In the olden days, after the invention of computer networks, but before the World Wide Web had been created, the Internet was funded by a quasi-military arm of the US Government, available to the public for free. Some of us debated the open nature of the service and the need to keep ads out of the Internet so it didn't become like TV - a crass commercial colony of US business. The argument seems quaint now.
The rationale was, even if you don't write many letters, our society as a whole benefits from having a sound communications infrastructure to support commerce and civilization. This is the same reasoning that underlies having everyone pay for roads even if they don't own a car, education if they don't have kids, or airports if they don't fly. Many people saw the Internet as this kind of backbone infrastructure - a public utility.
The Internet was invented, however, during the sharp rise of conservative economics in the US, including mindless privatization of public services. I think President Clinton was the last liberal president. President Obama is the first post-liberal president: somewhat progressive on some social issues, conservative on most economic issues.
This is the context for trying to understand how we're doing in maintaining open communication. If you think about non-democracies like the Soviet Union or today's China, you can see that manipulation of the means by which citizens talk with each other is a key feature of social control. Soviet citizens invented their own tiny uncensored communications infrastructure called samizdat - hand-copied, hand-delivered documents. Today's China has been efficient in controlling communication content for the vast majority of their citizens. They've learned that for their purposes, it's fine to control almost all of what its people can find out - the small amount that slips through is mostly inconsequential to their goal of social control.
The US Mail is our most uncensored means of communication. Assuming I'm not a spy or terrorist or dope dealer under surveillance by the government, I can be fairly sure that if I say outrageous things in a letter to my buddy in California, no one but he will know what I've said. The mass of mail is unreadable and unsearchable.
Nothing on the Internet is private. There are some very good encryption programs out there fore sure. But like China, our government knows that the overwhelming amount of Internet traffic, under continual cataloging by the National Security Agency's gargantuan computer arrays in Maryland, is an open book to them.
I don't think the Post Office is going to go away, but clearly it is in a state of transition and probably curtailment. While I'm glad to see Mailman Glenn at my mailbox every day, he mostly brings me bills and unwanted catalogs. Only one friend still writes to me on actual paper, and even she sends emails as well. I learn, communicate, shop, and manage financial and medical documents over the global computer network. All of it, every bit, is open to inspection by whomever in government, corporations, or others with technical ability - anywhere in the world - wants to know what I'm up to.
Government censorship used to be a labor-intensive activity. In the early 1970's when I was running a war relief project in South Viet Nam, my field staff and I quickly learned that if we used certain words over the telephone, the connection would go dead. Because the language skills of the censors listening in may not have been too good, we enjoyed coming up with work-arounds. For example, it was a problem to say the word "Paris," especially during the Paris peace talks. But if we said, "tower-ville," the conversation continued uninterrupted.
Nowadays, the computers that facilitate our communication are also used to censor. Twitter's recent announcement that it would be applying its censorship algorithm on a country-by-country basis is a case in point. Note that Twitter wasn't announcing that they censor messages - they already do that. We are today being told they are doing so with a finer screen that will permit people in various countries to have different levels of censorship. The computers automatically delete what Twitter deems unacceptable communication. No human surveillance is required.
An issue that can and should go beyond arguments between progressives and conservatives is our loss of private communication. In a country with a relatively open society, it's easy to forget that we must communicate without expectation of privacy, and that we exchange ideas at the sufferance of our government and the transnational corporations that partner with it and in some respects control it. And those massive corporations include the very ones that were bellyaching only last week about proposed legislation that could have censored them. Somehow they feel no conflict in decrying censorship by governments but continuing to make their own secret decisions about what they will and will not transmit on our behalf.
Is it a good idea to lose all privacy, to become an open book to anonymous others, whose interests may be unknown to you? And to have your ability to communicate decided by a computer program whose standards for censorship are themselves private? Everything we use to communicate over the internet or via mobile phone is digital: easily intercepted, catalogued and manipulated without our knowledge. The two remaining redoubts of analog communication are wired landline telephones and the Post Office. Both are dwindling fast.
