[368] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Google Kills Kittens! Google Censors Critics! And
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (privacy@vortex.com)
Mon Jul 14 22:32:41 2008
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Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:07:30 -0700
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Google Kills Kittens! Google Censors Critics! And Other Paranoid Falsehoods ...
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000404.html
Greetings. Over the weekend, and spilling over into this morning,
the blogosphere and a variety of mailing lists were abuzz with
accusations and speculation that Google, a vocal supporter of
network neutrality issues, was "censoring" -- by tagging as
potential "malware" (virus, etc.) sources -- pages of an
organization's Web site that tends to take the ISP-centric stance on
these issues, often opposite from Google's positions.
This noise was amplified by a pair of vocal pro-ISP, anti-Google
personalities, who jumped with both feet into the opportunity to
promote a theory that's about as reasonable as network neutrality
actually being a plot to take over the world's communications in
preparation for a mass UFO invasion (oops, did I just spill the
beans?)
To the credit of the Web site under discussion, they quickly moved
this morning to announce that in fact they had indeed suffered a
database injection attack, Google's malware warning
characterizations regarding the pages were accurate, and Google was
not censoring the organization's site.
Story retractions by bloggers followed almost immediately, with the
general theme being "better check out these stories more effectively
in the future."
But wait a second. How could anyone believe such a wacko scenario
in the first place? Because it makes absolutely no sense from the
word go, unless your head is stuck in some sort of warped bizarro
universe unrelated to the real world.
Even entertaining for a moment the idea that Google would engage in
such censorship of those who don't agree with their policy
positions, entails a whole string of unreasonable assumptions.
To start with, you have to assume that Google's management is not
only evil, but stupid as well. They're neither.
Even if a firm in Google's position wanted to censor its
"adversaries" -- to my mind a ridiculous idea from the git-go -- the
blowback when it was inevitably and quickly discovered would
absolutely lead to crucifixion on the patibulum of public opinion.
And by the way, trying to censor a site by tagging pages as
potential malware would make no sense under any circumstances -- it
wouldn't be particularly effective at actually censoring anything
and would just draw attention to what was going on.
What really bothers me about this entire event is that reasonably
well-informed people allowed themselves to be caught up in what can
only be categorized as paranoid anti-Google speculation, without
first thinking through how seriously ridiculous and unreasonable the
whole story really was.
When intelligent people start behaving that way -- in what amounts
to a cyberspace version of a mob mentality -- I think it's a strong
indicator that passion is getting the better of logic in policy
disputes, and that's a red flag that we should all be concerned
about.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com or lauren@pfir.org
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
- People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, NNSquad
- Network Neutrality Squad - http://www.nnsquad.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
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