Free speech is only partly a government issue ("1st Amendment"). Throughout the world, speech is chilled more by thugs than by police. It could be youth gangs beating up journalists like in Russia, or Islamists killing cartoonists and movie makers. Even in America, we increasingly have a culture that seeks to silence debate, rather than countering bad speech with more speech.
There is action we can take, and it's this: when some are threatened, they should not stand alone. They can't kill, beat up, or dox all of us when we are many. We should draw pictures of Mohamed. We should criticize the despotic rule of Putin. We should buy tickets to The Interview and brag about it online.
3 comments:
It's sad that XKCD disagrees with you about what the threats to free speech are.
http://xkcd.com/1357/
What an interesting time. A huge corp decides to pull a product from market because of cyber-threat. It will be interesting to see how this attack is used as leverage to alter the anti-hacking laws.
It smells to me like Sony might use this to strengthen their position against those evil-bit-torrent-hackers. The threat is already credible, due to their systems being hacked.
Mark,
I've already blog on how profoundly wrong XKCD is on this issue:
http://blog.erratasec.com/2014/04/xkcd-is-wrong-about-free-speech.html
Post a Comment