Protecting speech on the global data networks attracts an increasing attention. The efforts and the corresponding abilities of governmental authorities, corporations and copyright enforcement agencies are countered by similar efforts and abilities of researchers and engineers to provide means for anonymous and uncensored communication, as Freenet, Free Haven and Publius. All three of them show a similar design. Content is split up and spread on several servers. When a file is requested, the pieces are reassembled. This design makes it difficult to censor content. All of these systems are not commercial products.
The most advanced system seems to be Publius. Because of being designed by researchers and engineers at the prestigious
For more information on Publius, see John Schwartz, Online and Unidentifiable? in: The Washington Post, June 30, 2000,
Freenet web site:
Free Haven web site:
Publius web site:
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There is no society - in the past or in the present - free of censorship, the enforced restriction of speech. It is not restricted to authoritarian regimes. Democratic societies too aim at the control of the publication and distribution of information in order to prevent unwanted expressions. In every society some expressions, ideas or opinions are feared. Censored are books, magazines, films and videos, and computer games, e.g.
In defence of its monopoly of truth, the Catholic Church published a blacklist of books not allowed to be read: the Index librorum prohibitorum. As indicated by the fact that every declaration of human rights - including the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights and the
To a high degree the Protestant Reformation was made possible by the invention of the printing press. Now those who were capable of writing and reading no longer needed to rely on the priests to know what is written in the Bible. They could compare the Bible with the sermons of the priests. This may be one of the reasons why especially in countries with a strong Protestant or otherwise anti-catholic tradition (with the exception of Germany), free speech is held in such high esteem.
There seems to be no alternative: free speech without restriction or censorship. But censorship is not the only kind of restriction of speech. Speech codes as politically correct speech are restrictions, sometimes similar to censorship; copyright, accessibility and affordability of means of communication are other ones. Because of such restrictions different to censorship, we cannot think coherently about free speech independently of issues about social justice. Many campaigns for free speech, the right of free expression are backed by the concept of free speech as unconstrained speech. That is perfectly well understood under the auspices of regimes prominently, which try to silence their critics and restrict access to their publications. But the concept of free speech should not solely focus on such constrains. Thinking of free speech as unconstrained speech, we tend to forget to take into account - to campaign against - these other restrictions. Additionally, free expression understood in that way offers no clue how to practice this freedom of expression and what free speech is good for.
In liberal democratic societies censorship is not justified by recurring to absolute truth. Its necessity is argued by referring to personal integrity. Some kind of expression might do harm to individuals, especially to children, by traumatize them or by disintegrating personal morality. Some published information, such as the names of rape victims, might infringe some people's right on privacy or some, as others say, such as pornographic images or literature, e.g., infringes some people's right on equality (how?).
For more information on the history of censorship see
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According to a still widely held conviction, the global data networks constitute the long desired arena for uncensorable expression. This much is true: Because of the Net it has become increasingly difficult to sustain cultural and legal standards. Geographical proximity and territorial boundaries prove to be less relevant, when it does not affect a document's availability if it is stored on your desktop or on a host some thousand kilometers away. There is no international agreement on non-prohibited contents, so human rights organizations and nazi groups alike can bypass restrictions. No single authority or organization can impose its rules and standards on all others. This is why the Net is public space, a political arena where free expression is possible.
This freedom is conditioned by the design of the Net. But the Net's design is not a given, as
When the World Wide Web was introduced, soon small independent media and human rights organizations began to use this platform for drawing worldwide attention to their publications and causes. It seemed to be the dawning of a new era with authoritarian regimes and multinational media corporations on the looser side. But now the Net's design is changing according to their needs.
"In every context that it can, the entertaining industry is trying to force the Internet into its own business model: the perfect control of content. From music (fighting MP3) and film (fighting the portability of DVD) to television, the industry is resisting the Net's original design. It was about the free flow of content; Hollywood wants perfect control instead" (Lawrence Lessig,
In the United States, Hollywood and
For small independent media it will become very hard to be heard, especially for those offering streaming video and music. Increasingly faster data transmissions just apply to download capacities; upload capacities are much - on the average about eight times - lower than download capacities. As an AT&T executive said in response to criticism: "We haven't built a 56 billion dollar cable network to have the blood sucked from our veins" (
Consumers, not producers are preferred.
