My latest Guardian column is “Censorship is inseparable from surveillance,” which discusses the fact that network censorship entails surveillance, and how this exacerbates the public health problem caused by our difficulty in evaluating privacy trade-offs.

There was a time when you could censor without spying. When Britain banned the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the 1920s and 1930s, the ban took the form on a prohibition on the sale of copies of the books. Theoretically, this entailed opening some imported parcels, and it certainly imposed a constraint on publishers and booksellers. It was undoubtedly awful. But we’ve got it worse today.

Jump forward 80 years. Imagine that you want to ban www.jamesjoycesulysses.com due to a copyright claim from the Joyce estate. Thanks to the Digital Economy Act and the provision it makes for a national British copyright firewall, we’re headed for a system where entertainment companies can specify URLs that have “infringing” websites, and a national censorwall will block everyone in the country from visiting those sites.

In order to stop you from visiting www.jamesjoycesulysses.com, the national censorwall must intercept all your outgoing internet requests and examine them to determine whether they are for the banned website. That’s the difference between the old days of censorship and our new digital censorship world. Today, censorship is inseparable from surveillance.

Censorship is inseparable from surveillance

Nicole Powers from Suicide Girls sat down with me at my office last month for a long, in-depth interview that’s just been published: “You can’t escape it anywhere. It’s a race to the bottom all around the world right now. Canada, Germany, the US, and the UK, as well as the rest of the EU, are basically locked in a race to see who can implement 1984 the fastest. The US — obviously now you’ve got indefinite detention for American citizens on US soil. In Canada we’re on the verge of getting this lawful intercept bill that’s as bad as anything anywhere else in the world. In the UK we have the Digital Economy Act and widespread biometrics. In Germany the police just got caught deploying what they’ve called the 0zapftis Trojan, the government trojan where when people cross the borders and they examine their laptops they covertly put spyware on their computers so they can watch them after the fact. I mean really, at every turn there’s somebody doing this, so it doesn’t matter where you live. It really doesn’t at this point. That’s one of the things that I’ve really come to realize, the fight is global.”

My latest Publishers Weekly column is “Digital Lysenkoism,” a look at the bizarre internal forces that causes people who work at publishers to defend DRM, even though they know it doesn’t work.

I also recently chatted with a big-six digital strategist, who explained to me how his employer would soon be sending out all of its digital advanced reader copies (ARCs) as DRM-crippled PDFs. We shared a moment of incredulous silence at this. Most reviewers, after all, get hundreds of times more material than they can ever use. I literally get 100 books in the post for every one that I choose to review, and the idea that reviewers like me will put up with crippled e-ARCs that must be read at one’s desk or on one’s laptop, that we can’t load onto our tablets or e-readers, that generate all kinds of failures in the wee hours of the night, on weekends, or on airplanes when no one is around to offer technical support—well, it’s beyond absurd.

What will happen to these crippled e-ARCs, most likely, is that they will be ignored. This is exactly what happens to most DRM-locked screener copies distributed to voters for major film awards, like the BAFTAs and the Academy Awards. When you have 50 times more movies to consider than you could possibly watch, and when 10% of those movies require you to figure out how to connect a special player to your already overly complex home theater, well, that just makes it easy to exclude 10% of the load.

With A Little Help: Digital Lysenkoism

(Image: Lysenko with Stalin.gif, public domain/Wikimedia Commons)

The San Francisco Chronicle loves the stage adaptation of my novel Little Brother, and brings the welcome news that its run has been extended by two weeks!