links for 2007-06-13

• Human Rights in China: State Secrets: China's Legal Labyrinth
  "This report describes and examines the PRC state secrets system and shows how it allows and even promotes human rights violations by undermining the rights to freedom of expression and information, and by maintaining a culture of secrecy that has a chill
  (tags: china surveillance law humanrights freespeech statesecrets)
• GOOD Magazine | Goodmagazine - Internet Intervention
  "Unless the information industry commits itself to respecting the rights of all users around the globe, how can we trust it not to sell us out?"
  (tags: google yahoo! microsoft censorship privacy surveillance freespeech humanrights csr)

Comments

[mahathir_fan]

"the PRC state secrets system and shows how it allows and even promotes human rights violations by undermining the rights to freedom of expression and information"

This must be a relatively modern phenomena. I remember back in the good days of the Cultural Revolution, freedom of expression was everywhere in China. People were encouraged to criticize authorities. Even students were criticizing and disagreeing with teachers. Even godly figures (like Buddhas) were mocked and criticized.

We need to understand how China digress from having so much freedom of expression during the days of the cultural revolution to today where there is so little. During the cultural revolution, we criticized the government all the time, even dragged local Communist party officials to be publicly humiliated when they have committed crimes. Today we are afraid.

While we criticize the state of freedom of expression in China today, we must be fair and give credit to the state of freedom of expression during the cultural revolution.

[Rebecca MacKinnon]

MF you must be on some really great drugs or something.