Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns | Hacker News Reader

Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns

theguardian.com

122 pointsacqbu152 comments

> India leads total shutdowns globally. In 2021, the world’s largest democracy shut off its internet 106 times – more than the rest of the world combined. Hardest-hit was the conflict-ridden region of Jammu and Kashmir, which was subject to 85 shutdowns under the guise of containing separatist violence. The blackouts shut down Zoom classes for students, stopped doctors from communicating with their remote patients and crippled the banking system, causing mortgage holders to default on their loans. Apple crops rotted before they could be sold and businesses were paralysed.

India was a leader in Internet shutdowns in the years before 2021 too. Don't for a moment assume that the hardest hit region of Jammu and Kashmir is the only one. Internet shutdowns are routinely used in most states whenever the state executive or law enforcement thinks there could be some trouble. Sadly, the Indian judiciary is more of an ally to the executive, and doesn't consider these "sledge hammer" approaches as questionable or challenge-worthy. Strict control over the Internet and Internet based companies (which would be almost all) are of prime importance to the majority lawmakers and to the executive. That theme, which goes hand in hand with surveillance, is a major thread across the country, and a major threat to the "of the people, for the people" slogan (these are not "by the people", many of whom are taught what to think and believe by...media owned/influenced by the majority parties).

As an indian, I don't see anything wrong with my country having a kill switch for the internet because (1) India is a democracy (2) It is a foreign platform and (3) A kill switch for communication platforms is necessary to prevent rumour mongering or disrupt coordination during tense political situations like rioting (which is common in India). Note that this is not a new thing - every government also has a kill switch for various other communication platforms; for e.g. governments often do cut-off cell phone communications in a particular region during tense moments.

J&K though is a special case in India where indian government has indeed often curtailed democratic rights for many decades (often overreaching itself while fighting terrorism there), and has been guilty of over abusing their powers there, sadly without much repercussion. That's because J&K is a disputed area between India, Pakistan and China - India has fought 3 wars with Pakistan over it, China occupies some area of it, and had recently invaded India and even annexed some more area (China taking "incremental and tactical actions" to press territorial claims with India: Pentagon - https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/international/china-taki... ). The indian judiciary thus does grant the government more leeway for non-violent tactics like cutting of communication or holding an important political person under house arrest. But for violent abuses of power, the Indian judiciary has not hesitated to stand up for the rights of the citizens and has even ordered arrest and prosecution of Army and police officials when necessary. Unfortunately, Narendra Modi, the current indian Prime Minister is inexperienced in statecraft, has also made more of a mess by unnecessarily changing the status quo of J&K, thus creating more unrest in the state thus necessitating the current situation there (India’s Supreme Court Orders a Review of Internet Shutdown in Kashmir. But For Now, It Continues - https://time.com/5762751/internet-kashmir-supreme-court/ ).

That said, I do believe more restrictions and judicial oversight is necessary before the government is allowed to use such powers to kill communication platforms. Especially since the current right-wing religious fundamentalist Modi / BJP government has indeed abused this power undemocratically many times to use it even against legitimate opposition and blunt their protest movement and criticism against it:

- India farmers’ protests: internet shutdown highlights Modi’s record of stifling digital dissent: https://theconversation.com/india-farmers-protests-internet-...

- India muzzles citizenship law protests, detaining thousands and shutting down Internet in several cities: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/india-muzz...

- Govt suspends Internet in eastern state over military recruitment protests: https://www.businesstoday.in/latest/trends/story/govt-suspen...

- Modi govt’s response to farmer protests stirs fears of a pattern: NYT: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/foreign-media/modi...

Having a kill switch is not the issue,kill switch usage frequency is.

We have a nuclear device...

we carry out nuclear detonations every week... vs we would detonate one if someone uses nuke against us.

I hope point is clear.

If I was not clear, I too said the same thing - kill switches with reasonable restrictions and judicial oversights are ok in a democracy, but abusing it is not

(While my explanation of the over abuse in J&K may have sounded like a defence of the government, I assure you it is not. I was just stating the facts for those unaware of why the abuses are more there, i.e. because it is a disputed region prone to conflict. I have also listed examples of how my own government has definitely gone overboard and abused it against legitimate / non-violent opposition, which is totally unacceptable in a democracy.)

Well this explains why so many Indian-ex-pat-led social media executives have no concerns about censorship or the US 1st amendment, even within the USA.

Isn't it more ridiculous to think that corporates will help you uphold your rights more than political parties? It doesn't matter if Google or Microsoft has an indian at its helm, what matters is that they too are beholden to their shareholders who only care about their profit, not you.

Time to start building long distance (100+ mile) mesh nets.

