Free speech vs… The Canadian Government

As I said yesterday, the best way to cement your tyranny under the guise of legitimate government is to silence the opposition. Without an effective opposition, you won’t have to worry about people hearing any positions other than those that you agree with. Without the ability to hear/voice dissenting opinions, people will be largely ignorant of anything other that your sanitized version of “the Truth”.

So what do you do when your opposition is reality itself?

Easy, you pervert the scientific process:

The federal government engages in “unacceptable political interference” in the communication of government science, says the head of a group that represents both government press officers and science journalists. “Openness is being held ransom to media messages that serve the government’s political agenda,” wrote Kathryn O’Hara, president of the Canadian Science Writers’ Association, in an opinion published online Wednesday in the international scientific journal Nature.

It’s a deviously effective stratagem to ensure that conservative governments will be elected in perpetuity – make sure that nobody can access unbiased information. Pretty soon, scientists will be government appointees. After all, the current federal minister of science is a chiropractor who thinks that evolution is a “religious question”; it’s fairly obvious that if Stephen Harper even understands science he doesn’t particularly like it.

Now far be it from me to suggest that politicians outside the Conservative party aren’t just as corrupt and willing to clamp down on science they don’t agree with, but according to the complaint previous governments have not done this. As with the gun registry and the census, the current government seems particularly eager to ignore whatever evidence doesn’t support its agenda. The danger with picking and choosing which evidence to follow – aside from the fact that it will result in bad policy – is that people become inherently less trusting of scientific results. We then get anti-vaccine lunatics, creationists, 9/11 “Truthers” and their ilk looking more and more plausible, as we begin to trust the evidence less and less.

The other danger is that, and I cannot stress this enough, politicians are not scientists (particularly, paradoxically, the minister of science). As I’ve said countless times before, science requires specific training in the meth0dology. Understanding science is not simply a question of being smart, any more than fixing the engine of a car or performing heart surgery is. All of these things require dedicated study, an underlying knowledge of the theory, and a great deal of experience. Politicians do not have this at their disposal. To suggest that science reporting should be filtered by the inexperienced brains of politicians is as ridiculous as saying that you need a doctor’s note for an oil change.

This is particularly true when the politicians in question are not simply ignorant of science, but opposed to it. There was a huge public outcry back in November when a former Pfizer executive was appointed to a position on the board of the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR). The fear was that the presence of someone with such close ties to the pharmaceutical industry on the board of a federal health board would be biased against preventive and non-medical intervention, in favour of the industry of his origin. Whatever your feelings on this – Leona Aglukkaq addressed my concerns to my satisfaction in her reply to my indignant e-mail – the concern is just as legitimate in this case. We have a group who has revealed itself to be opposed to the use of science in policy becoming the sole arbiter of what science is worth reporting. Like putting Big Pharma in charge of health care research or letting the oil companies decide energy policy, letting this anti-science government strangle the lines of communication between scientists and the public is a horrendously stupid idea.

Here’s a picture of an otter:

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Liu Xiaobo sticks it to the Chinese government

This morning I told you about the Chinese threat against Norway, if the Nobel committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to dissident Liu Xiaobo. I am happy to report that Norway doesn’t appear to give a flying fuck about what China thinks is best for world peace, and has awarded him the prize anyway:

Imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo is this year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Liu is a 54-year-old literary critic and democracy activist who was awarded the prize for “his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said Friday. The Chinese government reacted angrily to Liu’s win. News of the prize was blacked out by Chinese state-owned media, and government censors blocked prize reports from the internet.

This is good news for pretty much everyone except Mr. Liu’s family, who are now facing a lot of unwanted attention from the Chinese government. There are many people who support the Chinese government. I’m sure there are millions of Chinese citizens who think it’s doing a bang-up job, and feel that the criticisms leveled against it are unfair. That’s a perfectly reasonable position to hold, particularly when you are the recipient of the benefits of socialist rule. However, when your freedoms are won at the price of the human rights of other people, then it is entirely reasonable to criticize the actions of the government. When the response to criticism is to jail or otherwise silence the critics, you can no longer claim that the government is acting in the best interests of its citizens – it’s acting in the best interest of itself.

