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Friday, January 22, 2010

Clinton speech - what it didn't say

Hillary is rather caught between her own spooks' need to snoop on her citizens (and everyone else in the world) and the old 'fr'dom' chant of George Dubya - she freely admits this is his policy initiative:
'All societies recognize that free expression has its limits. We do not tolerate those who incite others to violence, such as the agents of al Qaeda who are - at this moment - using the internet to promote the mass murder of innocent people. And hate speech that targets individuals on the basis of their ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation is reprehensible...We must also grapple with the issue of anonymous speech. Those who use the internet to recruit terrorists or distribute stolen intellectual property cannot divorce their online actions from their real world identities. [But] these challenges must [not] be[come] an excuse for governments to systematically violate the rights and privacy of those who use the internet for peaceful political purposes.' (My punctuation).
So do we want the home of the NSA, the Patriot (sic) Act and most of the surveillance-intelligence complex lecturing the rest of us on free speech while licensing the flogging of blade servers and other DPI kit to friends, Romans and Chinamen? Its a point made robustly by Rebecca McKinnon and Ian Brown, who points out the nasties perpetrated by Yahoo! and Microsoft back in the day. To which we can add of course Mr Murdoch, an unambiguous threat to free speech in China based on past history.

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