Alternately, I wonder if there's any way to lay down fiber long distance that doesn't require govt authorization...and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

I doubt it. You have to get the consent of every owner of property for a connecting 100+ miles. You pretty much have to either have an uninhabited wasteland or eminent domain to do that. Plus, you have to hire people to do hard manual labor for 100+ miles. You can try to just lay it on preexisting poles without permission some places, but who knows how long that will stay up.

And ultimately, fiber is something anyone with a shovel can destroy in 2 minutes. If the government doesn't want you to have Internet, a mesh network is a much more robust method if you can get it in place.

I agree with the latter part, but for the former note that Earth's surface is 2d: you can go around holdouts; unlike roads you don't care about the fiber being straight.

Actually you do. Longer fibers need more repeaters, and the ideal fiber on land is strung down pipes (this allows later capacity upgrades). Both of these are cheaper if existing roads are paralleled.

Sure, you want to optimize for total length. However, you don't have any meaningful restrictions on turn radius, which do exist when you want to build a road and which make building a road around holdouts oftentimes impossible.

Simple, cheap mesh networks based on consumer WiFi hardware are very short range. To get any reasonable distance between nodes you need towers and directional antennas.

You wouldn't be able to get a high-speed mesh network, sure, but LoRa[1] (or something LoRa-like - it's proprietary) provides in the range of kilobits per second across tens of miles. RONJA[1] trades throughput for range, with 10 megabit throughput over 0.8 miles).

Sure, you won't be able to even really download images through LoRa, but it'll do for textual communications in case of an emergency e.g. natural disaster.

A smart meshnet that has billing/transactions built in would allow nodes to charge based on bandwidth and data used (so a LoRa node could charge you more than a node that uses fiber, you can use the fiber node while things are normal, and then when things go sideways you can pay more to get an emergency message to your relatives through LoRa).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RONJA

Or you just use free-space optics. If you use lasers you can even (in theory) use DWDM and get xxx separate connections of 25, even 40 Gbps each. Line of sight is required but at some point someone will get it working with satellites. I believe line-of-sight >100km 400 Gbps links have been done.

Oh and once you get past ~900km the fact that via the satellite you have a straight line with ~100% the speed of light (as opposed to 2/3 speed of light with fiber) the satellite connection to LEO is actually faster than fiber. In practice it's less since there are no zero-delay zero-loss regen stations. Every 300km the signal needs to be converted to electrical and back, which adds (a lot) of latency. With satellites this isn't done, saving further time. And all of that is ignoring that when putting fiber of the surface of the earth you cannot just follow a straight line, so you have to add distance for avoiding other people's property too.

And perhaps relevant to an internet shutdown article: laser free-space optics cannot be located unless you're directly in the path of the laser. These links cannot be "denied" to anyone with sky access.

It's just reliably aiming a beam at a moving satellite that's currently beyond our technology.

Currently 40-50gbps to a satellite is the practical limit.

To clarify: are you intentionally differentiating between what RONJA is and "free-space optics"? My impression was that that's what RONJA was - a particular open-source implementation of a FSO setup designed for ease of assembly and robustness.

Probably better to use spread spectrum radio. Stations can be mobile and move to minimize tracking and interference. Fiber is fixed and the link can be severed with $20 bolt cutters.

Any practical grass-roots mesh wireless network would have to be built using commodity consumer WiFi hardware. People aren't going to go out and purchase spread spectrum radios, especially not in developing countries where governments are most likely to kill Internet access.

On the other hand, a shortwave radio is dirt cheap to build and can interface with the audio / mic ports on your smartphone / laptop. And the range is on the order of hundreds of miles.

can be used as a stealth backchannel to C&C compromised devices out of band from the internet/cellular connection

Would starlink help or is that too expensive? Or would governments block import of starlink terminals anyway?

It depends on the government, many of the "bans" are not very technologically advanced and easily circumventable with a bit of knowledge (however, doing so is usually quite illegal).

Australia and New Zealand have banned lots of content that can be easily found, at worst you need a VPN.

We are talking about internet shutdowns not "bans", so how are you going to "circumvent it with a bit of knowledge", unless you plan to break into isps buildings and you need a license to operate an ISP in India in case you didn't know.

Those Starlink dishes are pretty obvious. It would be very easy to photo an area using an Drone/UAV to see who has them. Those who have them will experience some fun time in the local re-education camp.

Do they need line of sight? I assume the dish would still work with some kind of blanket or plastic shroud over it, provided it was kept in the acceptable temperature range.

Or even just being painted to camouflage into the roof it was mounted to.

There'd be reasonable aesthetic reasons to do these things, from a deniability standpoint. Though I guess that doesn't help if you're under a regime where accessing an unauthorized satellite service is straight up banned.

