the "Ministry of Information" (not from Harry Potter)
There has been a significant amount of blogging and press regarding anonymity on the Internet. I have recently blogged on the subject.
However, now I am taking a look at the issue from the other side. In the back of my mind, I knew there were two sides to “authentic sources” and the Internet but the shock of that recent story skewed my internal debate. Here is a justification to support the need for anonymity. China’s Ministry of Information proposed a “real-name blogger registration system”. As if to demonstrate the problem …
The first meeting about the real-name blogger registration system two weeks ago was disclosed by the media, and it caused a stir everywhere.
Source: Zhao Ling (??)
I don’t have a good answer. How do we balance human rights ? It’s not right to allow one person to malign another behind an “identity cloak”. At the same time, how are people supposed to speak out against injustice if they will be persecuted and prosecuted.
March 31st, 2007 at 08:36
The China development will have exactly the effect the government there is looking for I think: modulation of speech on blogs. At least for a while it will… until some inventive technologist invents something to get around government policies.
It’s very interesting for me to watch “US” companies get turned into China’s little helpers in their campaign to keep the lid on the internet.
To wit, the “Don’t be evil” folks at Google tweaked their search engine results to omit distasteful terms like “democracy” etc..
Friendly, laid back Yahoo! on the west coast has a subsidiary in China who turned over names of cyberdissidents to the government. The rounded up rascals are serving long jail sentences now. Yahoo! hides behind the tired, well-used refrain of all big companies “We don’t have control over the day-to-day operations of our subsidiaries.” The subsidiary recently was cleared of wrong doing because it did not violate “local privacy” regulations.
Even “Where do you want to go?” Microsoft has been helping to censor Chinese blogs..