And that’s exactly what’s happened:

Meanwhile, Chinese media was instructed by the censors that messages containing Liu’s name were to be blocked and China Mobile users were already complaining that text messages with his name couldn’t be sent. Censors instructed microblogs China-wide to set “sensitive word filters” to block Liu’s names and stop all interactive online forums where people could leave comments about him.

It’s one thing to say that Mr. Liu’s writings are not in the best interest of China’s stability. It’s entirely reasonable to point out that he is in violation of Chinese law, and that his actions do not reflect the position of the government or the Chinese people. However, when the response is to prevent anyone from even learning about the award. If, for example, some organization awarded Paul Bernardo a humanitarian prize, do you imagine that such an award wouldn’t make the news? The outcry from Canadians would be overwhelming, and the award would be roundly condemned. The government wouldn’t need to shield us from the news by censoring its announcement.

I love the reason given for the award as well:

[Nobel Committee president Thorbjoern] Jagland, reading the citation, said China’s new status in the world “must entail increased responsibility. China is in breach of several international agreements to which it is a signatory, as well as of its own provisions concerning political rights.” Mr Jagland said that, in practice, freedoms enshrined in China’s constitution had “proved to be distinctly curtailed for China’s citizens”.

The gauntlet has been thrown down, China. When you cut yourself off from the international community, you were free to govern as you saw fit. However, when you become a player on the world stage, you can no longer continue to control the conversation as rigorously as you once did. The sooner that the government (any government, because these kinds of tactics are not unique to China) realizes this, the better off will be its citizens.

Shutting down the opposition: the next step of tyranny

A couple weeks ago, I pointed out a few stories that seemed to support my conjecture that free speech is the bedrock of a free society – that if you want to impose a tyrannical agenda on people, the first step should be to shut down their right of free speech. However, it’s not enough to simply trample the rights of individuals, you also have to shut down any dissenting political voices as well. The next step in establishing your iron-fisted rule must be to shut down any political opposition.

For evidence of this, we turn to Sri Lanka:

The main opposition Sri Lankan United National Party (UNP) has accused the authorities of undermining democracy by intimidating parliamentarians. It says that Mangala Samaraweera, the first foreign minister under Mahinda Rajapaksa’s presidency, has been unfairly questioned for hours by the police. Mr Samaraweera has admitted responsibility for printing a poster depicting the president as a dictator.

Sri Lanka has been a consistent feature on this blog since they granted wide additional powers to their president, as I see it as a perfect example of how a tyrannical state begins. First, a titularly-democratic nation invests power in a single person or political party. It shreds any checks and balances that allow the leader to be overthrown (by anything other than military force), or that places reasonable limits on the powers of the government. The next step is to use its newly-expanded power to shut down the rights of individuals to speak freely or hear ideas that are not state-sanctioned. And now, the government is literally jailing people for criticizing its actions. While sometimes hyperbole is uncouth in political discussion, I don’t think it’s unfair to call president Rajapaksa a dictator; I think in this case it’s a legitimate criticism. Legitimate or not, putting someone in jail for calling you dictatorial is… well… dictatorial.

And of course we can’t talk about the abuse of state power without bringing up China:

China has warned the Nobel Peace Prize committee not to award the prize to well-known dissident Liu Xiaobo. The Chinese foreign ministry said giving him the prize would be against Nobel principles. Mr Liu is serving a long prison sentence for calling for democracy and human rights in China… It would run contrary to the aims of its founder to promote peace between peoples, and to promote international friendship and disarmament, [a spokeswoman] added.

Did you catch the implicit threat there? Honouring someone who promotes democracy will endanger peace and disarmament… how? Well, obviously, by provoking the Chinese government into endangering peace and disarmament. The causal relationship here, however, does not start with Mr. Liu; it starts and ends with the Chinese. They could choose to ignore the results of a foreign private consortium. They could do what so many Americans did when president Obama won the peace prize last year – deride the selection criteria and committee. However, when you use the peace prize as justification for undermining world peace, you expose your willingness to shut down opposition in favour of your own agenda, rather than dealing with legitimate criticism.

