When the OpenNet Initiative started writing “Access Denied” a little over a year ago, the writers were challenged to consider how the data on what governments are blocking their citizens from reading and posting on the Internet is impacting “the slope of the freedom curve”. At the book release party on Friday, Charlie Nesson brought up the question of whether we can look at government blocking behavior to color in the picture of 1) what governments proactively don’t want people to see and 2) what people are already doing that the government is trying/failing to stop.
In the field of History, there is a set of accepted historiographical methodology that looks at laws proscribed to past societies, in an attempt to understand what people are actually doing. The assumption is that if there’s a law against it, people are (or, if enforcement was good enough, were) doing it. Could looking at filtering behavior color in the recent picture, and connect it to past study? How much of filtering is proactive, and blocking thing society doesn’t want anyway, like child porn, and how much is reactive? And how do we, as researchers, tell the difference?