The countries mentioned in the article pretty much falls into the 'we can do whatever we want with you' category. Russia, Myanmar, Sudan, etc. There is no deniability standpoint.

Yea I imagine there is a fairly easy solution to this problem. And if there is not - I guarantee you creative people in India are going to figure it out!

But there's no solution to the problem of people voting in governments that think frequent internet shutdowns are OK?

You're assuming that the government blocking the internet is especially oppressive. It could be that the country is relatively free, but the government sees internet shut downs as easy to implement and thus uses them often. This seems to be the case in India, as discussed above. In that case, a solution that requires the government to visit every individual's home to get them to shut off the internet would actually be quite hard to implement, and would likely be infeasible.

Why would it be hard to implement? Remember that unregistered satellite phone and internet terminals is illegal in India. The Starlink dish is not small nor easily hide-able if you want to access the Internet.

They don't need to visit everyone's home. As I said drone and UAV photos, then you know which home has it. Then re-education for those owners.

Starlink still uses ground stations which would fall under the local Internet control.

Unregistered satellite phones and satellite internet terminals are already illegal in India.

No mesh or satellite internet solution will fix a government.

Community mesh networks are hard to run and require real effort even if the local govt is not hostile. With a hostile govt it gets much harder. Unwirerer is a nice fantacy, but unlikely to become reality anywhere.

This has already been done at scale in Europe.

https://guifi.net/en

Strong communities + mesh is a vision for a bright future. The former has become a difficult hill to climb, though.

I’m not associated with the project and don’t follow it super closely, but I think this is the idea behind the briar project (at least for messaging)

https://briarproject.org

There are many projects similar with Briar, they all have the same limitations:

"The range of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi is around 10 metres, depending on obstacles. Clearly this isn’t enough for communicating across a city or even a large building. So when Briar receives a message from a nearby contact, it stores the message and can later pass it on to other contacts when they come within range (for example, when you move from one place to another)"

BRIAR's how it works page depicts Wi-Fi and Tor also, so range isn't necessarily an issue.

I wish - but if that was going to happen, it would have happened already. By the time enough people wake up to the necessity of an uncensorable communications network to make it feasible, it will be too late to make it happen.

technical solutions to political problems are always doomed.

It always, always, comes down to the the rubber hose decryption.

Still better than what we have now.

> Alternately, I wonder if there's any way to lay down fiber long distance that doesn't require govt authorization...and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

That’s a hard no.

Just the materials for a 100+ mile fiber network is hundreds of thousands.

Then there is the matter of right of way across all those miles. It would be nigh impossible to find a route that does not cross a road or land parcel that isn’t government owned.

Can confirm. Worked for an ISP. Do any of you even know how much it costs to rent a trencher for a couple of weeks? There's a reason the government has to subsidize internet infrastructure build-out (ie. via CAF, ACAM, etc.) is it's so prohibitively expensive that it wouldn't happen otherwise. As it stands, a new suburban neighborhood that's relatively dense won't see a ROI for at least 10 years (on avg).

You bring up a good point.

Additionally, just doesn't make sense to install a network that has long fragile potential points of failure (aka attack surface) like fiber cables to replace the network that is or may be shut down by bad actors.

Go back to 70s era radios. Long wave and medium wave antennas. Few kbps bandwidth... unstoppable.

And highly susceptible to jamming.

Grass roots wireless mesh networks are a nice concept in theory but no one has ever made them work well at scale. It's just a very challenging technical problem with nodes moving around around, going offline, intermittent radio interference, etc. So the routing tables constantly change. And unless people are willing to buy specialized hardware such as towers and antennas, the range between nodes can't be more than about 100 m.

The One Laptop Per Child project tried to use such a network to serve remote areas but it never really worked.

That's only if you assume you need lots of bandwidth. RIOT TOMORROW CAPITAL NOON or FREE FEARLESS LEADER HELD AT $BLACKSITE would be easily transmitted over any number of mesh networks, including the ones used for utility billing in many countries.

https://guifi.net/en

Or just Starlink or something else similar

i believe the hax have started for the starlink platform. once there is local control of the hardware, its academic to create a mesh device.

The US has this capability too. It's an expansive power and largely unchecked.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/22/representatives-propose-bi... (" Representatives propose bill limiting presidential internet ‘kill switch’")

In my opinion, this is a good thing. It's akin to disconnecting gas mains during a bombing run or similar. War is war and we need real defensive measures for broad cyberattack.

If it gets misused then we'll protest, etc.

Edit: You can downvote if you like, but this comment of mine isn't made in bad faith. It's fair to worry about a global cyberwar and fair to point out that in-person protests are still a viable response to abuse.

How would you organize protest with the government controlling communication? You have far more trust in the good will of those in power than I do.

