Why I banned a book: How censorship can impact a learning community | Hacker News Reader

Why I banned a book: How censorship can impact a learning community

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86 pointsjparishy45 comments

Book banning used to be scary when printed books were the only way of conveying long-form information to the public. Now authors can release the contents on the internet, which isn't perfect (less pleasant to read, no royalties) but good enough to protect freedom of speech.

After hundreds of years of the tyranny of book burners, technology has routed around the problem.

In locales where access to higher technology is limited, I imagine that book banning could still be quite effective.

It's still a problem in places where the primary means of accessing the internet is the library or cyber café (which might have some sort of filtering installed). It's not all that uncommon that books popular around most of the world are often unheard of in outlet-controlled places.

Note: Outlet control is often the holy grail of censorship (though that may be leaky as well) in that not only is content redacted, but knowledge of the content is also absent.

You can always hide usb pens and memory cards somewhere, but it might be a dangerous thing to do if one gets caught.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

If you wanted to get fancy, you could probably load TrueCrypt onto a removable media to have plausible deniability via a hidden volume, or some sort of "bad password? wipe contents!" setup. However, in a country that forces you to resort to such approaches, I would bet that their human rights record is such that they wouldn't mind tossing you in jail because you were "obviously hiding something".

In the Middle East, forbidden literature is best distributed digitally. It's far easier to conceal, transmit, and even produce. There are some Arabic book clubs online that have more materials than most physical libraries. Two great examples are the atheist and Marxist communities. Neither could have thrived so much without the internet.

But: If you can get your hands on a banned (physical) book, you can still read it in relative safety.

But if you are found in possession of the physical book you can be prosecuted. In a totalitarian scenario of course, nothing like enlightened society today.

Book banning online could become easier as governments get more control over the Internet. (at least for the masses)

Everyone who reads a controversial book on the internet can be (will be) tracked. Poor excuse for samizdat.

If that truly becomes an issue, people will use Tor.

At which point using Tor will become a crime.

At which point a new technology will emerge that circumvents or masks the ban.

Like the photocopier?

You raise a good point, but we can't get complacent. While the Internet makes it hard to cut off access to a book altogether, the technology exists to make books harder to find. Imagine slow- or errorbanning[0], but applied to authors and books rather than users and comments. There have been strides toward securing net neutrality, but it remains an issue. [1]

[0]: If you aren't familiar with these terms, Coding Horror has a good introduction: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h.... Most people here know of these techniques already because Hacker News uses hellbanning.

[1]: See https://www.eff.org/issues/net-neutrality

Just look at China's internet censorship regime for an excellent example of how this works.

The Great Firewall does not prevent a determined person from accessing banned content. You don't even have to be all that determined, really. They make no effort to block things like ssh tunnels or VPNs. You're just a quick "ssh -D" command or Tor install away from access to everything they block.

One wonders, then, why they bother. Many technically-minded people ask this question. Or they assume the Great Firewall does much more than it really does, and think that stuff like ssh must be blocked. (Of course, it's not. China likes international business, and if foreigners can't get secure access to their corporate networks, foreigners won't come to China to do business.)

The Great Firewall's purpose is not to prevent information from being accessed at all, its purpose is social control. If 100 Chinese internet users attempt to access blocked content, perhaps 10 will persist and succeed, while 90 will just move on to looking at cat pictures or whatever. From the point of view of the Chinese authorities, that is a success.

The Great Firewall will block attempts to read about the Tiananmen Square massacre. This seems silly, because Chinese people know about this event anyway. But it changes the discourse. It gently pushes the online conversation toward "safer" topics.

With modern technology, a determined person will always be able to find the content they want, no matter how banned it is. This is not a concern. What is a concern is the ability to push the less-determined people, who vastly outnumber the determined people, toward topics and material that the authorities prefer.

This reminds me of what many popular websites did during the SOPA and PIPA discussion. Though most sites simply displayed some mock warning or announcement stating "This is what you could see if SOPA was passed".

Instead of or in addition to fighting NSA surveillance operations and requests I wonder if sites could instead display a message or page detailing what the NSA would be provided with if they ever came asking for your information.

records maintained on your account: search: "Funny pictures of cats" IP: 192.168.0.1 account: johndoe5555@provider.com date: 01/01/2013 12:00:00.000 referrer: www.example.com

etc . . .

I love the idea.

Unfortunately, I think the average use would be more scared of the website than the NSA =/

That's a clever idea, but I think that most users would be disconcerted by the sheer amount of information that's collected by most web sites already. It would raise the question, "why do you need to collect all that?" before anything else. Which is a good question to be sure, but probably not the one that most companies want to be answering.

You're probably right about the web site getting the wrong kind of attention from this. I can almost see a government organization doing this instead, either as a public service or after some open information law is passed in reaction to public opinion on NSA surveillance.

The U.S. government might just be bureaucratic and fractured enough.

>...on a campus of 3,000, only eight people actually asked for a meeting with me to discuss the reasons I banned the book

I think this is really the most interesting part of the story- people are willing to complain but not take reasonable actions to remedy the situation. I think this is a symptom of a deeper problem in our society.

YES! +1k.

> Some used Facebook as a forum to make rude comments from the relatively safe distance social media provides. This is the sole purpose of facebook, as far as I can tell. Give a loudmouth a microphone and then try to ignore them as they shout as loudly as possible.

... and I reference the "Facebook experiment" article a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5811564

That comment was terribly meta. Yet I strain my brain trying to come up with something to do about THAT that isn't 'post a comment on HN' and I can't come up with anything.

And the favorite lists and references to Godwin's law ensue:

  * Steal This Book
  * Anarchist Cookbook
  * Uncle Tom's Cabin
  * Mein Kampf
  * Das Kapital
  * The Satanic Verses
  * Captain Underpants (for the kids, obviously)

Feel free to criticize or bust out some better titles. :)

And replying to myself... Fahrenheit 451, of course!

