Are e-books more or less secure from censors in a country like Iran than paper books are?
On one hand, you don’t have paper bookstores to draw police attention in meatspace—thousands of dangerous titles can fit on a thumbnail-sized memory card; never mind the copyright angle here. And you perhaps can download the evil stuff from abroad.
Then again, on the other hand, what about the threats of IP blocking and closely monitored Net access?
The DearAuthor angle
In the wake of some friendly advice to writers from Mohammad Hossein Safark, Iran‘s culture minister, the above questions could be all too relevant to Iranians. He warns authors to pre-censor themselves and avoid “excessive portrayal of a man and woman’s private relationships” and other taboos (including maybe political ones?).
Hello, Jane? We do get a very small number of Iranian visitors here at TeleRead. Anyone coming from Iranian IP addresses to DearAuthor.com—where some of the spicy books you review might give Safark a cataleptic fit? And what about the sites publishing or selling the actual titles, such as Ellora’s Cave?
Disturbing six-year media trend: Less press freedom
Whatever the reasons, censorship of books in Iran increased after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president, and perhaps that’s in line with a general trend in the past six years toward less freedom of the press. For all practical purposes, the trend may encompass books. See a report that Freedom House prepared for World Press Freedom Day, celebrated May 3, as well as a summary on the Newseum site.
As for the map, which Freedom House originated, and which is reproduced in different colors on a wall at the Newseum, the FH site offers a more detailed view (PDF alert). The green countries are “free”; the yellow countries, partly free; the purple countries, censored.
Successful hacker attacks on global collections someday?
So what might this all mean in terms of global digital libraries, including those run by the public domain community? Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive has laudably arranged for the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt (photo) to store works from the archive’s collection. So far, so good, apparently. But since Egypt is just “partly free,” according to the yellow color on the map, just what might happen if religious and political zealots eventually prevail and start poking around the hard drives to see what Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been up to lately?
The Internet Archive will survive here in the States. But readers in those yellow and purple countries may not fare so well.
Tech backgrounds among some of the more gung-ho zealots
Keep in mind, too, that some of the most gung-ho extremists intent on censorshp have technical backgrounds; will Brewster and other U.S. archivists someday face successful cyber attack on their collection from abroad, even if most or all of their files are geographically still in the States? And how might the attack happen? Better to think out these matters in advance. Same for archivists in Western Europe and other high-freedom areas. That said, I’d hope that Brewster and the others would already have backup files isolated from the Net and related security threats. As with privacy, maybe some of the biggest threats to freedom in the end will come not from governments but from the “private sector.” Or totalitarian governments perhaps enlisting hacker help?
Reminder: The United States, while a long way from Iran, is hardly the leader in the area of freedom of expression, according to a Freedom House table.
Ahead of us, with the freest countries first, are Finland and Iceland (tied for #1); Denmark and Norway (#3); Belgium and Sweden (#5); Luxembourg (#7); Andorra, The Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland (#8); Liechtenstein and Palau (#12); Ireland and Jamaica (#14); and Estonia, Germany, Monaco, Portugal and St. Lucia (#16). That’s right! In parts of Eastern Europe, going by the Freedom House study, people are more free than here in the States! We come in at #21, a tie with the Marshall Islands, San Marino, and St. Vincent & Grenadines.
Oh, well, at least the U.S. is ahead of the next cluster—Canada, the Czech Republic, Lithuania and the United Kingdom (#25). Freedom House discusses methodology here (no mention of situations involving books, although presumably the same concepts would mostly apply).
In its 2007 country profile of the U.S., Freedom House mentions two specific things that seem to keep us lower than the other countries you mentioned:
1. Continued FCC regulation of broadcast networks — its odd here that Freedom House on the one hand rightly suggests that FCC censorship is still a problem, but on the other hand also apparently doesn’t think the FCC does enough in preventing concentrated ownership of media properties. Anyway, given the rise of cable here, the effectiveness of FCC censorship is starting to tilt toward zero, but that it exists at all is seriously problematic.
2. Freedom House really doesn’t like our tendency to require reporters to divulge information in criminal cases that they dug up as part of their reporting. This is a touchy subject. On the one hand, the jailing of reporters over the Valerie Plame affair was outrageous. On the other hand, they cited the controversy over the SF Chronicle’s publishing of grand jury testimony relating to the Balco steroids investigation. Leaking grand jury testimony is a crime for a good reason, and I don’t have any sympathy for reporters who republish grand jury testimony. They are being used by one side or the other, and typically by agents of the state itself.