Category Archives: Censorship

Illustration by John Ritter

Many foreigners who come to China for the Olympics will use the Internet to tell people back home what they have seen and to check what else has happened in the world.

The first thing theyll probably notice is that Chinas Internet seems slow. Partly this is because of congestion in Chinas internal networks, which affects domestic and international transmissions alike. Partly it is because even electrons take a detectable period of time to travel beneath the Pacific Ocean to servers in America and back again; the trip to and from Europe is even longer, because that goes through America, too. And partly it is because of the delaying cycles imposed by Chinas system that monitors what people are looking for on the Internet, especially when theyre looking overseas. Thats what foreigners have heard about.

Theyll likely be surprised, then, to notice that Chinas Internet seems surprisingly free and uncontrolled. Can they search for information about Tibet independence or Tiananmen shooting or other terms they have heard are taboo? Probablyand theyll be able to click right through to the controversial sites. Even if they enter the Chinese-language term for democracy in China, theyll probably get results. What about Wikipedia, famously off-limits to users in China? They will probably be able to reach it. Naturally the visitors will wonder: Whats all this Ive heard about the Great Firewall and Chinas tight limits on the Internet?

In reality, what the Olympic-era visitors will be discovering is not the absence of Chinas electronic control but its new refinementand a special Potemkin-style unfettered access that will be set up just for them, and just for the length of their stay. According to engineers I have spoken with at two tech organizations in China, the government bodies in charge of censoring the Internet have told them to get ready to unblock access from a list of specific Internet Protocol (IP) addressescertain Internet cafs, access jacks in hotel rooms and conference centers where foreigners are expected to work or stay during the Olympic Games. (I am not giving names or identifying details of any Chinese citizens with whom I have discussed this topic, because they risk financial or criminal punishment for criticizing the system or even disclosing how it works. Also, I have not gone to Chinese government agencies for their side of the story, because the very existence of Internet controls is almost never discussed in public here, apart from vague statements about the importance of keeping online information wholesome.)

Depending on how you look at it, the Chinese governments attempt to rein in the Internet is crude and slapdash or ingenious and well crafted. When American technologists write about the control system, they tend to emphasize its limits. When Chinese citizens discuss itat least with methey tend to emphasize its strength. All of them are right, which makes the governments approach to the Internet a nice proxy for its larger attempt to control peoples daily lives.

Disappointingly, Great Firewall is not really the right term for the Chinese governments overall control strategy. China has indeed erected a firewalla barrier to keep its Internet users from dealing easily with the outside worldbut that is only one part of a larger, complex structure of monitoring and censorship. The official name for the entire approach, which is ostensibly a way to keep hackers and other rogue elements from harming Chinese Internet users, is the Golden Shield Project. Since that term is too creepy to bear repeating, Ill use the control system for the overall strategy, which includes the Great Firewall of China, or GFW, as the means of screening contact with other countries.

In America, the Internet was originally designed to be free of choke points, so that each packet of information could be routed quickly around any temporary obstruction. In China, the Internet came with choke points built in. Even now, virtually all Internet contact between China and the rest of the world is routed through a very small number of fiber-optic cables that enter the country at one of three points: the Beijing-Qingdao-Tianjin area in the north, where cables come in from Japan; Shanghai on the central coast, where they also come from Japan; and Guangzhou in the south, where they come from Hong Kong. (A few places in China have Internet service via satellite, but that is both expensive and slow. Other lines run across Central Asia to Russia but carry little traffic.) In late 2006, Internet users in China were reminded just how important these choke points are when a seabed earthquake near Taiwan cut some major cables serving the country. It took months before international transmissions to and from most of China regained even their pre-quake speed, such as it was.

Thus Chinese authorities can easily do something that would be harder in most developed countries: physically monitor all traffic into or out of the country. They do so by installing at each of these few international gateways a device called a tapper or network sniffer, which can mirror every packet of data going in or out. This involves mirroring in both a figurative and a literal sense. Mirroring is the term for normal copying or backup operations, and in this case real though extremely small mirrors are employed. Information travels along fiber-optic cables as little pulses of light, and as these travel through the Chinese gateway routers, numerous tiny mirrors bounce reflections of them to a separate set of Golden Shield computers.Here the terms creepiness is appropriate. As the other routers and servers (short for file servers, which are essentially very large-capacity computers) that make up the Internet do their best to get the packet where its supposed to go, Chinas own surveillance computers are looking over the same information to see whether it should be stopped.