Protests happened before the Internet. Before telephones, even. Neither are a requirement for people to communicate and organize.

But times change and so has technology.

Adversaries have access to this technology too, and it's a power multiplier. If they can shut down access to those they are oppressing, then they become far too powerful.

Yes, protesters can still protest, but without access to the same tech that those they are protesting can use, they can be out-organized, their voice muted, and their effectiveness minimized.

Before telephones protests were far from peaceful and usually ended up killing someone.

You're being disingenuous. Think about this. The authorities wouldn't blanket shut down the Internet, they'd do it for the protesting populace, but leave their own access untouched. Protests largely suceeded in prior times because the capabilities of the populace vs. the government were largely symmetrical.

That would not be the case in this instance. You (the protestors) would be back to runners, unencrypted radio/code. They'd still have the modern comm suite.

It doesn't make things impossible for protestors, but it greatly shifts things in the government's favor for containment and ability to sustain itself against a now unconsenting populace. Always remember asymmetry will be employed as early and often as possible.

> Protests happened before the Internet. Before telephones, even.

US Population, 1870: 38,558,371

US Population, 2020: 331,449,281

That's not even necessarily the main issue - it's that the cultural norms around how information was spread pre-phone/internet have now been lost, so there's realistically no good way to get a message out to a huge number of people without access to modern communications technology. In a world where flyers or word of mouth or bill posters were the only forms of communication people naturally paid much more attention to them and their patterns of movement and interaction within the community enabled their effectiveness. Shutting off all electronic communication access is orders-of-magnitude more limiting than, say, a twitter ban (which I've argued before barely qualifies as a restriction on free speech).

This argument is almost never useful. Times change.

People survived hundreds of years ago without electricity or running water, so it should be perfectly fine if the government shuts off utilities for protestors, right?

We lost common access to the means that were used to communicate earlier. For example, anonymous and unrevocable access to the phone network used to exist in the form of payphones, which are being phased out.

If there truly is a need to turn the valve the government should have no problem getting sufficient voluntary compliance by asking politely and publicly and articulating why such action is justified.

"Think of the children"

How would the every day person gather and protest. How would they know?

Honest question - how would you know?

- The problems will not be on the radio / tv.

- Services that try to talk about it can be silenced.

- Users who talk about things the government finds inconvenient will be silenced - its already happening.

- Groups trying to organize to protest things are already banned in some cases on facebook (see Australian response to covid vaccine mandate groups).

Governments can plan for and have shut off valves to silence you.

Do not be so quick to trust a government who obviously does not want to trust you.

When is the last time the government has been held accountable to the people?

In full? 1776

In practice what happens is that some boondoggle results in a catastrophic too big to brush aside and the part of the executive branch in question decides that just not doing that thing going forward is better than the scrutiny from the legislative branch and change their policy. Nobody is ever meaningfully held accountable. Sometimes there's a token scapegoat. The above pattern holds both at the federal and state level.

> In full? 1776

That wasn't the people. That was the oligarchs disagreeing as to who got to own the slaves and reap the spoils of genocide.

>That wasn't the people. That was the oligarchs disagreeing as to who got to own the slaves and reap the spoils of genocide.

Oh come on, quit with the BS talking points. War on your territory is NEVER good for business and overall wealth and they knew that back in the 18th century too. They would have been far, far, far, richer throwing their lot in with the status quo. Many of the prominent individuals who played key roles the revolution lost their wealth and in many cases their lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_Fathers_of_the_United...

> War on your territory is NEVER good for business and overall wealth and they knew that back in the 18th century too. They would have been far, far, far, richer throwing their lot in with the status quo. Many of the prominent individuals who played key roles the revolution lost their wealth and in many cases their lives.

So they fought and expended resources because they disagreed on which land stealing genocidal slavers got to be on top of the pile...

If it was for the good of the people, 'the people' would have included people and not just the elite men.

You can sue any government in the U.S., federal, state, or local. It is done all the time.

Remembering all those "The internet has no borders arguments from the 90s and early 2000s:

https://futuristspeaker.com/business-trends/eight-false-prom...

"A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible." - Matrix Epilogue (1999)

“Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.” Begin Wake Up by RATM.

I run infrastructure for a company that provides medical records services to medical organizations located exclusively in the US and have to deal with the usual scans/exploit attempts that come with running services on the public internet. Somedays I think it's just bonkers that anyone in China or Russia or wherever is allowed to contact my servers. I know that the internet is a "network of networks" to use an older term, and I don't really see an alternative, but it still strikes me some days.

Not just China and Russia, though. Lots of weirdness from Turkey, Viet Nam and even Netherlands.

