[Air-l] Al-jazeera: evil hackers vs. evil structure

Christian Sandvig csandvig at uiuc.edu
Mon Apr 14 13:05:41 PDT 2003


Bram Dov Abramson wrote:
> The NY Times ran a pretty good piece on this 
> (http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/2003-April/019695.html)

If you liked the NY Times piece, you'll like this commentary from The
Register (UK) from a few days earlier:

  Al Jazeera's web site - DDoSed or unplugged?
  By John Lettice  27/03/2003 
  http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/29984.html

The interesting thing about the Al-Jazeera story is that at first it
seems to be about "those evil hackers" again.  But underneath is a
poignant example of how the legal structure of the Internet constrains
speech.  Because an Internet ISP has nothing resembling a
nondiscrimination duty (unlike, e.g., a telephone company) and ISPs are
often protected from liability for censorship (e.g., the "good
samaritan" blocking and screening clause in the US Telecoms Act of
1996), this produces a recipe for overbroad private censorship.  Any
hacking only makes unpopular views even more likely to be rejected by
ISPs; the Register piece calls unpopular content the "poisoned chalice".

Another facet of this story is about how the technical (as opposed to
legal) structure constrains speech.  While Al-Jazeera was down, did
anyone try to find extremely controversial non-Western media coverage on
the Internet (e.g., Al-Jazeera's footage of civilian dead or British
soldiers)?  I did, and it is very difficult to find the controversial
pictures on the Web (I found only a few grainy screen shots).  But you
can easily find MPEGs of several controversial Al-Jazeera stories on
peer-to-peer networks.

Christian


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