Follow this link:
The Connection Has Been Reset - The Atlantic

When Rainbow Rowells first YA novelEleanor & Parkcame out this spring, people loved it. After John Green gave it a glowing (shimmering, really. Incandescent, even) review in the New York Times,even more people loved it. It was an Amazon Best Book of the Month, a New York Times bestseller, and it inspired a shocking amount of beautifully rendered fan art.I loved it, my mother loved it, my pregnant coworker loved it, my friend who never reads YA loved it. You probably loved it, too.(Full disclosure: Rainbow Rowell is a friend of mine. She once mailed me a photograph of Alan Alda and also a postcard with a drawing of an oyster on it that said The World Is Your Oyster after I quit my day job, so I would even go so far as to call her a good friend.)

A group of high school librarians in Minnesota loved Eleanor & Park so much that they chose it as their school districts summer read, giving all their high school students the option to read it and invited Rowell to come visit the Minneapolis-area schools and the local public library this fall.

But there are some who do not love it, not even a little bit, not even at all.

Two parents, with the support of the districts Parents Action League have convinced the Anoka-Hennepin school district, the county board, and the local library board to cancel her events next week calling Eleanor & Park a dangerously obscene book, demanding that it be removed from library shelves and asking that school librarians be disciplined for choosing it.

From theNational Coalition Against Censorship:

Until we got involved in the issue, Rainbow Rowell couldnt be 100% sure she had even been disinvited. The teachers and librarians had showed great enthusiasm at the outset, but as the date of her visit drew near, she was given mixed messages about her contract there and eventually came up against a communications freeze. A parent had lodged a challenge to profanity in the book and asked that the librarians who organized the talk to be punished. They riled up an action group (withexperiencein censorship) to organize against the author at the level of the County Board. The order came down. The talk was nixed and librarians were asked not to speak on the topic.

By mid-August, it looked as though the school visit would have to be cancelled Rowells literary agent received a note informing her of the official challenge but that it would still be possible for her to attend an event at the public library.

Then these concerned parents took the fight to the county board (Too hot for teens or taxpayer money, according to the Watchdog Minnesota Bureau), and that was the end of things. Right, as it happens, in the middle of Banned Books Week, which I found too delicious and infuriating to pass up, and begged Rainbow to let me talk to her about it. She begrudgingly agreed.

Rainbow! Hello! Thank you for changing your mind about this!

Mallory! Hi!

Go here to read the rest:
Talking With Rainbow Rowell About Censorship

Welcome to The Quote Garden! I dig old books. Est. 1998

Quotations about Censorship

Related Quotes Language Politics Human Rights Reading Media

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. ~Henry Steele Commager

The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen. ~Tommy Smothers

Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. ~Potter Stewart

We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard. ~Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, 1764

The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book. ~Walt Whitman

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too. ~Voltaire

Go here to see the original:
Censorship Quotes, Freedom of Speech Sayings

I can't define pornography, one judge once famously said, but I know it when I see it. (Justice Stewart in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 US 184 (1964).) Can we do better?

The word pornography comes from the Greek for writing about prostitutes. However, the etymology of the term is not much of a guide to its current usage, since many of the things commonly called pornography nowadays are neither literally written nor literally about prostitutes.

Here is a first, simple definition. Pornography is any material (either pictures or words) that is sexually explicit. This definition of pornography may pick out different types of material in different contexts, since what is viewed as sexually explicit can vary from culture to culture and over time. Sexually explicit functions as a kind of indexical term, picking out different features depending on what has certain effects or breaks certain taboos in different contexts and cultures. Displays of women's uncovered ankles count as sexually explicit in some cultures, but not in most western cultures nowadays (although they once did: the display of a female ankle in Victorian times was regarded as most risqu). There may be borderline cases too: do displays of bared breasts still count as sexually explicit in various contemporary western cultures? However, some material seems clearly to count as sexually explicit in many contexts today: in particular, audio, written or visual representations of sexual acts (e.g., sexual intercourse, oral sex) and exposed body parts (e.g., the vagina, anus and penis-especially the erect penis).

