking are left out.
Like this, the deaths on the own side are adjusted downwards whereas the victims of the enemy are counted proudly - as long as they are not civilians. The post-Gulf War period demonstrated how the population reacts if the number of innocent victims is much higher than expected. It was the fact of those numbers that provoked the biggest part of the post-war critique.
The media in democratic states tend to criticize this, which does not mean that they always want to be free of governmental influence. They can choose to help the government in a single case by not writing anything against it or by writing pro-government stories.
At the same time every democracy has undemocratic parts in it - which is already part of democracy itself. There are situations when a democratic government may find it essential to put pressure on the media to inform the population in a certain way; and also censorship is nothing that can only be connected to dictatorship; just think of the Falkland War, the Gulf-War or the Kosovo-War.
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DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)
The debates in the House and Senate preceding the signing into law of the DMCA by U.S. President Clinton in October 1998 indicated that the principal object of the Act is to promote the U.S. economy by establishing an efficient Internet marketplace in copyrighted works. The DMCA implements the two 1996
A full-text version of the DMCA is available from:
The Library of Congress: Thomas (Legislative Information on the Internet):
Moreover the U.S. Copyright Office provides a memorandum, which briefly summarizes each of the five titles of the DMCA (pdf format):
The DMCA has been criticized for not clarifying the range of legal principles on the liability of ISPs and creating exceptions to only some of the provisions; therefore giving copyright owners even more rights.
Among the variety of comments on the DMCA are:
Lutzker, Arnold P.: Primer on the Digital Millennium: What the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Copyright Term Extension Act Mean for the Library Community.
Lutzker & Lutzker law firm and the Association of Research Libraries: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act: Highlights of New Copyright Provision Establishing Limitation of Liability for Online Service Providers.
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The result of this informatisation is the creation of a virtual body which is the exterior of a man or woman's social existence. It plays the same role that the physical body, except located in virtual space (it has no real location). The virtual body holds a certain emancipatory potential. It allows us to go to places and to do things which in the physical world would be impossible. It does not have the weight of the physical body, and is less conditioned by physical laws. It therefore allows one to create an identity of one's own, with much less restrictions than would apply in the physical world.
But this new freedom has a price. In the shadow of virtualisation, the data body has emerged. The data body is a virtual body which is composed of the files connected to an individual. As the
The virtual character of the data body means that social regulation that applies to the real body is absent. While there are limits to the manipulation and exploitation of the real body (even if these limits are not respected everywhere), there is little regulation concerning the manipulation and exploitation of the data body, although the manipulation of the data body is much easier to perform than that of the real body. The seizure of the data body from outside the concerned individual is often undetected as it has become part of the basic structure of an informatised society. But data bodies serve as raw material for the "New Economy". Both business and governments claim access to data bodies. Power can be exercised, and democratic decision-taking procedures bypassed by seizing data bodies. This totalitarian potential of the data body makes the data body a deeply problematic phenomenon that calls for an understanding of data as social construction rather than as something representative of an objective reality. How data bodies are generated, what happens to them and who has control over them is therefore a highly relevant political question.
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The Internet Societal Task Force is an organization under the umbrella of the Internet Society dedicated to assure that the Internet is for everyone by identifying and characterizing social and economic issues associated with the growth and use of Internet. It supplements the technical tasks of the
Topics under discussion are social, economic, regulatory, physical barriers to the use of the Net, privacy, interdependencies of Internet penetration rates and economic conditions, regulation and taxation.
A branch of
According to the
Copyright laws generally provide for three kinds of neighboring rights: 1) the rights of performing artists in their performances, 2) the rights of producers of phonograms in their phonograms, and 3) the rights of broadcasting organizations in their radio and television programs. Neighboring rights attempt to protect those who assist intellectual creators to communicate their message and to disseminate their works to the public at large.
Newsgroups are on-line discussion groups on the Usenet. Over 20,000 newsgroups exist, organized by subject into hierarchies. Each subject hierarchy is further broken down into subcategories. Covering an incredible wide area of interests and used intensively every day, they are an important part of the Internet.
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The first half of the 20th century was the era of the vacuum tube in electronics. This variety of electron tube permitted the development of radio broadcasting, long-distance