Again, the source of this next story is as obvious as picking on the Chinese:

An Iranian court has banned two leading reformist parties, judiciary spokesman Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejeie has said. The Islamic Iran Participation Front and the Islamic Revolution Mujahideen Organisation were “dissolved”, he said. Both supported opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, the main challenger to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in last year’s disputed election. Members of both parties were jailed during the government’s efforts to stifle the mass protests that followed.

The Iranian regime, in doing this, completely undermines any credibility they have been trying to garner as a stable democratic nation in the eyes of the international community. It is a dictatorial theocracy that views dissent as treason. While I am constantly aware of the spin that news organizations use in their reporting of stories, the repeated actions of this government (indeed, all of these governments) are clear signs to me that their explanations and rationalization are thin and poorly-constructed lies.

So while I would very much like to see our current government ousted in favour of one that actually uses its brain, I would be among the first on the protest lines to defend them against any over-reaching attempt by a Liberal or NDP government to outlaw the Conservative party. A healthy opposition is vital to the existence of a stable democratic state, and any attempt to shut down such opposition is not only tyrannical, but a betrayal of the citizens of that state.

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That being said…

Religious people are still capable of committing acts of great kindness:

Rabbis from Jewish settlements have given a box of Korans to a West Bank mosque as a gesture of solidarity after an arson attack blamed on settlers. Palestinians cheered as the rabbis and other settlers arrived at the village of Beit Fajjar in bulletproof cars accompanied by Israeli soldiers. They were welcomed by the local imam.

It will be my ongoing struggle as I continue to write this blog (hopefully sticking with it for a while – we’re at 8 months now) to ensure that I maintain a sense of perspective and balance. While my rampant liberal bias is evident from even a casual glance, I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that evidence which may not support my argument entirely. This particular story is a case of true religious tolerance and attempts to reconcile.

“This act does nothing for the settlements; it is morally and religiously wrong and is offensive to its core,” he added. “This is not how we educated our children; Islam is not a hostile religion even if we have a dispute with some of its followers.”

The governor of Bethlehem, Abdel Fatah Hamayel, said: “We welcome the Jews to Beit Fajjar so they can see with their own eyes the crime that was committed in this mosque, which was against humanity and against religion.”

When secularists and anti-theists like myself talk about the evils of religion, we are explicitly not talking about people like this. What we are talking about is the kind of hatred and illogic that spawns the attack in the first place. We are talking about the idea that there can be a ‘crime against religion’, as though religion has rights that go beyond the rights of the human beings that make up their congregations. Ideas don’t have rights. Beliefs don’t have rights. Philosophies don’t have rights. People do.

However, it’s often tempting to gloss over the good things that are done in the name of religion in my zeal to tear down the idea of religion as meriting some kind of special treatment or special rights. It’s especially difficult to bring up the positive things done in the name of religion when there are so many unbelievably evil things done with the same justification. Hopefully my willingness to highlight these kinds of things will lend my words a bit more credibility when I jump up and down on the head of the followers of YahwAlladdha – I’m not just saying this stuff because it’s fun; I’m saying it because it’s real.

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Why not offending the religious is bullshit

As I mentioned a couple weeks back, there is a debate within the atheist/secular community about the best approach to spreading the message that we exist and care about things. Briefly, the two camps boil down into accommodationists – those who think we should be working with religious groups and believers to find common ground, and confrontationalists – those who think that the preferable approach is to be assertive and not worry about making people feel good. Daniel Schaeller prefers the terms ‘diplomats’ and ‘firebrands’, which I think is an apt (and less unwieldy) characterization.

If it’s not clear from the way I write here (and the title on the top of this post), I ally myself more closely with the firebrands. While I recognize the simultaneous facts that a) both approaches are crucial to advance the secular position, and b) that the diplomats will get all the credit when the dust clears, I have never been one to shy away from controversy in the name of sparing people’s feelings. But there’s another issue in the mix that seemingly goes without comment.