Within the general class of sexually explicit material, there is great variety in content. For example, some sexually explicit material depicts women, and sometimes men, in postures of sexual display (e.g., Playboy centrefolds). Some depicts non-violent sexual acts (both homosexual and heterosexual) between adults who are portrayed as equal and consenting participants. Other sexually explicit representations depict acts of violent coercion: people being whipped, beaten, bound, tortured, mutilated, raped and even killed. Some sexually explicit material may be degrading, without necessarily being overtly violent. This material depicts people (most often women) in positions of servility and subordination in their sexual relations with others, or engaged in sexual acts that many people would regard as humiliating. Some sexually explicit material involves or depicts children. Some portrays bestiality and necrophilia; and so on.

On the first definition of pornography as sexually explicit material, all such material would count as pornography, insofar as it is sexually explicit. But this simple definition is not quite right. Anatomy textbooks for medical students are sexually explicit-they depict exposed genitalia, for example-but are rarely, if ever, viewed as pornography. Sexual explicitness may be a necessary condition for material to count as pornographic, but it does not seem to be sufficient. So something needs to be added to the simple definition. What else might be required?

Here is a second definition. Pornography is sexually explicit material (verbal or pictorial) that is primarily designed to produce sexual arousal in viewers. This definition is better: it deals with the problem of anatomy textbooks and the like. Indeed, this definition is one that is frequently employed (or presupposed) in discussions of pornography and censorship. (See e.g., Williams 1981.) Of course, it is important to distinguish here between sexually explicit material that is wholly or primarily designed to produce sexual arousal (i.e., whose only or overriding aim is to produce sexual arousal) and material whose aim is to do this in order to make some other artistic or political point. The film, Last Tango in Paris arguably aims to arouse audiences, but this is not its primary aim. It does so in order to make a broader political point.

It is sometimes assumed that pornography, in this second sense, is published and consumed by a small and marginalized minority. But, while exact estimates of the size and profitability of the international trade in pornography vary somewhat, it is generally agreed that the pornography industry is a massive international enterprise, with a multi-billion dollar annual turnover. In 2003, the pornography industry (taken to include adult videos, magazines, Cable/Pay per view, Internet and CD-Rom) is estimated to have grossed US$34 billion world-wide; and in excess of $8 billion in the U.S. alone, greater than the combined revenue of ABC, CBS, and NBC ($6.2. billion). (See Internet Filter Review: Internet Pornography Statistics in Other Internet Resources.) Pornography is much more widely consumed than is sometimes supposed, and is a large and extremely profitable international industry.

However, the term pornography is often used with an additional normative force that the first and second definitions leave out. When many people describe something (e.g., a book such as Tropic of Capricorn or a film such as Baise Moi)as pornographic, they seem to be doing more than simply dispassionately describing its sexually explicit content or the intentions of its producers-indeed, in these debates, the intentions of producers are sometimes treated as irrelevant to the work's status as pornography. They seem to be saying, in addition, that it is bad-and perhaps also that its badness is not redeemed by other artistic, literary, or political merit the work may possess. (Consider, for example, how people use the term visual pornography to condemn certain sorts of art or television, often when the material is not even sexually explicit).

This suggests a third definition: pornography is sexually explicit material designed to produce sexual arousal in consumers that is bad in a certain way. This definition of pornography makes it analytically true that pornography is bad: by definition, material that is not bad in the relevant way is not pornography. It might be that all and only sexually explicit material is bad in a certain way (e.g., obscene): in which case, pornography will refer to all and only the class of sexually explicit materials. But it might be that only some sexually explicit material is objectionable (e.g., degrading to women), in which case only the bad subset of sexually explicit material will count as pornography. And, of course, it is possible that no sexually explicit material is bad in the relevant way (e.g., harmful to women), in which case we would have an error theory about pornography: there would be no pornography, so defined, merely harmless, sexually explicit erotica.

A number of approaches define pornography as sexually explicit material that is badalthough they disagree as to the relevant source of its badness, and consequently about what material is pornographic. A particularly dominant approach has been to define pornography in terms of obscenity. (For critical discussions of this approach see Schauer 1982, Feinberg 1987, MacKinnon 1987.) The obscenity might be taken to be intrinsic to the content of the material itself (for example, that it depicts deviant sexual acts that are immoral in themselves) or it may lie in contingent effects that the material has (for example, that it tends to offend reasonable people, or to deprave and corrupt viewers, or to erode traditional family and religious values). If all sexually explicit material is obscene by whichever of these standards is chosen, then all sexually explicit material will be pornography on this definition. This is the definition of pornography that moral conservatives typically favour.

Continued here:
Pornography and Censorship (Stanford Encyclopedia of ...

