Feuerberg’s article summarizes a report entitled “Undermining Democracy: 21st Century Authoritarians,” released on Capitol Hill, June 4 – the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre – sponsored by Freedom House, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia. Its 80 pages find that four authoritarian states—China, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela—are setting forth a new authoritarian model for countries to follow, and that they have the resources and sophistication to be highly influential in the developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Now I have been amongst the many – it seems to be the great majority of those who have expressed an opinion at all – to have commented (in this post and others) on both the sheer stupidity and the political danger of the Australian government’s proposals for mandatory filtering of the internet in this country at ISP level. It may seem, as the few supporters of this scheme might argue, that the Australian proposals are much weaker than those of China, Russia or Iran, and it might be claimed that we can trust the Australian government not to abuse the technical capabilities it wants in the way that those countries do.

Both of these defences have some weight, I freely concede. For the moment. For today. Doubtless also for next month, probably for next year. As for 5 or 10 years time – let’s say I wouldn’t want to take large bets on it. The point, of course, lies not in what the silly current scheme actually is, but where it is going – down the road to authoritarianism, to the evisceration of democracy, to state control of information and in that way to the state control of perception, of history and of thought. If in doubt, refer to China, where many modern Chinese seem to even doubt that Tiananmen Square even happened, let alone know anything of the tens of millions who died in the famine created by the Great Leap Forward, or that Tibetans really are unhappy about being oppressed, imprisoned and killed.

Anyway, all of the above is reasonably well known in the “free world”. Still. What I want to know, although I suspect that the answer is obvious, is this: what is being done in a positive sense to guarantee freedom of information? If a government were truly committed to democracy and freedom, then instead of funding research into internet filtering, it would be funding projects to do exactly the opposite – to develop computer and internet programs and hardware to guarantee such privacy and security that

1) those who provide information can do so without fear of identification or reprisal

2) anyone can access that information without being spied on; this would imply that they can search without the government knowing who is searching for what, and can see and forward information without the government knowing.

Some say we all have an inner child. I suspect that most of us have a inner little right-winger somewhere inside too, and at this point the inner little right-winger may be raising a fist and shouting “But, but… what about the terrorists? Won’t they have free access to learn how to make bombs! They will be able to plot in secret! And the paedophiles! Won’t these people all be able to e-mail each other without us knowing! And won’t terrorist cells be able to co-ordinate without the security forces knowing anything about it! What are you going to do about that?”

The answer has to be – yes, of course those people will do those things. And of course I find those things as evil as anyone else does, and of course we all want to stop them doing those things. But controlling information won’t stop them. Never did, never will. It is often speculated that paedophiles pass their files around in encrypted ways. Much was made a few months ago of a paedophile ring that had been using peer-to-peer networking having been cracked by the security forces – a success that, while perhaps genuine, was trivial. Software and hardware are both evolving at a dizzy rate, and the rest of the offenders, be they paedophiles or bomb-makers, will move on to new methods within weeks. That little success does not justify going further and faster down the path of authoritarian, government control of information. Are we so dazzled by the internet that we have forgotten that people still talk to each other? Still print things or draw diagrams on paper? Still meet in parks, and cafes and bars, still pass manila envelopes from one to the other? Total government control of electronic communications is awkward for such people, to be sure, but it would hardly present an insurmountable problem. Their activities are already, rightly, illegal, and there is no need for further authoritarian mechanisms to control them.

How far will we go to control these bogeymen, the “paedophiles and terrorists”? Destroy all the information we don’t like? Oh yes, book-burning has been done before now. Stop them talking about their ideas? Oh yes, tongues have been cut out before now, as have hands, eyes and ears.

Total government control of information is a genuine but minor hindrance to those bogeymen. The real advantage of such power is that it makes a whole population far easier to control, to manipulate, to swallow the “official story” and look away when elections are rigged, when workers’ health is destroyed or the earth is polluted by bad industrial practice, when people are held without trial and without knowing the charges against them, when the wealth of the powerful grows while the weak are exploited or even enslaved, when whistle-blowers are silenced and activists dissappear.