Well I added "wherever" as a catchall - public is pretty much public. And there's a chain issue - if you ban country A, but not country B, and A is allowed to connect to B, then A can still find a path through to you - it's all just one network with a near infinite number of paths.

I spent some time in Vietnam and it’s amazing how often website just block you outright (i believe US BLS is unreachable) or you’re flagged immediately as high risk (understandably since VN rarely prosecuted computer crime that originates there).

Visit the same website from 100km away in Singapore and it’s like your in the US.

banning and blocking is easy; building bridges is hard. It is documented in modern times that the first to leave a war zone are the teachers and the civilian medical people -- they can't function as they must in a world built with passkeys, barbed wire and bulk control rules. The PP here has a commercial medical system, so of course the first consideration is protecting --money-- privacy of --insurance records-- patients. Go ahead and block the world for the medical insurance, it is a block already by its nature.

The question now is, will any civilian communication survive the battles of nations and currencies.

So you're saying that the USA's adversarial legal system makes bans and blocks the easiest/most probable way of dealing, but the consequences of that are far reaching, and yet to be noticed.

If all your endpoints are at least somewhat under your control (i.e. the thing doesn't need to be accessible via a web browser on a vanilla computer) you can reduce "exploits" to "exploits of my implementation of TLS/my VPN of choice" plus the bootstrap issue.

If the endpoints are not under your control to that extent, then I'd argue that "all the residential ISPs in US" is just as bad as "all of China/Russia" due to botnets.

I'm not sure what you mean by implementation of TLS. It's just standard Java TLS libraries, though of course we can be pretty strict about which ciphers are in use - we do control the client to that extent and are typically pretty good about keeping on top of that at least.

If you require client certificates then you don't need to worry about non-insider attacks on anything other than your TLS library and your client cert bootstrap procedure.

I didn't even think of that as a possibility, but it's a good suggestion and something that's within the realm of feasible (though far from trivial) for us. Thank you.

TBF putting a reverse proxy that does authn and rejects requests that do not authn correctly in front of everything (except for the login pages) is nearly as good: the exposed area is then login page, reverse proxy, and the authn login in the reverse proxy. That might be vastly simpler to implement.

If you host your own network, you can work with your network provider to blackhole basically everything except your known clients.

You'd have to record IP ranges and other things, but you could do it.

Or you can ask them to blackhole the rest of the world and add exceptions if necessary.

It's not uncommon to block those nations (and others) if there's no reason to serve them. When I was last in the networking world it was very common for companies to do so.

It blocks more malicious traffic than you might expect. I would have assumed that bad actors in those nations wouldn't be scanning FROM them as much but that's not the case. I suppose anyone blocking them is just off their list of targets as they're not being low hanging fruit.

For some companies it is like flipping off a light switch, malicious traffic goes from 100 to near 0 immediately.

I don't like the idea of doing it, but as an admin seeing that effect and having limited resources, you do it.

It's not hard to do this if you collaborate with your upstream or run your network, you have to ban all datacenter/hosting companies networks as well. Then your users complain they can't access your service because their vpn is using these networks...

Why do you not just block everything outside of the US?

Well, I don't really know how to is a reason, but I suppose a surmountable one. The other thing is that I can't guarantee that all my customers' don't employ people outside the US.

For a bit of context, one might want to look at the history of governments exerting control over newspapers, telegraph offices, telephone exchanges, radio stations, TV stations, etc. during the century or few before the internet became popular.

"Freedom of the Press" is in the United States Bill of Rights (c.1789) because government control of information and mass media was a really old & familiar tactic even back then.

I think they mean WWW shutdowns? Or are governments killing VOIP, newsgroups, email, etc?

Somehow I doubt that governments are successful in completely shutting down a network of networks that is designed specifically to resist shutdown attacks from internal or external. Maybe I'm naive.

edit: Maybe they're referring to the ability to order ISPs to kill access at the router level. So yeah maybe the concept of centralizing access to the internet via service providers is the problem worth discussing.

We don't have dialup anymore, we can't just simply point our comcast / verizon / whatever router to a new provider and have our access again. Not only do we not have dialup anymore, we don't even have landlines anymore in quite a lot of households. If the routers died, many houses would in fact be cut off.

It can mean government control over all IXPs in the country (including DPI hardware and a killswitch), and legal mandate for all ISPs in the country to use only government-controlled IXPs. So unless you have a satellite connection or a private microwave link to a friend's antenna on the other side of the border, you don't get internet.

International dial-up is an option too. Although providers are getting fewer. If you've got a landline, a modem and a technically oriented friend outside the shutdown, it doesn't take too much to setup an iffy dialup server.

Can't do a lot of surfing with those speeds today though.

Its not really an option. In the countries referenced by the article, the Government is the telecom monopoly or there is a few which will listen to the government.

