NOTE: There are enormous amounts of evil depicted across all of the lists in the negative master list. This just focuses on the few that have evil (or Lucifer) in the title.
Extraordinary, Beautifully Put Together, Basic Reference, March 4, 2008
Ronald J. Deibert
This is a beautifully put together book in terms of brains, content, presentation, and coverage.
An edited work, with ten primary authors, it actually reflects the collaborative efforts of an international network of collaborators, and can safely be considered the seminal basic reference on this topic.
The first 150 pages include an introduction and six chapters, on measuring global internet filtering, the politics and mechanisms of
control, tools and technology for filtering, filtering and the international system, corporate filtering, and ethics. The rest of the book, 285 pages, is taken up by regional overviews and then country-specific summaries of filtering policy.
The motives for filtering are three: politics & power; social norms & morals, and security concerns.
Two types of filtering occur: announced, and disguised. Announced filters show a blocking page, unannounced filters pretend there was an error. Blocking anc be of entire sites, or specific pages identified by keywords.
The eye-opener for me was that filtering is not just on content, but on capability. Skype and Google Earth are two of the primary capabilities that are being denied to the people around the world by repressive ignorant governments who would rather have perpetual poverty than allow the people to leverage every aspect of the Internet including free global communications.
This is a first class intellectual, social, economic, and political contribution to the literature.