For corporations what remains to be done to control the Net is mainly to cope with the fact that because of the Net it has become increasingly difficult to sustain cultural and legal standards. On Nov 11, 1995 the German prosecuting attorney's office searched Compuserve Germany, the branch of an international Internet service provider, because the company was suspected of having offered access to child pornography. Consequently Compuserve blocked access to more than 200
Also in 1995, as an attack on US Vice-President Al Gore's intention to supply all public schools with Internet access, Republican Senator Charles Grassley warned of the lurking dangers for children on the Net. By referring to a Time magazine cover story by Philip Elmer-Dewitt from July 3 on pornography on the Net, he pointed out that 83,5% of all images online are pornographic. But Elmer-Dewitt was wrong. Obviously unaware of the difference between
Almost inevitably anxieties accompany the introduction of new technologies. In the 19th century it was said that traveling by train is bad for health. The debate produced by Time magazine's cover story and Senator Grassley's attack caused the impression that the Net has multiplied possible dangers for children. The global communication networks seem to be a inexhaustible source of mushrooming child pornography. Later would-be bomb recipes found on the Net added to already prevailing anxieties. As even in industrialized countries most people still have little or no first-hand experience with the Net, anxieties about child pornography or terrorist attacks can be stirred up and employed easily.
A similar and related debate is going on about the glorification of violence and erotic depictions in media. Pointing to a "toxic popular culture" shaped by media that "distort children's view of reality and even undermine their character growth", US right-wing social welfare organizations and think tanks call for strong media censorship. (See An Appeal to Hollywood,
The intentions for stimulating a debate on child pornography on the Net were manifold: Inter alia, it served the Republican Party to attack Democrat Al Gore's initiative to supply all public schools with Internet access; additionally, the big media corporations realized that because of the Net they might have to face new competitors and rushed to press for content regulation. Taking all these intentions together, we can say that this still ongoing debate constitutes the first and most well known attempt to impose content regulation on the Net. Consequently, at least in Western countries, governments and media corporations refer to child pornography for justifying legal requirement and the implementation of technologies for the surveillance and monitoring of individuals, the filtering, rating and blocking of content, and the prohibition of anonymous publishing on the Net.
In the name of "cleaning" the Net of child pornography, our basic rights are restricted. It is the insistence on unrestricted basic rights that needs to be justified, as it may seem.
Underlying the campaign to control the Net are several assumptions. Inter alia: The Net lacks control and needs to be made safe and secure; we may be exposed inadvertently to pornographic content; this content is harmful to children. Remarkably, racism seems to be not an issue.
The Net, especially the World Wide Web, is not like television (although it is to be feared this is what it might become like within the next years). Say, little Mary types "Barbie" in a search engine. Click
In reaction to these anxieties, but in absence of data how children use the Internet, the US government released the Communications Decency Act (CDA) in 1996. In consequence the
So, after the failing of the CDA the US government has shifted its responsibility to the industry by inviting corporations to taking on governmental tasks. Bearing in the mind the CompuServe case and its possible consequences, the industry welcomed this decision and was quick to call this newly assumed responsibility "self-regulation". Strictly speaking, "self-regulation" as meant by the industry does not amount to the regulation of the behaviour of corporations by themselves. On the opposite, "self-regulation" is to be understood as the regulation of users' behaviour by the rating, filtering and blocking of Internet content considered being inappropriate. The Internet industry tries to show that technical solutions are more favourable than legislation und wants to be sure, not being held responsible and liable for illegal, offensive or harmful content. A new CompuServe case and a new Communications Decency Act shall be averted.
In the Memorandum
In fact, the "self-regulation" of the Internet industry is privatized censorship performed by corporations and right-wing NGOs. Censorship has become a business. "Crucially, the lifting of restrictions on market competition hasn't advanced the cause of freedom of expression at all. On the contrary, the privatisation of cyberspace seems to be taking place alongside the introduction of heavy censorship." (
While trying to convince us that its technical solutions are appropriate alternatives to government regulation, the Internet industry cannot dispense of governmental backing to enforce the proposed measures. This adds to and enforces the censorship measures already undertaken by governments. We are encouraged to use today's information and communication technologies, while the flow of information is restricted.
According to a report by Reporters Sans Frontières, quoted by Leonard R. Sussman in his essay
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"Freedom of anonymous speech is an essential component of free speech."
Ian Goldberg/David Wagner,
Someone wants to hide one's identity, to remain anonymous, if s/he fears to be holding accountable for something, say, a publication, that is considered to be prohibited. Anonymous publishing has a long tradition in European history. Writers of erotic literature or pamphlets, e. g., preferred to use pseudonyms or publish anonymously. During the Enlightenment books as d'Alembert's and Diderot's famous Encyclopaedia were printed and distributed secretly. Today
The original design of the Net, as far as it is preserved, offers a relatively high degree of privacy, because due to the client-server model all what is known about you is a report of the machine from which information was, respectively is requested. But this design of the Net interferes with the wish of corporations to know you, even to know more about you than you want them to know. What is euphemistically called customer relationship management systems means the collection, compilation and analysis of personal information about you by others.
