Saturday, January 28, 2012

FDL: Twitter allows for censorship of tweets in individual countries.

David Dayen story here.

At least it forces the issue when they make an overt announcement. It is the type of news story I have been wanting to see for five years. Cover Twitter executives - cover Evan Williams - don't just cover stories that break ON Evan Williams' medium.

This means that *every* news outlet and every piece of the internet that makes a de facto standard out of having the Twitter "T" in the corner is going to have to contend with the fact that they are using a medium that censors when governments ask. I have never liked the damn thing because I always felt as though this censorability and master switch-ability was being downplayed or ignored.

I guess as this notion of censorship erodes trust in Twitter, it probably drives some people to set up their own services with strong encryption. See recent Wired story about development of replacement social networking :here. So what I'm wondering is, then does strong encryption get criminalized, or given the reliance of business on encryption, will there be strong encryption licenses, and will it be illegal to SE without permission from a government?

There has never been a better time for Eben Moglen's Freedom Box.

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