Internet Censorship

Internet Censorship is becoming a big topic on the web over the last few years. More and more, governments are trying to gain control of the internet, and monitor or censor what their citizens can view, and do on the web. 

The Turkish government has blocked quite a few websites and blogs as of late, and a filtering system is in the making, that may possibly go live on the 22nd of August. This filtering system will make it possible for the government to keep logs of every individual user's activity. As to why or how the system is being put into place, no one really knows. This filter however is an invasion of privacy, as noted by a group of hackers known as "Anonymous". In protest to this recent announcement, they took down Turkey’s Telecommunications Communication Presidency (TIB) which [at the time of this article having been written] is still down.

"Anonymous" and many other hackers have taken to attacking government websites, and other acts of the sort to protest the censorship that is constantly rising in many countries, and they are gaining notice.

Recently, the Protect IP Act has been under the spotlight in the United States, as it passed the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously. If passed, this bill would give authorities the right to legitimately seize any domain name they deem to be facilitating copyright infringement. The bill, also however, states that if a domain is not registered or controlled by a U.S. company, the authorities can also order search engines to take it completely out of their search results, have ISPs block it, and order the ad-networks (that fund the sites operations in most cases) along with the payment processors for said sites to stop providing their services to the site being blocked.

This new bill is targeting mostly "pirates", and those who distribute copyrighted goods over torrent trackers. While this is all fine and dandy, there are more circumstances to be noted with this idea.

One of the more important notable problems that will arise is the fact that not all torrent trackers are used for illegal sharing. In fact, there are many torrents out on the web right now that are perfectly legal. Many webmasters, individuals, and even companies have taken to using the peer to peer technology that took off in the early 2000's to share their freeware programs, and many other free creations of their own, along with other non-copyrighted materials.

Another important consideration to be made is, if this bill does pass, and the government gets the right to being censoring these domains, that might make way for them to grow with their censorship. This bill is already walking a fine line on infringing rights in The First Amendment [despite it's main alleged intent being to combat piracy].

What is your opinion?

Feel free to share them in a comment below, or discuss it on the forums!

The Internet Kill Switch

[Note: This was written with an article via TechCrunch as it's source. You can read the original article here.]

Recently, in both Egypt, and now Libya, governments have decided to shut down the entire internet for their country. This not only fueled protests already occurring in said countries, but also arose the question, if our government wanted to shut down the internet completely to prevent a cyber-terrorist attack, or just in general to do so, would they be able to do so?

To turn off the internet in Egypt, the government simply forced their Internet Service Providers to shut down their servers. In Libya, the internet was still up, but the traffic allowed through it was throttled down to 0, so nothing could go in or out. Theoretically speaking, if the United States Government wanted to, they could simply force all of the major Internet Service Provides offline, but what they may have in the works is much simpler.

A new bill was been proposed, known as the "Internet Kill Switch" bill [even though those words are not included anywhere in the bill] some time ago. It has since stirred up a good amount of controversy, and in an attempt to make it more acceptable to the American people, it has been revised, and given the name “Cybersecurity and Internet Freedom Act of 2011" Early this year. [PDF]

While this bill has yet to be passed, and differs quite a bit from the original bill, it's still a great controversial subject in may conversations nowadays, as everyone contemplates the idea. It's main advocates; Joseph Lieberman, and President Barrack Obama are pushing the issue still, with it as one of their main hopes for the future.

Something most people are unaware of, however, is the fact that the President already has the power to turn off the internet. This power has been around for a long time, and derrives from the Communications Act of 1934. A section in it [702] gives the president the ability to, in the event of war, “cause the closing of any facility or station for wire communication” without warning. [PDF]

This topic in general has spawned a good amount of debate as to whether or not it is constitutional, or fair to the people. Do you think it's a good idea to have an "Internet Kill Swith" type option for the nation, in the event of a cyberterrorist attack? If you would like to discuss the topic in General, feel free to visit our forums, and talk with the community about it. Tell us what you think!

The current thread we have open for this discussion can be found here although you are welcome to start your own threads, and post wherever you like. See you on the boards!