Censorship in Turkey is regulated by domestic and international legislation, the latter taking precedence over domestic law, according to Article 90 ("Ratification of International Treaties") of the Constitution (so amended in 2004).[1] Despite the protections presented in article 90, Turkey ranked 138 in the Reporters Without Borders' 2010 Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index.[2] In 2011-2012 Turkey ranked 148 out of 169 countries in the Reporters Without Borders list. In 2012 the Committee to Protect Journalist (CPJ) ranked Turkey as the worst journalist jailer in the world (ahead of Iran and China), with 49 journalists sitting in jail.[3] Twitter's 2014 Transparency Report showed that Turkey filed over five times more content removal requests to Twitter than any other country in the second half of 2014.[4]

Within the framework of negotiations with the European Union, the EU has requested that Turkey issue various legal reforms in order to improve freedom of expression and press.[when?]

Regional censorship predates the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. On 15 February 1857, the Ottoman Empire issued law governing printing houses ("Basmahane Nizamnamesi"); books first had to be shown to the governor, who forwarded them to commission for education ("Maarif Meclisi") and the police. If no objection was made, the Sultanate would then inspect them. Without censure from the Sultan books could not be legally issued.[5] On 24 July 1908, at the beginning of the Second Constitutional Era, censorship was lifted; however, newspapers publishing stories that were deemed a danger to interior or exterior State security were closed.[5] Between 1909 and 1913 four journalists were killedHasan Fehmi, Ahmet Samim, Zeki Bey, and Hasan Tahsin (Silah).[6]

Following the Turkish War of Independence, the Sheikh Said rebellion was used as pretext for implementing martial law ("Takrir-i Skun Yasas") on March 4, 1925; newspapers, including Tevhid-i Efkar, Sebl Reat, Aydnlk, Resimli Ay, and Vatan, were closed and several journalists arrested and tried at the Independence Courts.[5]

During World War II (19391945) many newspapers were ordered shut, including the dailies Cumhuriyet (5 times, for 5 months and 9 days), Tan (7 times, for 2 months and 13 days), and Vatan (9 times, for 7 months and 24 day).[5]

When the Democratic Party under Adnan Menderes came to power in 1950, censorship entered a new phase. The Press Law changed, sentences and fines were increased. Several newspapers were ordered shut, including the dailies Ulus (unlimited ban), Hrriyet, Tercman, and Hergn (two weeks each). In April 1960, a so-called investigation commission ("Tahkikat Komisyonu") was established by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. It was given the power to confiscate publications, close papers and printing houses. Anyone not following the decisions of the commission were subject to imprisonment, between one and three years.[5]

Freedom of speech was heavily restricted after the 1980 military coup headed by General Kenan Evren. During the 1980s and 1990s, broaching the topics of secularism, minority rights (in particular the Kurdish issue), and the role of the military in politics risked reprisal.[7][7]

Article 8 of the Anti-Terror Law (Law 3713), slightly amended in 1995 and later repealed,[8] imposed three-year prison sentences for "separatist propaganda." Despite its name, the Anti-Terror Law punished many non-violent offences.[7]Pacifists have been imprisoned under Article 8. For example, publisher Fatih Tas was prosecuted in 2002 under Article 8 at Istanbul State Security Court for translating and publishing writings by Noam Chomsky, summarizing the history of human rights violations in southeast Turkey; he was acquitted, however, in February 2002.[7] Prominent female publisher Ayse Nur Zarakolu, who was described by the New York Times as "[o]ne of the most relentless challengers to Turkey's press laws", was imprisoned under Article 8 four times.[9][10]

Since 2011, the AKP government has increased restrictions on freedom of speech, freedom of the press and internet use,[11] and television content,[12] as well as the right to free assembly.[13] It has also developed links with media groups, and used administrative and legal measures (including, in one case, a $2.5 billion tax fine) against critical media groups and critical journalists: "over the last decade the AKP has built an informal, powerful, coalition of party-affiliated businessmen and media outlets whose livelihoods depend on the political order that Erdogan is constructing. Those who resist do so at their own risk."[14]

Turkeys Journalists Union estimated that at least "72 journalists had been fired or forced to take leave or had resigned in the past six weeks since the start of the unrest" in late May 2013 due to pressure from the AKP government. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, head of the Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP) party, said 64 journalists have been imprisoned and We are now facing a new period where the media is controlled by the government and the police and where most media bosses take orders from political authorities. The government says most of the imprisoned journalists have been detained for serious crimes, like membership in an armed terrorist group, that are not related to journalism.[15][16]

Here is the original post:
Censorship in Turkey - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

presents

This page is a work in progress, and more works may be added to this page over time. Please inform onlinebooks@pobox.upenn.edu of any new material that can be included here. Note that the listings are meant to be representative rather than exhaustive. Also, many recent books that have been banned or challenged have not been included here, because they have not been made available online. (But see below).