The AC wasn't really a "book" per-se, but a collected volume of snippets, wasn't it? I'd hardly call that a "banned" book though. I mean, it contained illegal activities which would have been verboten in most places.

When I was in high school, there were kids who would frequent online forums (and a myriad of ad-heavy free hosts including GEOCITIES!!!!) that would put up The AC, using the library computers.

They used Websense to filter content, which was about as effective as a sieve since they hadn't contemplated open proxies. 10 - 20 New ones which would pop up from time to time and the IPs would get traded on those forums.

From the copies that got passed around on floppies (aaah, floppies. Remember those?) I'd say The AC was a collection of (mostly bad) texts assembled from various authors who posted these on Usenet and the like previously. I remember there were multiple versions; nothing really "official" since many were edited and compiled by independent authors and all are guaranteed to get you in hospital or jail.

I think a couple of idiots in our school accomplished both.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_cookbook

No, it was a book, published in hard copy. And it's probably older than you are.

The best story I've read on the Internet about the Anarchist cookbook was a guy who claimed that he accidentally blew up his middle school with home made dynamite in Ireland, and only got away with it because the government blamed it on the IRA. (I can't seem to find it right now though.)

The fastest way to falsify that story is if the recipe for dynamite in the Anarchist cookbook is wrong. (Which it may very well be, as the book is full of wrong information IIRC.)

I googled for it and found a "anarchist cookbook v2000". It contains recipes for dynamite and nitroglycerin that are correct, but stupendously dangerous to do.

When is the last time any of those books were banned in the USA? (I chose a country where I know Mein Kampf is available to purchase and legal to possess.)

I would add Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hit_Man:_A_Technical_Manual_for...

Librarian activists use the word 'ban' differently than everyone else. To most people, to ban something is to prohibit it. To librarians, to ban a book is to keep it out of stock. This may still be morally wrong in some situations, but it is dishonest of these activists to conflate such an action with book burnings and other more radical forms of information suppression.

The modern way to ban books is steganography-like: hide them in a sea of information.

Imagine this: services like amazon take over all the dead-tree book market. The government cracks down on piracy, and eliminates that way of getting books. A few big players end up controlling all the books on drm'd electronic devices.

The future could be an easy place to ban books.

"The hardcore flying saucer cultist, on the other hand, is a very special personality who has thus far escaped close scrutiny by the scientific community. Contrary to Buckner's finding, a poll of 250 hardcore "ufologists" in the United States in 1969 determined their median age to be 31. Teen-agers and house-wives constitute the most active groups, collecting clippings of sightings and issuing amateur newsletters and magazines, usually mimeographed. The classic search for identity plays an important role. The teen-aged ufologist is most often isolated on a farm, or separated from his peers because of his eccentric personality." The Flying Saucer Subculture, John Keel (1973)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimeograph

I'd always wondered how you produced a zine before personal computers.

Scary still and somewhat related is: instead of banning books, just change the content to fit your needs. Like Nineteen eighty-four.

Oh, and like this: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/t...

Is there something about this post that got it killed automatically, or did I just get banned or something?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069755

edit: Oooh, I'm guessing the reference to H a ckaday?

> Our unorthodox (okay, heretical) experiment was very successful in highlighting how a simple bureaucratic decision can curb our freedom to read.

Huh? Isn't the lesson more like, "People react very badly when a bureaucracy tells them what they cannot do"?

Or, as Oscar Wilde put it: "There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."...or, in the OP's case: "Better to be censored than to be ignored"

Did anyone else in junior high/high school actively seek out the books on the Banned books list just to see what the hell was so interesting about them?

----

A more relevant experiment would be to just hide certain books for a year and see if anyone notices. However, the percentage of a community that will read any one book in a year is so small that you wouldn't be able to discern any overall negative effect from hiding it.

>A more relevant experiment would be to just hide certain books for a year and see if anyone notices.

How could you distinguish between a book being hidden, and the library simply not having said book, or having said book but it is accidently in the wrong section.

Well, yes, that's the thing, right? The best way to censor something is to disappear it without anyone noticing. The OP asserts that censorship is something that we can inherently discern and that the announcement of the book-banning proves it. No it doesn't. If the library were to just remove the book, people would just read some other book or do something else.

I'm not philosophically opposed to the OP, I'm just pointing out that the most dangerous censorship is the kind you aren't aware of

I guess the "very successful" part was really the 8 people trying to understand the reason the book got banned, and the (few ?) other constructive responses to the announcement.

Especially if the other years' banned book weeks got no measurable reaction at all. People on facebook reacting shallowly to some announcement should not be news.

> banned book weeks

The problem here is that it isn't 'banned' books, it's 'banned and challenged' books, which means 'any book anyone has complained about', which means Harry Potter qualifies.

You cannot tell me with a straight face that Harry Potter has been meaningfully banned in the Western world.

It's a pious lie which reduces an important topic to a laundry list of things the most extreme prigs got uptight over in the course of the past year or so. It trivializes the whole issue.

> You cannot tell me with a straight face that Harry Potter has been meaningfully banned in the Western world.

The only effect of a library banning Harry Potter was increased sales at the local Wal-Mart.

This reminds me of a similar story about how creative messaging can make people appreciate books and free speech: http://vimeo.com/35758683

It's a great experiment. Sometimes you have to shake things up to keep the importance of an issue alive. Of course things take a life of their own on the internet and Facebook.

that's funny... it looked to me like one of the better promotions you could have had for the banned book in question. In fact, the whole thing seemed, well, like an unsubtle advertisement, unsubtle to the point where it became less effective.

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