One test of a true justice system is that even the people for whom we have the greatest distaste, even horror, and whose guilt seems most obvious are given the opportunity to have the charges against them clearly laid, the evidence tested and a proper defence mounted. Similarly, a test of whether we truly support democracy in the information age is whether we allow the genuinely free exchange of information, even knowing that on occasion that freedom will be used for evil purposes, just as writing and talking, looking and listening have been used for evil in the past. And the genuinely free exchange of information can only come about with privacy and security software that protects the identity of publishers and makes information available, while government snoopers know neither what the information is nor who is looking at it.

We should be funding that research, not filters!

I guess I’m not entirely sure what I feel about euthanasia, but I’m quite sure that I don’t concede my right to know about these things to the government, or to a list that it draws up in secret.

Oh, sorry, I forgot, they died of malaria. That’s not news, is it?

(Thanks to Dr Crippen of the Guardian for this point.)

All of which underlines my curiosity about why we are panicking at all. Where is the sense of proportion? It’s not that I want to make light of those people who have been very ill – or even died – as a result of this disease. And I do presume that the WHO knows what is talking about, and that there is indeed some cause for concern. But what has actually happened so far? When I last read the figures (and that was yesterday, so they may have gone up since then, of course) seven people are confirmed as having died of swine flu so far in Mexico, over a period of a few weeks. Mexico City is said to be nearly at a standstill. But wait a minute! In a city the size of Mexico City somewhere getting on for 1000 people must die of one thing or another every day, some of them, no doubt, from flu. In America, more than 60,000 people die of flu each year – between 150 and 200 a day. Every one of those, presumably, was as unwanted as the deaths from swine flu. So far swine flu has been responsible for perhaps a few tens of deaths.

Once again, let’s not make light of it, and if the WHO is issuing warnings, no doubt we should take them seriously. Perhaps things will get very, very, very much worse than they are now. But why is there such a panic? Do we find this more comforting to worry about than things like the global financial crisis, Robert Mugabe, the Gaza Strip of the CIA’s “renditions”? Perhaps we feel that by going around in a surgical mask we can do something about this one, where we feel relatively powerless in other areas. Or do we somehow want there to be a pandemic? Does swine flu promise to satisfy an obscure yet powerful need for danger and alarm?

Perhaps there is something I’m failing to understand, and I do hope that I’m not tempting fate when I ask – what is all the panic about?

What is my take on the taste? Very cheap, dirty, over-perfumed soap.

He or she, it or they? Call me old-fashioned but I find a lot of attempts to write or speak in gender-neutral language tend to range between the ugly and the comical. Recently I saw ‘… and if anyone transgress this vow, may the wrathful deity split his or her head into seven pieces!’. But there is no need for it!
I was brought up to look down on the use of ‘they’ as a non-specific pronoun. And while some of the attempts to be gender-neutral may be too ugly for me to be willing to use, I’m well aware that we really want and need to use gender-non-specific language much more these days than we did decades ago. The use of ‘they’ does the job, but it is deprecated as ‘uneducated’.
But hey! They fooled us again! Just like the grammarians tried to tell us that split infinitives were un-English (by which they really meant “unlike Latin”), they tried to tell us that the ‘singular they’ is un-English. Despite having been used since at least the late 1300s, by such writers as Jane Austen: Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, the King James Bible, The Spectator, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Frances Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, Henry Fielding, Maria Edgeworth, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, William Makepeace Thackeray, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot [Mary Anne Evans], Charles Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, John Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walt Whitman, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, W. H. Auden, Lord Dunsany, George Orwell, and C. S. Lewis.
Deprecated starting in the late 18th or early 19th century, the loss of a gender-non-specific pronoun has been a problem ever since.