Class Videos

Today we watched three videos in class, each dealing with threats to modern society. The first video criticizes governments around the world for attempting to regulate freedom in cyberspace. The second video points out the flaws in our copyright laws, stating that any work created before the 1920s is public, but anything after is copyrighted. The third video criticizes Disney's approach to stereotypical racist and sexist character portrayals in children's films. I found the first video to be most interesting. Barlow idealizes the concept of lawless cyberspace, and for the most part, I agree with him. It is interesting to look at attempts by countries to exclude material that they deem unsuitable.

Due to the complex interconnections of the internet, it is impossible for a country to regulate censorship or piracy through standard means. However, Barlow's idea of a self governing system of the internet is pretty far-fetched; the viewpoints of the masses are too varied to come to a consensus, let alone enforcing them. The internet is a place without political borders, the only two ways that regulation could (maybe) be achieved is: 1. completely shut off your country from the rest of the internet (North Korea, and to a lesser extent, China), or 2. create some single organization or one world government that controls everything on the internet. Any interaction outside of the closed system would offer a gateway into ideas possibly not permissible to the host government. Even in this situation there is still ample room for contraband content to be passed through public-key cryptography or anonymous data distribution networks such as Tor and Freenet. Attempting to break massive amounts of encryptions is essentially infeasible, even for large governments. It is estimated to take 15 million computers a year to crack 1 RSA-1024 key and every message sent could use a different key. So while it possible to scan regular internet traffic, such is not the case with when encryption is brought into the picture. Cryptography can be analogous to gun control, if you ban guns the criminals will keep them and only the good will turn them in. The same would be present with cryptography, criminals would still continue to use it, and it is trivial to implement (unlike gun manufacturing). Thus, it is evident that no matter how hard governments try, complete internet censorship and regulation will never be a reality any time soon.

-Derek Leidemann