Its very simple to analyze calls to see if its voice or a modem. Guess what happens if its the later?

Fck these people who take such actions. Public should cut the food and water supplies to their families. Fcking bastards.

The biz I'm at is on VOIP. We've still got a hot landline for the security system, and I've got a wicked Pentium II machine, Hayes modem, and dial-up account at the ready.

NOT that I can push the ERP system to everyone, if, but my hope is that this one machine would be our lifeline to data.

Why wouldn’t they?

Nominal proponents of open society in the West were all too happy to engage in censorship during an emergency rather than stand by their principles.

What would motivate people to embrace an open society if the nominal proponents don’t?

> Nominal proponents

Could you be slightly more specific?

Governments which claim to support values like freedom of speech, but in fact do not.

Eg, the US — who is outspoken on that issue, but during an emergency used social media companies to censor doctors, politicians, etc who did not agree with them.

They passed laws making those social media companies censor them?

They didn’t have to.

They had officials coordinate with social media companies to coordinate takedowns of accounts and messages which disagreed with them.

So, public health officials asked social media companies to stop accounts from spamming that vaccines cause autism?

There was no law and no threat, just public and private coordination.

I have no problem with that. Sorry, this is not even close to censorship.

If a member of the government asks their friend in a social media company to quietly take down a post, they are using influence and corruption (of the company) to impose government censorship. If they ask the legal representatives of the company to make a policy decision to take down a post, there is the implied threat of regulation, and it is government coersion. Both are legally violations of the first amendment.

I think it's bad public policy for government to coerce social media companies into censoring information, however it's not clear whether that legally amounts to a First Amendment violation. There are no clear legal precedents in that area. It will be interesting to see how the courts rule on the Missouri v. Biden case.

https://ago.mo.gov/home/news/2022/05/05/missouri-louisiana-a...

You have freedom to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theatre.

Just as you have freedom to pay for the consequences of that.

Bad example

Exactly! Good example!

That metaphor was originally used to justify criminalizing protesting wars.

Which emergency are you referring to? And what censorship methods are you referring to?

For example, I think the media choosing not to cover a story immediately when it is being peddled by an unreliable political agent doesn’t qualify as censorship. Even if it turns out to be true.

>The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.

>Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

Or maybe because the large public doesn't care reading about some things, thus the press will not write about it. That's capitalism at work and the freedom of the press. There's no law forcing us to read everything, luckily, and just because a few people consider something of interest doesn't automatically make it of interest.

It takes a special type of hubris to read Orwell on censorship and say you know better.

COVID was the example I had I mind, where they censored medical professionals, politicians, and journalists who said lockdowns were a bad idea, questioned the data supporting mRNA (eg, Robert Malone), etc.

But since you mentioned not covering a story — we also have the Hunter Biden laptop, which wasn’t merely not covered, but actively censored on social media during an election. (Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg admitted as much.) The whole point of freedom of speech is the censors are notoriously bad at deciding what is “misinformation”, as they were in that case… where they shut down a political story which hurt their preferred candidate but was nonetheless true.

Social media != the government

Social media censors partly because of pressure from governments that make it clear that regulation will be coming if they don't do it "voluntarily".

Examples of such pressure from the government? Do you mean when Trump threatened to remove section 230 protection from social media companies because he didn't like "the way he was treated" on their sites?

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/23/916096008/justice-department-...

FB censored the Hunter laptop story during the election at the behest of the FBI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN3PIGLDscQ

That doesn't sound like pressure at all, that just sounds like a tip from the FBI that they could do whatever they want with. Furthermore, they didn't even ban the story anyway.

“Basically, the background here is the FBI basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know you should be on high alert,’ ” said Zuckerberg. “ ‘We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that so just be vigilant.’ ”

"Facebook did not completely ban sharing of the article, but instead limited how much its algorithm automatically shared it to other people for a week, while third-party fact-checkers tried to verify the reporting."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532

https://nypost.com/2022/08/28/fbi-put-the-hunter-biden-story...

The Biden administration have said they are “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation”

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/202...

The FBI (government) told Facebook (private company) to censor things that aren't illegal, and they did. In this case, social media === government for all intents and purposes.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532

https://nypost.com/2022/08/28/fbi-put-the-hunter-biden-story...

Which means FB has a working relationship with the FBI doing whatever the FBI says without asking questions.

FBI didn't tell them to censor the fake piss dossier on Trump, and that was 100% bullshit.

Along comes a Biden run for president, and real, legitimate, truthful damaging information about Biden's entire degenerate family gets suppressed.

BIG HMMMMMMM.

You're saying Trump's DOJ and FBI threatened FB with _______ unless they blocked the spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story?