Most of you have probably heard of Richard Dawkins, the British biologist and professor who is the author of books like The God Delusion, The Ancestor’s Tale, Climbing Mount Improbable, and most recently The Greatest Show on Earth. Undoubtedly if you’re not familiar with his work, you’ve simply heard that he’s a militant asshole. In fact, the term ‘militant atheist’ gets thrown around so much that I find myself being accused of being just as bad as those who murder in the name of their religion, as though clearly expressing my thoughts on a blog is the same as killing someone.

Here’s the problem. Richard Dawkins is not a militant asshole. He’s a nerd from England who likes poetry and evolutionary biology – that’s it. What is his major crime that has earned him the appellation of ‘militant’? He wrote some books and has given some speeches. He also refuses to pretend as though the weaksauce apologies for religion are worth more than the air it takes to utter them. But because he’s talking about religion, he’s somehow violent and hateful. Well I’m sorry, but that’s bullshit, and here are some reasons why.

1. Coptic Pope Apologizes for Insulting Islam

Earlier, Bishop Bishoy had said that – contrary to Muslim belief – some verses of the Koran may have been inserted after the death of Prophet Muhammad. Egypt’s al-Azhar Islamic authority said the comments threatened national unity… “Debating religious beliefs are a red line, a deep red line,” Pope Shenouda said in the television interview on Sunday. “The simple fact of bringing up the subject was inappropriate, and escalating the matter is inappropriate,” he added.

This is the religious mindset, when allowed to take root in the public conscience. Not only does a comment made by a member of one religious organization – made about a different organization – threaten national unity, but even talking about beliefs is somehow inappropriate. Can you imagine if someone from the Canadian government made an announcement that debating economic policy or health care or military involvement was “a deep red line” that couldn’t even be discussed? They’d be laughed out of the room, or perhaps chased out with pitchforks. And yet, when a religious person says something so breathtakingly stupid, we’re just supposed to follow along. If we don’t, then we’re somehow militant.

You want militant? I’ve got your militant right here:

2. Austrian temple shooting yields convictions

An Austrian court has convicted six Indian men in connection with a gun attack in a temple in Vienna in which a visiting preacher was killed. Indian preacher Sant Ramanand, 57, was shot dead and more than a dozen others wounded, including another preacher… Prosecutors say the men had planned the attack on the visiting preacher because of a religious dispute. The men went on the rampage wielding a gun and knives during a temple service attended by about 150 people.

That is what a militant position looks like. Ideas that do not conform to your own are not met with skepticism or even outright dismissal, but violence. The lives of those who disagree with your position are forfeit. People who think differently from you deserve to die. Assuming the men in the court case were literate they could have written a book. Even if they weren’t literate they probably could have started a blog (the internet has pretty low standards). They could have protested. They could have said “I am secure enough in my beliefs that I will completely ignore your obvious stupidity.” But that’s not what a militant does. What a militant does is get 5 friends, board a plane to another country, and then try to shoot and stab 150 people. And yet, when firebrand atheists point this out, the immediate response is that we are “no better” than these terrorist fuckbags for being vocally opposed to religion in public life.

The religious shouldn’t be worried about atheists, they should be worrying about each other:

3. Palestinian mosque set on fire

Israel is investigating Palestinian reports that a mosque in the West Bank has been set alight by Jewish settlers. Palestinian officials say settlers set fire to the mosque in Beit Fajjar, near the town of Bethlehem. They blame residents of a nearby settlement because the arsonists reportedly scrawled Hebrew graffiti on one of the mosque’s walls.

I recognize that the conflict between Israel and Palestine is beyond my full understanding. It is a complex issue involving history, geography, foreign political influence, and xenophobia. However, when it asserts itself in the form of the destruction of religious buildings, it’s difficult for anyone to try and say that religion doesn’t play a central role in the problem.

So I challenge those who would use the phrase ‘militant atheist’ to do the following: find me one example of threats of the destruction of national unity, or mass murder, or the destruction of religious buildings, committed by atheists in the name of atheism, and I will make you a batch of delicious cookies.

