The Morning Roar: Govs Force Search Engines To Show Wrong Results, Roger Waters' Letter To Neil Young, and Experts Say Big Brother Will Control All Web By 2025
Your Tuesday Morning Roar! Governments Forcing Search Engines to Show Wrong Results Computerworld has an incredibly interesting article up titled "Why we need an underground google," which details the extent that search results are being effected by government interference that completely alters searchable results.
Until recently, search engine censorship was not on the list of first-world problems. But in the last few years, governments in the United States, Europe and elsewhere in the industrialized world have discovered that, although they're prevented by free-speech laws from actually blocking or banning content where it lives, censoring search engine results is a kind of "loophole" they can get away with. In an increasingly digitized, search-engine discoverable world of content, censoring search results is a way to censor without technically violating free speech protections.Starting in 2011, companies like Google started reporting a disturbing rise in government requests for search engine results to lie -- to essentially tell users that existing pages and content on the Internet do not exist when in fact they do. Requests for such removals by the U.S. government, for example, rose 718% from the first half of 2011 to the last half. And they've continued to rise since.And such requests weren't just coming from the U.S., but from "Western democracies not typically associated with censorship," according to the Google policy analyst who reported the trend on behalf of the company and talked about Google's Transparency Report.The reasons for these requests vary, and often sound reasonable -- national security, law and order, national pride, religious sensitivity, social order, suppression of hate speech, privacy, protection of children -- you name it. But when you add them up and allow them to grow in number over time, the cumulative effect is that increasingly, search results don't reflect the real Internet.
I, for one, had no idea that this was a common practice, wherein the government could blackball a site from being indexed by search engines. While I knew the government may legally attempt to have sites removed by court order by going through ISPs, etc., the fact that they are censoring existing sites that legally exist is sheer insanity. While reading the article it becomes apparent that they "delete" virtually all record of the data by forcing any search results related to certain people, or things, to be omitted, smacking of the sort of editing seen in Orwell's 1984.Please give the entire disturbing article a read here.Neil Young Tel Aviv Concert Cancelled For "Security Reasons" But Roger Waters' Letter May Be Behind It A letter penned by Roger Waters to Neil Young has been making the internet rounds, gaining quite a bit of traction and notoriety, which chastises the rocker for performing in Tel Aviv in the midst of ongoing violence between Israel and Palestine. If you have been reading our site, you'll know that I personally have expressed my opinion on Israel's actions, propaganda and APAC before, and that my views coincide with those of Waters.An excerpt from the letter he made public on his facebook page:
It is time for "Rock Against Racism" to show some of it's muscle by refusing to lend our names to the whitewashing of the illegal colonization of Palestinian land and the systematic oppression of its indigenous people. Unfortunately the opposition lobby has a lot of muscle too. They spend millions on their "Hasbara"(If like me you have no Hebrew)”Explaining” or to you and me "Propaganda". The propaganda machine is well oiled and ruthless. We, on the other hand, have only our commitment to non-violent resistance to lie down in front of the IDF caterpillar tractors that would raze the native people from the land of Palestine. We stand with those people, and with all the brave people of Israel and Palestine, Jewish and Arab alike who oppose The Israeli Governments brutal policies. We stand with Rachel Corrie, the young American woman who gave her life under the caterpillar's tracks. Please join me and countless other artists all over the world in solidarity with the oppressed and the disenfranchised. It is time to heed the peoples call. People like The Bedouin, the nomadic people of the Negev in the arid south of Israel, please research their plight, one village, Al-Araqib has been destroyed 63 times by IDF Bulldozers. If you are in doubt about any of this, I will go with you to Palestine, and Israel, if they’ll let me in, you will see what I have seen, and then let us figure out the right thing to do.
Young's concert was just cancelled as of today, officially by Tel Aviv's security forces under the guise of concerns over safety. That's a valid reason. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a smokescreen, however, for Neil to either pull out for public relations reasons or because he found his conscience.Experts Say by 2025 Government Will Have Control of Everything Watched, Read or Bought Online Not much sugar coating to be done here. A panel of 1,400 experts have agreed that by 2025 the governments of the world will have extended their powers of censorship and control over the internet to such an extent that virtually everything accessible online will have gone through their strict filters.
According to their responses, they believe actions by nation-states to maintain security and political control will lead to more blocking, filtering and segmentation of the internetTrust will be weakened, as a result of revelations about government and corporate surveillance - and this will likely increase surveillance in the future.And commercial pressures will affect the flow of information, and make the web less open - a threat campaigners for net neutrality already fear following debates over internet fast lanes.Paul Saffo, managing director at Discern Analytics and consulting associate professor at Stanford University, said that by 2025 'the pressures to balkanise the global internet will continue and create new uncertainties.'Governments will become more skilled at blocking access to unwelcome sites.’Dave Burstein, editor of Fast Net News, added: ‘Governments worldwide are looking for more power over the net, especially within their own countries.‘Britain, for example, has just determined that ISPs block sites the government considers ‘terrorist’ or otherwise dangerous.
This conveniently ties into our first story of the day, making these a themed issue. Hooray! Full article here.Read The Morning Roar every weekday Monday-Friday!The Lions of Liberty are on Twitter, Facebook & Google+Receive access to ALL of our EXCLUSIVE bonus audio content – including “Conspiracy Corner”, “Degenerate Gamblers” and the “League of Liberty Podcast” by joining the Lions of Liberty Pride and supporting us on Patreon!
