Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Web censorship: It doesn't work in China, it doesn't work at home.

Some hackers in Toronto have created a tool that would allow Chinese citizens looking for uncensored information to access it, free of Chommunist oversight.

Meanwhile, most American high schools have some form of filter so that students can't access "inappropriate" materials during school. That includes obviously inappropriate things like porn, but also "advocacy groups", pages deemed "tasteless", and other rather innocuous categories. Since anything a tech person working at a high school can do, one of the students there can do better, each new restriction is only effective for about a month. Apparently yesterday was a slow news day, so the DMN ran a front-page article about the futility of these efforts.

The debate over the constitutionality of restricting the rights of students in public schools can go on until kingdom come for all I care, because I don't think there ought to be public schools in the first place. But this does indicate something positive in the nature of humanity: Freedom always finds a way to win, no matter how hard its enemies try to destroy it. Our job, as those who recognize this, is to help convince other people that it's true. The Libertarian Party needs to focuse solely on elections and let other organizations focus on education.

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