In 1997 America Online member Timothy McVeigh, a Navy employee, made his homosexuality publicly known in a short autobiographical sketch. Another Navy employee reading this sketch informed the Navy. America Online revealed McVeigh's identity to the Navy, who discharged McVeigh. As the consequence of a court ruling on that case, Timothy McVeigh was allowed to return to the Navy. Sometimes anonymity really matters.
On the Net you still have several possibilities to remain anonymous. You may visit web sites via an
In Germany, in 1515, printers had to swear not to print or distribute any publication bypassing the councilmen. Today repressive regimes, such as
Anonymity might be used for abuses, that is true, but "the burden of proof rests with those who would seek to limit it. (Rob Kling, Ya-ching Lee, Al Teich, Mark S. Frankel, Assessing Anonymous Communication on the Internet: Policy Deliberations, in: The Information Society, 1999).
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The World Wide Web is constituted by documents linked with other documents, thus allowing access to referred documents. Censorship affects hyperlinks as well. Say, you publish an essay on racist propaganda on the Net and make link references to neo-nazi web sites. It goes without saying that you do not endorse neo-nazi pamphlets. By linking to these web sites you want your readers to get an idea of what you are writing about. Linking does not necessarily mean approving. Is this not evident?
According to Swiss and German prosecuting attorneys you may have committed a crime without having illegal intentions. From his web site Thomas Stricker, director of the Institute of Computer Systems at the ETH Zurich, has linked to an anti-racist web site with links to racist content in order to draw the attention to the difficulties legal regulation of the Net has to face. Neglecting his intentions, Swiss authorities instituted a criminal action against Stricker.
Another case, reported by the Global Internet Liberty Campaign, proves that not just links to racist resources or to resources with links to such resources are under prosecution. The Motion Picture Association of America sued to prevent Internet users from linking to websites that have DeCSS, a program helping Linux users play DVDs on their computers. The trial is scheduled for December.
References:
Global Internet Liberty Campaign, Hollywood wants end to links, in: GILC Alert 4,4, April 24, 2000, http://www.gilc.org/alert/alert44.html
Wolfgang Näser, Allgemeines zum Thema "Homepage",
Florian Rötzer, Ab wann ist ein externer Link auf strafrechtlich relevante Inhalte selbst strafbar?, in:
Florian Rötzer, Strafverfahren gegen ETH-Professor wegen Links zu rassistischen Websites, in:
Florian Rötzer, Ab wievielen Zwischenschritten ist ein Link auf eine rechtswidrige Website strafbar, in:
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Until now it was not possible to find out the specific segmenting of intelligence budgets as far as the ECHELON project is concerned. Many experts agree that ECHELON specific costs are woven into the complex budgets of several intelligence units. Money comes also from the host countries and Partners in the UKUSA Agreement.
For further reading:
Refocus Intelligence Priorities:
>Approximately $27.6 Billion requested for 1999. The Congress has proposed an increase over the Clinton administration request. Almost all of this effort is devoted to exploiting the disciplines that were of primary importance during the Cold War: imagery intelligence [IMINT], signals intelligence [SIGINT], and human intelligence [HUMINT]. But with the end of the Cold War new disciplines, measurements and signature intelligence [MASINT] and open source intelligence [OSINT] are of far greater relevance to contemporary and emerging security concerns and intelligence needs, ranging from counter-proliferation activities to peace-keeping operations.<
Organization Annual Budget Staff
NRO 6,2 billion $ 1.700
NSA 3,6 billion $ 21.000 (- 40.000?)
CIA 3,1 billion $ 16.000
For comparison: CSE has only a $200-300 million dollar budget.
In 1988 Duncan Campbell wrote (
And another view on the relation between the several intelligence units as far as budget is concerned: "Spying Budget Is Made Public By Mistake", By Tim Weiner The New York Times, November 5 1994
>By mistake, a Congressional subcommittee has published an unusually detailed breakdown of the highly classified "black budget" for United States intelligence agencies. In previously defeating a bill that would have made this information public, the White House, CIA and Pentagon argued that revealing the secret budget would cause GRAVE DAMAGE to the NATIONAL SECURITY of the United States. $3.1 billion for the CIA $10.4 billion for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines special-operations units $13.2 billion for the NSA/NRO/DIA <
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The ECHELON project was designed and is coordinated by NSA to intercept ordinary e-mail, fax, telex and telephone communications throughout the global telecommunications networks. Its purpose is the surveillance of non-military targets, such as governments, organizations, businesses and individuals. The goal of the system is to intercept large quantities of communications and analyze the gathered data using sophisticated processing hard- and software to identify and extract messages of interest. The ECHELON processing equipment searches through huge amounts of intercepted communications for keywords. Those keywords contain concepts, names, locations, subjects, personal data of individuals,... The processing computers are known as ECHELON Dictionaries.