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It don’t matter if you’re not black or white

Because we live in Canada, and because so much of the way we see ourselves is inextricably tied up with the United States, we tend to see racism issues as black and white. I don’t mean this in a philosophical dichotomy way, I mean that we tend to focus on race and racism as a black people issue and a white people issue. At the presentation I gave on October 1st, I realized after the fact that the majority of my examples of race and racism are about black people in opposition to white people. Many of my examples from the blog are about black issues in the context of the white majority.

The reality, however, is that race issues go way beyond black and white. We live in a country (and, particularly, I live in a city) that is made up of a number of different groups with distinct cultural histories that are interacting in a unique way. Each group has its own issues to resolve with every other, and the majority of these have nothing to do with white people. Kids whose parents are from India or Pakistan (or those who are born there and immigrate) have to resolve old-world issues completely out of context of shared geography. Korean kids and Chinese kids are superficially grouped into “Asian” here in North America, but there is significant conflict between the countries of China and South Korea, conflict which is compounded by the fact that most others don’t know enough to differentiate between these two groups. Native Canadians find themselves in much the same condition (at least as far as perception goes) as black people, and yet there is very little camaraderie between the two groups.

The fact is that the racial conversation is very real for groups that don’t fall into a black/white or the _______/white dichotomy. James Sweet, a blogger from Rochester, NY, recently posted a piece asking why we use the phrase “person of colour”. After all, everyone is a colour – white people aren’t actually ‘white’. Why do we cling to this ridiculous nomenclature that seems to divide the world into white and non-white?

I responded in the comments to suggest that the reason for the term is because there are issues that are relevant to non-white people as a classification, but that referring to them as “non-white” reinforces the subtle idea that white people are the “default”, whereas everyone else is a deviation from that standard. To forestall the predictable objection that ‘nobody really thinks like that’ – yes, they do. A lot. I recently had a meeting with someone who I hadn’t met before (well I had, but she didn’t remember me). When I arrived, she walked right past me. I introduced myself, and she was shocked. “I was expecting you to be short and Irish,” she said. Now far be it from me to suggest that this says anything negative about this person, she’s really very nice and quite professional. It is simply that her assumption, based partially on my name and partially on the job title I have, was that I would be a white guy. So much so that it didn’t even occur to her that the black guy waiting outside her office was her 11 o’clock.

So we use “person of colour” as a way of describing a sociocultural phenomenon of existing in contrast with a dominant political majority group, without implicitly elevating that group. It’s a subtle rebranding that helps to erode one of the subtle nuances of endemic racial bias, rather than simply being an arch-PC term to avoid hurting feelings.

However, and this is really the subject that this post is about, there are far more numerous racial dichotomies that we as PoC deal with every day that have nothing to do with white people. In this particular case, treating PoC as a homogeneous group does us a significant disservice, because it accomplishes a counterproductive elevation of non-PoC, while necessarily neglecting the fact that the group is not a group.

So why don’t I spend more time talking about these other conflicts along racial lines? If I recognize that the black/white dichotomy is an oversimplification of race and race issues, why not do my part as an anti-racist commenter (if I may be so bold as to describe myself that way) and focus on these other issues? Part of my reluctance to wade into those other conflicts is that I don’t have any connection to them. I grew up observing the black/white dialogue, since it was relevant to my life personally. Simply being a PoC doesn’t grant me some kind of magical insight into cultures that are not my own, except insofar as I recognize those elements that are common to my own history.

I regret that I wasn’t able to make this issue more explicit during my talk, because I may have seemed to grant license to treat the black/white issue as either emblematic of the totality of the race discussion; or worse – I may have suggested that only black/white racism is worth discussing. I certainly did not intend to convey that, and I’m hopeful that anyone who was at the presentation or who watched it online didn’t carry that impression away.

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Pope demonstrates why the cake is a lie

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them….To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”

– George Orwell, 1984

There’s a concept in the sciences called “regression to the mean”. In statistics, regression to the mean is a phenomenon whereby as you add more observations to a sample, the values will tend to fall around the average (mean) value. In science, this effect is seen in the form of extreme observations moving toward the average the more frequently or longer they are observed. In medicine, we see this phenomenon in sick people who spontaneously improve in a non-intervention (or a placebo) control group.

