Net censorship - it's missing out the UK and USA

 Doug Dickinson points to the Open Net Initiative's report on internet censorship around the world and its debilitating effect on democracy, especially the ability of people to express themselves or dissent.

The survey found evidence of filtering in the following countries:
Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Burma/Myanmar, China, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, UAE, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Yemen. (from the BBC)

My big question: where are the UK and the USA?

I know that we are not on the same scale as Iran and our censorship hardly has the same consequences, however we do have censorship in our public institutions, including schools, which prohibits public servants and children from publishing their point of view or having it read within public service institutions.

I wrote for Connected Magazine on this low level censorship last month and have seen some changes in attitude in some areas of Scotland. However, there are still too many places which think that it's acceptable to block sites such as Flickr on the basis of child protection, while allowing similar Google sites. Is it because the image is linked to directly in Flickr? I doubt it. For me, the reasoning lies more in the fact that their charges, the kids, can write to the photos, under them and on them. They can publish their own in the same place. They don't want that, or rather the responsibility the institution might bear of kids doing that.

I'd like to see a continued evolution of thinking regarding blocking and filtering in schools, not with safety but rather with democracy and civil liberties in mind. The safety angle is, for me, on a technocratic tactical level. Where the digital literacy programmes of an organisation are weak the amount of command and control exercised is inversely related. And you know what they say about control; it has an inverse relationship to trust.

Comments

[chris]

I noticed on a recent visit to Dunoon GS that on my own blog any pics I'd blogged from Flickr didn't appear. No change there, then. Even my profile pic wasn't allowed ... :-(

[John]

In Glasgow flickr is blocked to prevent children seeing unsuitable content rather than the fact that it allows children to contribute.

Maybe we can have a wee yack around the table about this on Wednesday.

I'd like to see a continued evolution of thinking regarding blocking and filtering in schools me too.

[Matthew Reames]

I can understand (to some extent) why certain sites are blocked for students. What annoys me, though, is that the exact same filters are placed on the teacher (at least at my school). That means no flickr, no google images, no blogger, no blogspot, no wikispaces... The University of Taiwan site is blocked (I was trying to email a professor about a middle school maths day I heard about in Taiwan.) It would even be nice to have access to some online translation sites (babelfish? Blocked) to allow some of our ever-increasing numbers of EAL children look up terms and words used in class.

Sorry. I tend to go on a bit about this topic, mainly because I feel the lack of trust in me as a professional.