Word: censorships
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Less serious, but no less rancorous or symbolic, was the allegation of censorship in the publication of the U.N.'s own 50th-anniversary commemorative book, A Vision of Hope. The editor, Jonathan Power, a British journalist, protested that the U.N. staff made extensive cuts in the manuscript that 15 writers had turned in. Power says more than 70 references were deleted and most focused on nations cited for abusing human rights or failing to sign the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights...
Civil libertarians were outraged. Mike Godwin, staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, complained that the indecency portion of the bill would transform the vast library of the Internet into a children's reading room, where only subjects suitable for kids could be discussed. "It's government censorship," said Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "The First Amendment shouldn't end where the Internet begins...
...technical reasons, it is extremely difficult to stamp out anything on the Internet--particularly images stored on the Usenet newsgroups. As Internet pioneer John Gilmore famously put it, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." There are border issues as well. Other countries on the Internet--France, for instance--are probably no more interested in having their messages screened by U.S. censors than Americans would be in having theirs screened by, say, the government of Saudi Arabia...
Historians say it should come as no surprise that the Internet--the most democratic of media--would lead to new calls for censorship. The history of pornography and efforts to suppress it are inextricably bound up with the rise of new media and the emergence of democracy. According to Walter Kendrick, author of The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture, the modern concept of pornography was invented in the 19th century by European gentlemen whose main concern was to keep obscene material away from women and the lower classes. Things got out of hand with the spread of literacy...
...designed to answer a fundamental concern of parents, educators and even employers: How can porn be prevented from coming into computers? Fearful that Congress will try to stifle cyberspace with overly broad antismut laws, computer hackers and civil libertarians are promoting such desktop remedies as a way to keep censorship where they think it belongs--in the home...