This somewhat overlaps with the “relative frame of reference” idea from physics – that is, that a stationary object appears to be moving towards you at the same rate you move towards it. As such, spontaneous regression to the mean, seen from an outside perspective, appears to be a move either up or down toward the average. However, if your frame of reference is one that views things from the perspective of an observation that lies far above the mean, regression toward the mean appears to be a move downward.

I’ve also spoken before about the completely false picture of Christianity that some Christians like to paint – that of poor beleaguered misfits just trying to practice their own beliefs in peace. It’s a complete lie, and thanks to the Pope, I have evidence:

The Pope said: “I cannot but voice my concern at the increasing marginalisation of religion, particularly of Christianity, that is taking place in some quarters, even in nations which place a great emphasis on tolerance. There are those who would advocate that the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere. There are those who argue that the public celebration of festivals such as Christmas should be discouraged, in the questionable belief that it might somehow offend those of other religions or none.”

Yes, Mr. Ratzinger (which sounds, incidentally, like a really unpalatable flavour of tea), from your privileged perspective high atop the social ladder, it would appear that Christianity is being “marginalized”. However, you betray your own ridiculous level of special pleading in your own words. The advocacy of moving religion out of the public square into the private sphere is not marginalization. Nobody is forcing Christians to stop believing what they like – they’re just not allowed to make decisions on behalf of other people. And yes, the people who argue against Christmas have a point – namely, that a specific religious belief system is not representative of the population at large.

The reason for the Orwell quote at the top is that the Pope spends the first 7 minutes of his address talking about the need for freedom of religion and the separation of church and state. He then pivots (on the head of Sir Thomas Moore) to talk about how religion should be more involved in political life. It’s not hypocrisy to him, it’s doublethink. He holds the ideas of freedom of religion simultaneously with the idea of greater church control of public life.

He also pulls the ‘lack of moral fundamentals’ card, a personal favourite of mine (so brazen is its hypocrisy). He talks a good game about the need to use reason, but in true Catholic style, he makes the Augustinian provision that reason should be subject to religion. He actually encourages more religiosity in the body politic, as though places like Iran, Somalia, the USA and Malawi aren’t warning signs that religion is a lousy way to run a country.

It appears to be Ratzinger’s intent to smear secularism, asserting repeatedly that it is somehow comparable to fundamentalism. Please show me one fundamentalist secularist. I’d really be curious to see one.

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Free speech vs… the Internet

I’ve periodically waxed poetic about my love affair with the internet. I view it as a new version of the printing press, giving unprecedented access to both information and speech to millions of people who would otherwise never even glimpse the leaps and bounds made in the last 100 years. This level of access will ultimately have a stabilizing effect on the world, as ideas will spread, and issues will no longer be bound by physical or political borders.

However, this level of access has negative repercussions as well:

The sharp growth in extremist websites is making recruitment much easier for al-Qaeda, according to Interpol head Ronald Noble. “The threat is global, it is virtual and it is on our doorsteps,” he said. Mr Noble told a conference of police chiefs in Paris there were 12 sites in 1998 and 4,500 by 2006.

This is the ugly side of free speech. Allowing all people access to a tool like the internet means that everyone will, eventually, use it. Sadly, the reality is that ‘everyone’ includes a bunch of assholes who think that violence is a reasonable and justifiable way of spreading ideas.

So what are lawful societies supposed to do? Block the information? They may pursue that, but thanks to teh G00gle, they may not be able to do it with impunity any longer:

Earlier this year, Google released details about how often countries around the world ask it to hand over user data or to censor information. The new map and tools follows on from that and allows users to click an individual country to see how many removal requests were fully or partially complied with, as well as which Google services were affected.

Of course, this is only one server (albeit a major one), but it may point in the direction of what will happen to freedom of information in the future. There will be a struggle between civilian governments and large corporations over who has access to and control over the series of tubes that make up the internet. The tool is really not altogether that useful yet. I was able to learn that Canada has fewer than 10 requests to remove Google-based data (YouTube, Blogger, etc.) Somewhat encouraging, I suppose.

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