Another BN desperation: censorship to start in Malaysia?!
By Guan Sin
A real desperation of BN, it seems. The call for proposal for Internet censorship by the government has already gone out.
The political tsunami of 2008 is attributed by many, correctly only to a certain extent, to be helped by the new media and blogosphere. After suffering the shocked defeats, one would expect BN to assess what it missed on the new media and to do a catch-up. Catch-up it did, albeit slowly and with little participation in it, but now it shows that the political dinosaur knows better with knee-jerk reaction – dampen the growth of new media, effectively killing the Internet of Malaysia.
Our neighbour Singapore has learned the hard lesson more than ten years ago, but, rather than avoiding a repeat of it, Malaysia aspires to suffer the pain now. I remember when I was still an Internet engineer in 1997, I was responsible to implement for my employer the blacklist provided by the then Singapore Broadcasting Authority (SBA). The first version of the SBA blacklist consisted of 100 entries of “objectionable sites”. The fact that it was 100 entries exactly is a tell-tale sign – it was meant to be a political gimmick, not solution, to show the conservative members of the society that the government was doing something.
Read more at: https://airkosong.com/_/2009/08/06/another-bn-desperation-censorship-to-start-in-malaysia/
