Censorship Of The World Wide Web

Over the years, there has always been a lot of controversy surrounding the topic of whether or not the government should be able to monitor our activity on the internet. This especially become a huge debate more recently simply because of the many terrorist attacks and dangerous events that we’ve encountered. Many believe that if the government was given more insight to what the people of this country looked at on the internet, then they would be able to prevent many horrible things from happening. On the other hand, however, others feel that this is a violation of personal privacy and therefore should not be allowed. The government already monitors our internet usage but they are thinking of increasing what they monitory which has lead to many differing opinions among the people of the United States of America.

People say that if the government were to censor what users can have access to on the internet, it will make it harder for terrorists to recruit people and even impossible to recruit them online. A problem arises if the government abuses its power. For example, if the government were to see something that don’t agree with say for instance a user on a website attempting to organize a peaceful protest, it could be labeled as an act of terrorism by the government just to get it removed. Actions like these may not happen in the United States but they do happen in other countries where their government has control over almost everything that its citizens have access to. Sally Driscoll and Tracey M. DiLasio said in the article titled “Counterpoint: There is no Need to Create New Censorship Laws Specifically for the Internet” “the influence of the Internet continues to spread around the world, many countries are struggling with the question of how best to control it. The worst censorship occurs in countries such as China, North Korea, and Vietnam. Saudi Arabia and Iran maintain the tightest Internet controls in the Middle East. Some of these ideals may also violate human rights laws.” Punishment for anything that may seem controversial in the eyes of the government in some of these countries can range from imprisonment to being tortured to death. There are people within some of these countries that may have family members outside of the country and their only means of communicating are through the internet. In some countries, you can be sentenced to death just by talking with someone outside of the

Censorship has existed since the early ages, dating back to the pre-common era. One of the earliest records of censorship can be found in the Office of the Censor, founded in 443 B.C. to help the Roman council oversee “public morality”.

These actions and more perpetrated by the American government are merely the beginnings of an extremely invasive government. If precautions aren’t enacted now, it will be difficult to eventually halt the institution of a society like Oceania, “If we are going to hold up 1984 as a cautionary tale…we should look to bolster our Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights, [and] update legislation like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act…” (thehill.com). In addition to limiting free thought, censorship in any form can alter the way people view what is real.

We think that by going to Incognito Mode on Chrome or to a Private Browsing Window on Safari, all our browsing history will not be recorded. That seems a bit hard to believe – what stays on the net stays on the net. You have already made a digital footprint and you cannot erase it. Therefore the government will have the liberty to see what we have searched when really, we do not want that. These days, the Internet has heightened censorship than in previous years due to exponential growth in globalisation, enabled by communications technology, global markets and transport technology. Indubitably, cyber is integrated within our economy and consequently, it affects the political landscape. The government must regulate Internet traffic, but not without invading our privacy. Somehow, they need to be conscious of both parties. They cannot abolish our basic right of privacy but at the same time, they need to keep us citizens safe by monitoring the political landscape. Privacy is something that we all hope to seek, but there would be no ways of achieving this if they do not balance these two

George Bernard Shaw once said, “The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.” Internet censorship is the control or suppression of what can be accessed, published, or viewed on the Internet. In other words, one day you might not be able to Google everything you want to know as you can now. Although the Internet can be a dangerous without caution, countries need not to censor the Internet for their own selfish reasons. Internet censorship is a form of a dictatorship, and they can cause riots as well as take away our first amendment right.

This source relates to my research topic because I will be explaining how China is an example of a country using Internet Censorship. This article states the pros/cons that come with Internet censorship.