In 1930, U.S. Customs seized Harvard-bound copies of Candide, Voltaire's critically hailed satire, claiming obscenity. Two Harvard professors defended the work, and it was later admitted in a different edition. In 1944, the US Post Office demanded the omission of Candide from a mailed Concord Books catalog.

John Cleland's Fanny Hill (also known as Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) has been frequently suppressed since its initial publication in 1749. This story of a prostitute is known both for its frank sexual descriptions and its parodies of contemporary literature, such as Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders. The U.S Supreme Court finally cleared it from obscenity charges in 1966.

Aristophanes' Lysistrata, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio's Decameron, Defoe's Moll Flanders, and various editions of The Arabian Nights were all banned for decades from the U.S. mails under the Comstock Law of 1873. Officially known as the Federal Anti-Obscenity Act, this law banned the mailing of "lewd", "indecent", "filthy", or "obscene" materials. The Comstock laws, while now unenforced, remain for the most part on the books today; the Telecommunications Reform Bill of 1996 even specifically applied some of them to computer networks. The anti-war Lysistrata was banned again in 1967 in Greece, which was then controlled by a military junta.

The Comstock law also forbade distribution of birth control information. In 1915, Margaret Sanger's husband was jailed for distributing her Family Limitation, which described and advocated various methods of contraception. Sanger herself had fled the country to avoid prosecution, but would return in 1916 to start the American Birth Control League, which eventually merged with other groups to form Planned Parenthood.

Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman's famous collection of poetry, was withdrawn in Boston in 1881, after the District Attorney threatened criminal prosecution for the use of explicit language in some poems. The work was later published in Philadelphia.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiography Confessions was banned by U.S. Customs in 1929 as injurious to public morality. His philosophical works were also banned in the USSR in 1935, and some were placed on the Catholic Church's Index of Prohibited Books in the 18th century. (The Index was a primarily a matter of church law, but in some areas before the mid-19th century, it also had the force of secular law. A summary of the contents of the last edition, published in 1949, is available from the Internet Archive. The Index was finally abolished in 1966.)

Thomas Paine, best known for his writings supporting American independence, was indicted for treason in England in 1792 for his work The Rights of Man, defending the French Revolution. More than one English publisher was also prosecuted for printing The Age of Reason, where Paine argues for Deism and against Christianity and Atheism.

Excerpt from:
Banned Books Online

ReviewTechUSA Pro Censorship Exposed As Hypocrite
Tags: ReviewTechUSA Hypocrite Pro-Censorship Censor E-Begged Marriage Liar Flip flop Lies Eating Disorder Food Addiction eBay Fraud Selling Broken Hardware Exposed Rich richard masucci ...

By: Review Hell Too

Read the original here:
ReviewTechUSA Pro Censorship Exposed As Hypocrite - Video

CENSORSHIP: X -FILES AND SUPER-SOLDIERS OF DR. WILHELM REICH
Doctor of Medicine "Reich #39;s theories held that deficits or constrictions in bodily orgone were at the root of many diseasesincluding cancermuch as deficits or constrictions in the libido...

By: Ellison Ballard

See the original post:
CENSORSHIP: X -FILES AND SUPER-SOLDIERS OF DR. WILHELM REICH - Video

5 Censorship Trivia - VGFacts Five Trivia Feat. Caddicarus
Subscribe for more gaming trivia! http://bit.ly/DYKG_Subscribe http://vgfacts.com - http://didyouknowgaming.com Check out VGFacts.com! You can also follow us at the links below. https://www.faceb...

By: DidYouKnowGaming?

More here:
5 Censorship Trivia - VGFacts Five Trivia Feat. Caddicarus - Video

[2.55 SPOILERS] FINAL FANTASY XIV: Unnecessary Censorship #5
Here #39;s the fifth and last in a series of videos I really enjoyed making! Hope you enjoy, and if you do please leave a thumbs up so I can keep this series going! They will be resuming when Heavenswa...

By: Zodical Candy

Visit link:
[2.55 SPOILERS] FINAL FANTASY XIV: Unnecessary Censorship #5 - Video