I receive lots of spam and forwarded links everyday. Most are junked by the university email filter. Some slip through, which I delete right away. Certainly, we have a choice. Our right to receive and send information; our value for honest chat, fairness, accuracy and responsibility; our common sense and decency - these should be sufficient to guide what we read, say, search or circulate online.  

Yes, in a democracy we should be free to challenge conventional wisdom, confront those who rule us, hold them accountable for their words and actions. Likewise, governments expect the same from its citizens. The problem arises when our rights conflict as citizens conflict with the government’s ‘right’ to dictate what we can receive, access or publish online.

azlan The Home Ministry is exercising this ‘right’ in moving to extend current restrictive media laws to rein in the internet. This, in spite of the Multimedia Supercorridor Ten Bill of Guarantees - the seventh says the Internet will not be censored.

I can only imagine how the Home Ministry’s cyber-sedition guidelines - which will incorporate the provisions of the Penal Code, Sedition Act 1948, Film Censorship Act 2001, Printing Presses and Publications Act 1984, Multimedia and Communications Act 1998 and Internal Security Act 1960 - will make life difficult for those committed to see political reforms, civic transformation, a sense of community that crosses racial and religious fault lines, and corruption wiped out, happen in their lifetime.  

By interfering in the people’s right to communicate, confront and challenge ideas on the Internet, the government will further alienate itself from the people, and stains its international standing, which if it hasn’t already, on the press freedom and corruption fronts as consistently noted in the World Press Freedom, Global Financial Integrity and Transparency International annual reports.

Certainly, we have a government - corrupt and increasingly repressive from decades of staying in power - advised by a bunch of ‘idiocrats’ (as termed by KJ John in his column) who react to strident political discourse on the Internet as a threat rather than as an informative barometer of the opposition’s agenda, the people’s concerns and aspirations.

The Internet is not beyond regulation

Arguments for and against regulating the Internet are not new though. I do recognise the Internet is not beyond regulation. And that’s for good reasons - to protect intellectual property rights, to curb illegal activities  such as child pornography, piracy, financial frauds, racial and religious vilification, identify thefts, bullying and so forth.  

But when corrupt governments resort to suppress dissenting views on the Internet to protect their power position and keep their corrupt governance and racial prejudiced policies under wraps, they violate the Internet’s essence as a neutral, open marketplace of ideas and information.   

No fair-minded citizen should tolerate or accept the Home Ministry’s incursion into the people’s public space. Cyber citizens should mobilise to protest and protect whatever freedom is left for our online news and blog sites to cover the stories and publish commentaries that the mainstream media, liable under the PPPA, choose not to run.  

azlan Netizens who believe in the reformasi movement should re-strategise on how to counter the government’s imminent control of what we say, read or circulate online.

The good news is developments in anti-censorship technologies - and Wikileaks - show the futility of any government’s attempt to control the internet. Netizens in China have successfully skirted the ‘Great Firewall’.

‘Hactivists’ in the United States continue to successfully develop ‘circumvention technologies’ and anti-censorship tools. A program, ‘Identity cloaker’, and Virtual Private Network are also widely available online for users to encrypt their contents and protect their privacy. These are some of the programs available to help prevent internet providers from keeping logs of the users’ activities and let users bypass sites blocked by repressive governments.    

The Global Internet Freedom Consortium has also developed tools to help users in China, Iran, and Burma to communicate online unencumbered. Keeping track of the Open Net Initiative’s report on Malaysia and developments in world Internet filtering and censorship will keep you in touch with circumvention technologies.

Skirting around repressive regulations

More tips on how to skirt around repressive government regulations are explained in a Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber Dissidents, which can be downloaded from the Reporters Sans Frontieres website.   

One of the notable articles is ‘How to blog anonymously with Wordpress and TOR’ by Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Global Voices, and researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. In a separate interview Zuckerman explains some of the steps taken by repressive governments to control speech online - filtering, laws, constraining publications, counter propaganda, hacking.

These are just a few examples of how cyber citizens, as custodian of humanity’s primary resource - information - is firm on keeping cyberspace free from government and corporate control.  

china internet law Of course, the government can take the other extreme of requiring all websites - including those from overseas - to be registered with the Home Ministry if they are to be viewed in Malaysia, such as the ‘white-listing’ of acceptable sites in China by the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Savvy netizens, however, will inevitably find other ways to bypass the restriction.  

The bottom line is the Internet, designed to be free and open, is only as good as our purpose for using it - to organise and mobilise for social change and fundamental reforms, to engage in mind expanding discourse and to test our ideas - besides the pointless cruising for trivia, gossips, social dates, online shopping and self-marketing.

DR ERIC LOO left Malaysia for Australia in 1986 to work with the print media.  He currently lectures at University of Wollongong, Australia, and also mentors international journalism students via UPIU , run by United Press International. He is founding editor of Asia Pacific Media Educator. His recent books are 'Best Practices of Journalism in Asia' (2009); and 'Journalism in Good Faith: Issues and Practices in Religion Reporting' (co-authored with Mustafa K Anuar, 2009). Email: eloo@uow.edu.au