The NSA has the ability to monitor and regulate anything and everything people do on the internet. However citizens do have rights and laws to protect them from when and what they monitor them on. The NSA on all levels of government must have probable cause in order to monitor what is on or what people are doing on the internet. However once somebody brings attention to their activity on the internet, the NSA is then allowed to check it out. The NSA has teamed up with many large search engines such as: google,bing,yahoo,firefox and many others to have access to recent search history and sites visited from each user. These search engines are not allowed to release your information without the NSA having a suspicion or reason to believe that you are performing illicit

The Worstall article discusses the strategy to end censorship of the internet in two ways. The first is to switch the Chinese search engine and then redirect users to a mirrored version (Worstall, 2015). Google’s settings are precise and competitive with numerous search engines such as Ask.com, Bing, Yahoo, to name a few. To bring down the China firewalls, Google has the capability to do so without interference from Chinese authorities, however, this is a big gamble for Google. Services such as Gmail have been difficult to access in the past, nevertheless, Google is used globally and “blocking the company entirely would have immediate and disastrous economic consequences” (Smith, 2013).

Censorship means controlling what information a person or group of people can access. Censorship in China is used as a tool to monitor any citizen wanting to discuss their communist party’s ideals. “In China there is a very genuine fear of an uncontrolled internet and social media being a really serious threat to Communist Party control over the country.” “China’s censors are well trained and are equipped to identify content that poses a potential challenge to the Chinese Communist Party’s social and ideological control.” China censors almost all the media its citizens have access to including television, news, magazines, books, and the largest source of information: the the internet. “Soon after China tip-toed onto the internet in the late

eventually taken down due to copyrights and legality it trespassed in, but even after its demise, many new sites that allowed torrenting and other p2p file sharing began to spring up all over the internet. This led to the development of many of the sites that are still around today, such as the recently deceased Pirate Bay, Bittorrent, and many others. With the development of all of these newfound websites, it set the way for internet downloading as never seen before. People had before been restricted to VHS and CD burners, but never before something of this magnitude. With the massive increase in pirating done over the internet, companies and individuals soon became aware of the possibilities that could happen if their music or product became available to pirate.

Censorship was considered to be a legitimate limit for governments to regulate the moral and political life. It has lasted for thousands of years from the origin of society and the earliest censorship of government can be traced back to the office of censor established in Rome, the Greek communities(Newth, 2010). However, censorship has become a controversial issue and has created significant debate over whether the government should censor the media. Many philosophers in the history have similar opinions as Thomas Carlyle who argued that "every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man! " which can mistake the role of censorship.

In the end, the Internet has been a medium facilitating them to form a set of unique mechanism and system, on which they train their staff and contact partners. There is no denying that online network has served as their tool to overturn the government. In addition, when the Internet surveillance technology can be used to detect criminal activities and terrorism, but there are privacy concerns (Dinev et al., 2008). To make it further, the existence of Internet has also posed threats to the rights of privacy, one of the basic human rights. (Martin, 2014), a columnist with The New York Times, observed that the US government’s attempt to create an all-encompassing, all-seeing, database of its citizens is an “attempt to create an Orwellian ‘virtual, centralized grand database,’ which could put a spyglass on American’s every move, from literally the way Americans move to their virtual moves, scanning shopping, e-mail, bank deposits, vacations, medical prescriptions, academic grades and trips to the vet”. For instance, in June 2013, an American technical analyst, Edward Snowden exposed the PRISM, official name as “US-984XN”. This program was an electronic monitoring system initiated by NSA since George Walker Bush was in the office. According to the documents released by Snowden that NSA had been accessible to large amounts of personal chatting information, storage data, voice messages, file transference, individual

There are lots of countries that use internet censorship. A few of them are China, North Korea, and Russia. China is one of the leaders in using and censoring the internet. They have the biggest internet censorship system on the globe. Their system grew rapidly compared to most of the other countries censorship systems.

Internet censorship is developing far and wide and influences us, regardless that as United States citizens, we have additional technological opportunities than what many other nations do. Numerous Americans underestimate the opportunities that living in the United States permits us. Whether we are sending electronic mail, posting on our social media pages, or seeking out the latest news, we are ensured the opportunity of self-expression and an inexhaustible amount of information right at our fingertips. Censorship takes control of people's expression, and many countries, governments, and leaders support it for this reason. Internet Censorship in the United States in comparison to different nations brings to light the global and ethical issue regarding the basic human rights of education, communication, and freedom.