Without the investigative publications of James Bamford, Duncan Campbell, Nicky Hager, Jeffrey T. Richelson, William Burrows and others ECHELON would never have made its way to public notice and would have never led to alarming public opinion.
In 1948 the former alliance of USA, UK, Canada, Australia an New Zealand established in World War II was formalized into the UKUSA Signals and Intelligence agreement to aim primarily together against the former USSR, although reades of the agreement say, that it is definitely only signed by the United States and Britain. (Nicky Hager, Secret Power, New Zealand's role in the internatinal spy network, Craig Potton, 1996, p61)
The UKUSA nations also agreed to standardize their terminology, code words, intercept-handling procedures, and indoctrination oaths, for efficiency as well as security. NATO nations and other nations as Japan and Korea later signed on as third parties. Among the first and second parties there is a general agreement not to restrict data, but with the third parties the sharing is much less generous.
Now the functions have shifted to interception ranging from diplomatic communications, to industrial espionage. Keytargets are besides political and military intelligence, terrorism, weapons construction and proliferation and economic intelligence. Rumors are heard that the US intelligence agencies use their foreign stations also for monitoring their allies. It seems that the UKUSA alliance is maintaining around 120 known surveillance stations, some huge and some very small or even functioning fully automatically, but rumors go that the number of small SIGINT surveillance stations might also be as high as 4900.
UKUSA:
>UK-US SIGINT co-operation began in 1940, during World War II close intelligence relationships also between other countries of the Commonwealth and the United States were formed. New Zealand f.e. was involved in submarine operations and served as basis for American troops fighting against Japan in the pacific. In Spring 1941 four representatives (two from the Navy and two from the Army) delivered a model of the Japanese PURPLE machine--used by Japan to encipher diplomatic communications to British codebreakers at Bletchley Park. In return, the British gave the U.S. representatives an assortment of advanced cryptological equipment, including the Marconi-Adcock high-frequency direction finder. (see p312 in James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1982). Meanwhile, it was agreed that the British would break Tokyo-London traffic while the Americans broke Tokyo-Washington traffic. The results of the U.S. codebreaking effort that were considered useful to Britain in its war with Germany were passed to London via the British ambassador in Washington.<
(Ronald Lewin, The American Magic: Codes, ciphers and the Defeat of Japan, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1982, p46)
>U.S. entry into the war expanded the exchange of intercepted military traffic because of necessary arrangements for a coordinated attack on diplomatic traffic. Britain's production of such intelligence was labeled ULTRA.<
(Ronald Lewin, The American Magic: Codes, ciphers and the Defeat of Japan, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1982, p47)
>Although ULTRA information was made available to U.S. and British military commanders via Special Liaison Units, the exact nature of its acquisition was initially obscured. It was not until April 1943 that the British revealed to U.S. military intelligence officials the secret--that Britain's codebreaking organization could break the ciphers produced by the German ENIGMA machine used for much of German military communications.< (James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1982, p314)
UK-US SIGINT co-operation was formalized on 17 May 1943 with the conclusion of the still-secret, and possibly still-active, BRUSA COMINT agreement. The complete text of BRUSA, including its appendices, was released by the National Security Agency (NSA) in November 1995. Text and appendices are published in Cryptologia, "The BRUSA Agreement of May 17, 1943," 21, no. 1 (Jan. 1997): p30-38. That agreement led to extensive cooperation between the US Army's SIGINT Agency and the British Code and Cipher School.