FB didn't even ban the story though? Even if FB is suppressing information at the request of the FBI, there are hundreds of other news sources out there that people can use. I don't use Facebook, especially not for news consumption.

Here's a more concrete example:

Trump's DOJ threatened FB with removal of section 230 protection, or complete shutdown in Twitter's case, unless they stop censoring news stories that these companies believe to be false or misleading.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/05/28/trump-sign...

Private companies should be free to allow or disallow whatever they want at their discretion on their private platforms, left or right. If I owned a social media platform, I would also probably block stories that I think are false, because I don't think that being known as a platform for the spread of misinformation would be good for my brand. I don't complain about Facebook or Twitter's censorship, and I don't complain about Truth Social or Parler, all are private companies that can do what they want as far as I'm concerned. I don't get my news from any of those sources, no one should.

> You're saying Trump's DOJ and FBI threatened FB with _______ unless they blocked the spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story?

Where on earth did you get that from? FB is in cahoots with the FBI (and ADL), period.

FB has a censorship regime that massively favors one set of politics, which is guided by the FBI, ADL, and probably many other political orgs we don't even hear about.

Isn't that what you were insinuating?

In any case, I agree with you that FB is in cahoots with the FBI. FB has a ton of juicy information that the FBI would love to get their hands on. But getting back to the topic at hand, this looks like a case of "you scratch our back I'll scratch yours," not government censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story which the FBI would have no incentive to do, especially under Trump. FB wants to remove disinformation from their platform (or at least appear like they're making an effort), and the FBI wants a friendly relationship with FB so they can lean on them for whatever data they need.

I really don't get the arguments that there is government censorship going on when the Hunter Biden laptop story was one of the most widely publicized stories of 2020 available on pretty much every news outlet nationwide.

Alright i'll humor you: what proves the hunter biden laptop story? Last I checked some guy said he had it, and that it had damning evidence on it, but for some reason refused to produce said evidence, or any evidence that the laptop was bidens or that there was a laptop at all.

You'd think if the contents of said laptop were as damning as they were purported to be, they would be all over, yet the guy who supposedly had it didn't release it. Why?

I say this as someone who still thinks it is overblown and fair that the social networks didn't let it get amplified as a distraction right before the election. (It was being pushed by people who trafficked in all kinds of misinformation)

It did come out, it was real, and had real emails from Hunter being a total idiot trying to use his Dad to make connections and get paid. It also had nudes and drug use and other embarrassing dumb shit.

It is just a distraction though. Everyone knows Hunter has problems and it had nothing to harm Biden’s character if you are an independent third party looking at the evidence.

So… this bugs me when it becomes the rally point for “censorship”. Give me a break.

Media companies are not the government, and they do not have a legal responsibility to promulgate all views. In the case where a majority of the medical community perceives that misinformation and disinformation is directly leading to people dying, media companies may feel they have a moral obligation to publish the scientific mainstream over the fringes.

The same goes for political coverage. Fox News is within their rights not to broadcast Senate hearings featuring multiple conservative Republicans alleging that Donald Trump attempted to overthrow the democratically elected government.

What Trump attempted on January 6th was treason against the United States. What Fox News promulgates is merely media content to sell advertising space.

I think pretty much nobody stands by their principles. Because ultimately principles are a means to an end, and if the end is not achieved, they're discarded.

And this really makes perfect sense to me when you think of it. We're not logical robots. If whatever principles we hold backfire badly enough, we'll discard them or add exceptions because the reason for those principles is that we believe they make a better world. If the world is not made better, then the principles failed in their aim.

Morality needs a degree of flexibility to survive, or somebody will exploit it.

Except that, in this case, discarding them led to a worse world:

- bitter divisions in the nation because they subverted the consensus mechanism

- poor policy decisions because we didn’t have a robust debate about options

- poor medical outcomes because we didn’t exercise due caution

The reason we had those principles in the first place was to avoid repeats of past bad outcomes from not having them — and they were discarded at a societal level for shortsighted reasons.

Your job as a leader is to uphold those principles in hard times because they’re the path to a better outcome. And our leaders badly failed us.

Actually I'm not sure what you're talking about. Give specific examples of those things?

I guess it depends on what you define as a principle. You are in a manner correct, but saying that "nobody stands by their principles" is not nuanced enough.

I personally would broaden the definition that a principle depends on the context, and in the simplest sense a principle has to work in your favor in the long run. For example honestly is generally a good policy, but not if you are a Jew trying to hide your ethnicity in Nazi Germany.

Its not even random people you don't see - its us. Us, in HN, the people you are talking to now - we would rather have censorship than free speech. You get the government you deserve.

The article yesterday "Backsliding on free expression around the world needs to end" shows exactly what the majority of people here think.

