I can just imagine how smug the National Security Council Officer might have looked like when he declared the National Plan to censor the internet.
“It is to keep out pornographic materials and bloggers who inflame racial sentiments. We need to maintain racial harmony. We cannot have full-blown democracy like in the United States,” he told AFP.
“This country must survive,” said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
[...]
The NSC official dismissed suggestions that the proposal echoed China’s aborted ‘Green Dam’ project (right), a plan to introduce Internet filtering software on all new computers sold in the country.
“It is not like China’s Green Dam nor is it a plan sparked by last weekend’s anti-government street protests,” he said, referring to a massive opposition-led rally against laws that allow for detention without trial.
Of course to add to the whole dialogue, the Malaysian Information Communications and Culture Minister said that he wanted to be the protector of all Malaysian children.
The information, communication and culture minister also took a swipe at “liberals” and told them to look at countries that had become “victims” of pornography.
“We cannot compromise on the protection of Malaysian children from pornography,” Rais said when questioned about the Internet filter as reported by The Malaysian Insider yesterday.
“Those who refer to themselves as liberals or liberalism should look to those countries that have become victims where child sex has happened, the moral of pornography has become widespread. So the government will look at ways to overcome this problem,” he added.
I mean who could argue with all of that. Surely we need our government to protect our kids from paedophiles. The conservatives in the country would be jumping for joy with the type of pro-active measures that the government is taking to protect our society. The reality however, reflects the poor understanding of technology that both our National Security Council and Information Minister have. There is one fact that remains that will forever challenge regimes who try to censor the internet – It’s impossible to censor the internet.
If you filter on the basis of keywords, people will use different keywords. When you catch up and filter the new keywords, even newer ones will be invented. If you filter based on IP addresses, servers will just move IPs and people will move on. If you use some proxies, people will use others. If you sniff all traffic, people will use Virtual Private Networks over the internet and bypass your filters. If you choose to block everything, then no commerce can run at all and the country would got to the dogs. But this article is not about divulging techniques of bypassing filters. It is about making sure that the government realises that censoring the internet is an act of stupidity. It not only makes them look bad, it will also be detrimental to the whole nation.
The reality is that this country is at a crossroads. It’s facing a leadership crisis because the leaders are too old to “get” the younger generation. Malaysia is probably the only country in the world where a leader can be classified as a youth leader although he is 45 years old. Hence, these leaders don’t “get it” when the country overwhelming voted against them in the last elections. The root cause they believed was because the online media “influenced” our younger generation and the tradisional hegemony of controlling information via the mainstream press was now lost.
Shoestring budget websites like Malaysiakini.com have equal or even more influence than the government controlled websites. Such a feat was almost unimaginable in 2007.
The country is growing up. In the past,the ruling coalition could say that the internet was irrelevant because not everybody had access to the internet. Today, online newpapers bridge that gap by offering SMS updates pushed directly to your phone for only RM5.00 per month. So yes, even if you don’t have the internet, you can get internet news pushed directly to your mobile phone for an extremely cheap fee. This changes the dynamics of the country significantly. Villagers who have no internet or broadband access can find out about initiatives and how people respond to decrees by government ministers will vary. If 10 years ago a Malaysian minister can declare a new initiative as being “good for the people” and get away with it, today, it will create a huge amount of debate in online circles and “spill” over to the mainstream media.
So the natural solution for many of these old ministers is to censor the internet. After all, if you remove the source of information, the problem should go away. The problem with the internet that regimes like North Korea, Iran and Burma have come to realise is that its tentacles are so widely spread that it is impossible to cover all your bases. People will find a way to get access to the online media because it is impossible to completely shut it out from your country. More importantly, censoring the internet will put Malaysia in the same league as these pariah nations.That is something we just cannot afford in these times.