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February 01, 2006
Google, Censorship & the Feds
When it comes to the Google flap, my friend Pete Gontier said it best in comments yesterday: "I gave up on 'don't be evil' when Google announced its IPO. Hello, Internet pundits? Google is now obligated by law to be evil, just like any other public company."
But the outcry continues. Execs from Google, Microsoft and Cisco have reportedly declined to speak at today's briefing on freedom of expression and Internet censorship in China before the Congressional Human Rights Cacus. (No word on Yahoo yet.) Can't say I blame them.
The briefing is an excellent opportunity for Amnesty International to spread the word about repressive, sucky Chinese policies and how American companies support them. And it's a fine platform for American representatives to market themselves as upstanding, freedom-loving, censorship-hating policitians who really, really deserve your vote next time around. But it's a no-win PR nightmare for company execs. Since they weren't legally compelled to show, they were smart to pass on the public grilling.
The exercise has piqued my curiosity, though. If Congress is so fired up over freedom of expression and Internet censorship, why stop at China? There's been a raft of expression-trampling behavior and censorship, Internet and otherwise, occuring right here at home.
*NASA's top climate scientist says the federal agency is trying to silence him.
*The New York Times fought OSHA for several years to get information on national injury and illness rates (which the Memory Hole, god bless it, has made public.
*Inconvenient information has a way of disappearing from federal web pages. (That a photo of President Bush and disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff is no longer available for public purchase and that the president refuses to authorize the release of others is really small potatos, if you ask me.)
Then again, perhaps it's best not to look to Congress for action on Internet censorship.
"The staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest in an independent biography of the Lowell Democrat" on Wikipedia, according to the Lowell Sun. "The Meehan alterations on Wikipedia.com represent just two of more than 1,000 changes made by congressional staffers at the U.S. House of Representatives in the past six month."
Since there's such rampant tampering with Internet info in any case, why not turn it to your advantage? There's no Wikipedia entry for Deborah Branscum, for example, but I might warm up to rewriting history online if there was a Wikipedia article that made me seem younger, smarter and blonder than I am. My mom, Robbie Branscum, shaved a few years off her age for an autobiographical entry in a reference book. Guess she was ahead of her time.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at February 1, 2006 06:07 PM