Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Monday, August 15, 2011

How to limit uncivil liberties

Here's a follow-up to the news reported here yesterday, that Iranian authorities were trying to stop smart phone-organized water gun fights. Those authorities were thinking about what happened in Egypt and what's happening in Syria. Others are thinking about what happened in London, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.

We all (assuming that most readers here live in liberal democracies) support freedom of speech, don't we? What do we do when that freedom is used for illegal purposes? Can we effectively prohibit illegal speech? What about shutting down the means of communication? What about prohibiting some speech before it is made?

Political leaders in the UK are discussing just such issues. Would these questions come up in other places under other regimes? Well, in China there seems to be some "I told you so" sentiment (see second article). The Chinese would probably also cheer the actions taken by San Francisco's BART.

London riots: Britain weighs personal freedoms against need to keep order

After four nights of lawlessness that has upended British society and seen 1,200 alleged looters and arsonists swept off the streets, the government is also targeting a digital culprit: social media.

Governments from China to the authoritarian regimes challenged by the Arab Spring have sought to control social networking sites, fearing their power to connect and organize dissidents hungry for democracy. But Britain is weighing an unprecedented move to intervene in the personal communication of its citizens after concluding just the opposite: that social media, including BlackBerry Messenger and Twitter, are undermining its vibrant democracy…

[Prime Minister] Cameron said… that officials were working with the intelligence services and police to look at how and whether to “stop people communicating via these Web sites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”…

Furthering a nascent debate here over civil rights in the aftermath of the riots were additional emergency measures outlined by Cameron.

The government announced that it would start slapping “gang injunctions” — now used for adults — on underage teens, using court-ordered restraining orders to ban them, for instance, from wearing gang colors or walking around their neighborhoods with attack dogs.

Police have also been authorized to force suspicious-looking people who have their faces covered by, say, bandannas and “hoodies” — the uniform of British hooligans and gang members — to identify themselves. The government is also reviewing the possibility of imposing curfews…

[L]awmakers across the political spectrum were condemning the role of social media in the riots, calling for a way to blunt their use as tools of violence…

Britain's U-turn over web-monitoring

The British government, once an ardent advocate of absolute Internet freedom, has thus made a U-turn over its stance towards web-monitoring.

Communications tools such as Facebook and cellphones also played a delicate role in the massive social upheaval earlier this year in north Africa and neighboring west Asian countries, whose governments then imposed targeted censorship over message flows on the Internet.

In a speech delivered in Kuwait in February, the British prime minister, however, argued that freedom of expression should be respected "in Tahrir Square as much as Trafalgar Square."

Learning a hard lesson from bitter experience, the British government eventually recognized that a balance needs to be struck between freedom and the monitoring of social media tools.

Cameron himself admitted that the "free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill."

"And when people are using social media for violence, we need to stop them," he told lawmakers Thursday.

We may wonder why western leaders, on the one hand, tend to indiscriminately accuse other nations of monitoring, but on the other take for granted their steps to monitor and control the Internet.

They are not interested in learning what content those nations are monitoring, let alone their varied national conditions or their different development stages.

Laying undue emphasis on Internet freedom, the western leaders become prejudiced against those "other than us," stand ready to put them in the dock and attempt to stir up their internal conflicts…

And, before you begin to think the issue is only outisde the USA

Bay Area Officials Cut Cell Coverage to Thwart Protestors

To nip protest in the bud, authorities cut off a public communications system…

The Bay Area Rapid Transit, or Bart, as the system is known, was worried about a group called No Justice No Bart, which is protesting the fatal shooting of a 45-year-old man by Bart police officers last month…

Officials were concerned that the protestors “would use mobile devices to coordinate their disruptive activities and communicate about the location and number of Bart police,” the transit agency said Friday afternoon in a statement. Cutting off cellphone service for several hours at selected stations was “one of many tactics to ensure the safety of everyone on the platform,” Bart said…

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Labels: civil society, rule-of-law, UK