In short, the vast majority prefer "right speech" over "free speech".

The vast majority prefer many things that are relatively low-quality, stupid, etc.

The every day user, even on here, supports shutting down internet access for some - why wouldn't the government give them what they want.

You cannot simultaneously hold that - for the good of us all - we have to remove people from internet services (see 'paradox of tolerance') and then pretend that the government shutting people out from the internet is bad.

Too harsh? No. Check out the article on HN yesterday to see what your fellow users like and believe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32678501

> Check out the article on HN yesterday to see what your fellow users like and believe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32678501

I did check that link. It doesn't seem to support your argument. Can you be more specific? It is some HN comments? If so link them. Is it the article itself? If so quote at least one part.

If I call out particular comments and users, I think I would come close to violating HN rules.

I think I can talk about a few comments, not linked, without causing dang issues. I hope.

- Second highest root comment talking about how people being removed from twitter isn't a big deal, its not 'my freedoms' and the real threat is the government putting people in prison and this other stuff just doesn't matter. - ctrl-f paradox - ctrl-f intoleran

We, the people and the people on HN in particular, feel justified to silence those who disagree with us because its for the greater good.

More to the point, are you saying you have never seen folks on here talking about how we should censor/remove-from-services/silence/shadow-ban people that state believes opposite them?

A country gets the government it deserves - I feel like we are going to get one that is quite happy to silence individuals.

There is a giant chasm between “Twitter gets to decide what it wants to host on its own web site” and “government censorship of speech”. It’s not in the same ballpark. It’s not even the same sport. Nobody has the obligation to publish, broadcast, or amplify someone else’s speech. If you don’t like one particular social media’s content policy, choose from one of the dozens of others or one of the thousands of web forums, or post in your own blog, or use one of hundreds of chat apps, the telephone, newsletters, or the (real) public square.

"You have every right to go protest in that empty square over there."

You say this as a metaphor, but it is already the physical reality. I was at a US National Park in 2010, and in the parking lot outside the visitor's center (where it would get in nobody's way) was a roped off "Free speech zone." Despicable.

"Free Speech Zones" date from the WTO protests in the 90s, and were generally upheld by the courts. More a direct nullification of the first amendment than the beginning of a slippery slope. Maybe not coincidentally, I remember the major usage of free speech zones being to defend Democratic Party Conventions.

This is the kind of stuff protests specifically ignore and/or exploit. Are the police going to harass you if a ton of protesters gather just outside the steps to city hall and effectively block access just by sitting there and hanging out? Definitely. And that huge increase in inconvenience is exactly what gets your cause noticed and covered and in the front of peoples minds.

The trick is, of course, to not actually cause inconvenience in a way that hurts anyone (so do not protest obviously outside the doors of a hospital emergency room entrance) while simultaneously maximizing inconvenience for those that matter.

I will not go into the specifics of ideology or politics, but I will point out that I think your statements are valid but ignore the current reality.

Consider "Parler":

- They were trying to cater to users who were banned from twitter.

- They set up services using AWS. AWS Banned them.

- They built their own infrastructure to get around the ban.

- Google/Apple banned them from their mobile devices so no user could use them.

I think the current reality is a bit more complicated than it used to be. Or should be. Perhaps.

In all of these cases the real problem is that the US Government is unwilling to enforce the monopoly rules and/or there is a company who has become too big and is now the only source of information.

If alternative app stores were more popular (and useable at all on Apple devices) then Apple would not be able to unilaterally ban something.

I am not defending Parler specifically here at all - that place is a dumpster fire.

> There is a giant chasm between “Twitter gets to decide what it wants to host on its own web site” and “government censorship of speech”.

How wide is the chasm between "The administration and congresspeople directly contact twitter and ask them to remove particular ideas and people from their website" and "government censorship of speech"? If you can do the first, why even push for the second? Chinese-style censorship involves approval boards, paperwork, and permanent records. What we have now involves government officials making deniable phone calls and veiled threats.

Removing some people from certain services in population X that are bad actors according to those services != removing everyone in population X from some or all of the Internet

These aren't equivalent and don't contradict.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32661638 is probably a better comparison than Twitter doing whatever Twitter does.

What a disappointing link.

Not because it was unhelpful - it explained the issue rather well - but because it shows our colleagues eagerly lining up to beg a corporation to silence people they disagree with.

What about a network of hacked starlink nodes? Would that provide a way around it?

Maybe - but probably the government could just order Starlink to shut down their stuff as well.

There is always Packet Radio but it is slow as hell....

Assuming starlink remain "good guys"... good luck with that idea :-P

> This story was funded by the Judith Neilson Institute

I can't help but think that we are reading a narrative rather than an actual report.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com