>The BRUSA Agreement established high-level cooperation on SIGINT matters and covered the exchange of personnel, joint regulations for the handling of ULTRA material, and procedures for its distribution. The joint regulations included strict security provisions that applied to all British and U.S. recipients of ULTRA material.<(James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1982, p315)
>Along with the increased cooperation between Britain and the United States, there was increased involvement by the Anglo-Saxon members of the British
Commonwealth--Canada, Australia, and New Zealand--in a wide variety of intelligence activities. U.S.-Canadian cooperation began in October 1941, when the Canadians offered the Federal Communications Commission free access to the product of Canadian monitoring activities. In return, the United States provided Canada with technical direction-finding data that were "invaluable for pinpointing the location of a transmitter." < (Bob Elliot, Scarlet to Green: Canadian Army Intelligence 1903-1963, Toronto, Canadian Military Intelligence Association, 1982, p461)
>Canadian DF stations subsequently made significant contributions to the Allied North Atlantic SIGINT/ocean surveillance network. The Canadian codebreaking agency was also successful in intercepting and decoding German espionage control messages to and from agents in South America, Canada, Hamburg and Lisbon. In addition, messages to and from the Vichy delegation in Ottawa were intercepted and decoded. Further, the peculiarities of radio wave propagation resulted in Canadian monitoring facilities being able to intercept military transmissions originating in Europe that were inaccessible to equipment based in Britain.< (F.H. Hinsley, E.E. Thomas, C.F.G. Ransom, and R.C. Knight, British Intelligence in the Second World War Volume 2, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 551ff)
>In addition to its UKUSA participation, Canada's SIGINT relationship to the United States is defined by the CANUS agreement. On September 15, 1950, Canada and the United States exchanged letters formally recognizing the "Security Agreement between Canada and the United States of America" (which was followed exactly two months later by the "Arrangement for Exchange of Information between the U.S., U.K. and Canada'').< (Jeffrey T. Richelson, The U.S. Intelligence Community, Westview Press, 4th ed., 1999, p273)
>It was with respect to Japan, however, that SIGINT cooperation among all five nations reached its highest level. Monitoring stations in Canada, particularly the major one at Halifax, gathered large quantities of coded Japanese transmissions. In April 1942, a combined Allied signals intelligence agency for the Pacific, the Central Bureau of the Allied Intelligence Bureau, was activated in Melbourne with a U.S. Chief and an Australian Deputy Chief.< (Jeffrey T. Richelson, The U.S. Intelligence Community, Westview Press, 4th ed., 1999, p267)
>The extent of cooperation is particularly highlighted in the case of Australian intercept stations. There was an Australian Air Force intercept station at Darwin, a U.S. Army radio intercept station in Townsville, a Royal Australian Navy monitoring station at Darwin, and a British post in Brisbane for the interception and distribution of Japanese radio communications. Additionally, a Canadian Special Wireless Group arrived in Australia on May 18, 1945 to take over the task of intercepting and analyzing Japanese military Morse code signals.< (Bob Elliot, Scarlet to Green: Canadian Army Intelligence 1903-1963, Toronto, Canadian Military Intelligence Association, 1982, p385)
>The intelligence relationship among Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States that was forged during World War II did not end with the war. Rather, it became formalized and grew stronger. In 1946 a US Liaison Office was set up in London and efforts for joint exchange operations in the beginning Cold War started. It was agreed that solved material was to be exchanged between the two countries.< (Ronald Clark, The Man Who Broke Purple, Boston, Little Brown, 1977, p208)
>1947 saw an event that set the stage for post-World War II signals intelligence cooperation: the formulation and acceptance of the UKUSA
Agreement, also known as the UK-USA Security Agreement or the "Secret Treaty." The primary aspect of the agreement was the division of SIGINT collection
responsibilities among the First Party (the United States) and the Second Parties (Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand.< (Jeffrey T. Richelson, The U.S. Intelligence Community, Westview Press, 4th ed., 1999, p267)
>The UKUSA relationship (and its SIGINT aspect) is more than an agreement to coordinate separately conducted intelligence activities and share the intelligence collected. Rather, the relationship is cemented by the presence of U.S. facilities on British, Canadian, and Australian territory and by joint operations within and outside UKUSA territory and, in the case of Australia, of U.K. and U.S. staff at all DSD facilities.< (Desmond Ball, A Suitable Peace of Real Estate: American Installations in Australia Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1980, p40)
>In addition to specifying SIGINT collection responsibilities, the Agreement also concerns access to the collected intelligence and security arrangements for the handling of data. Standardized code words (e.g., UMBRA for signals intelligence, VIPRA, TRINE), security agreements that all employees of the respective SIGINT agencies must sign, and procedures for storing and disseminating code word material are all part of the implementation of the Agreement.< (Duncan Campbell, "The Threat of the Electronic Spies," New Statesman, February 2, 1979)
The liaison and cooperation established with the BRUSA, UKUSA and CANUS Agreements during the 1940s were reinforced by William F. Friedman (the "dean of cryptology") during the 1950s and continued to solidify during the 1960s and 1970s.
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