Stuff You Should Know - How Internet Censorship Works

Episode Date: May 19, 2015

Some of it seems innocuous enough: protecting kids from unseemly sites or intellectual property from piracy. But the tools to protect these things are the same that governments can also use to censor ideas and quell dissent. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey guys, it's Chikis from Chikis and Chill podcast. And I want to tell you about a really exciting episode. We're going to be talking

to Nancy Rodriguez from Netflix's Love is Blind season three. Looking back at your experience, were there any red flags that you think you missed? What I saw as a weakness of his, I wanted to embrace the way I thought of it was whatever love I have from you is extra for me. Like I already love myself enough. Do I need you to validate me as a partner? Yes. Is it required for me to feel good about myself? No. Listen to Chikis and Chill on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant with Stuff You Should Know with Jerry. Depending where you are in the world, you may

not be hearing this right now. Yeah, I've heard tell that we are banned in China. I don't know that that's true. I bet it's true. We're not feds in person. Yeah, but well, we'll get that one. I'll bet you couldn't find our Chinese Pollution Sniffer episode though. Well, that's what I'm saying. I bet there's certain things. Or the One Child Policy episode. Yeah. I'll bet you couldn't find that one. Which, by the way, we're probably banned in China. It's a little weird that we didn't even mention that episode in the Zero Population episode. Did we not? No. Not only did we not mention that episode, apparently we didn't even mention China's One Child Policy at all. I thought we did. It doesn't seem like us. Actually, it seems exactly like us. You know what I did

though? Public service announcement. I said it was okay for a poisonous spider to bite your dog. And that's not true. I don't know where I got that. I definitely didn't make it up. Like, I read it and I couldn't find it and it's wrong. So it is not good for your animals to get bitten by poisonous spiders. And of all people, for me to say that, I was shamed. It's okay. That's right. I just want to correct that up front. I think that's good. That's as long as you correct yourself when you find out. Like, that's great, Chuck. Yeah. It just bothered me that I couldn't find out where I did it and people just thought I was just freewheeling. It doesn't matter. So okay, you feel better now that you got that off your chest? I do.

Are you ready to talk about internet censorship in all of its vicious, pernicious, nefarious forms? Sure. Okay. Let's do it. So in researching this article, fine article by John Strickland, host of Tech Stuff, who has probably covered this eight ways from Sunday. Probably. So if this floats your boat, go check out Tech Stuff as the podcast. It's good stuff. And it's Tech Stuff. Yeah, great. I found that I knew most of this stuff already, but I also found in doing external research that he followed pretty much the standard of explaining censorship on the internet. Sure. And that it takes a number of different forms, but ultimately its goal is the same. It's just restricting access to information,

whether that information be in the form of a nudie picture or a nudie picture. Yeah. Or an essay that is, that controversies some sort of official policy of a government. Sure. There's all sorts of different ways that you can restrict access to information. And we've been doing it for a very, very, very long time. Like this is nothing new. It's just censorship in a new form in a new medium. That's right. Because, I mean, we did one on book banning. Yeah. Pretty old way form of censorship. Sure. The MPAA. That was another censorship episode. Yeah. And so now that we have the internet, there's this big struggle over just how much access should people be allowed. Yeah. And a lot of people say unfettered, 100% total access to everything all the time

everyone should have. If you don't want your kids looking at stuff, buy a web filter. Do it yourself. Yeah. But it's not the role of anybody else besides parents, specifically with their children, to feather access. Sure. On the internet. And I kind of agree with that. Well, yeah. Yeah. Well, and as a parent, like I wouldn't want to leave that to someone else anyway. You know? Great point. Like, I think a parent should decide when and where their kid discovers certain things. Right. Just have that in their control, you know. So I get that part of it for sure. So I guess we should go ahead and start there. That is one form of internet censorship is a parent saying, I've seen the web. I know it's on that thing. It gets kind of dark.

Right. It gets super dark. They're like by accident sometimes, you know, like you've typed the wrong thing in, in Google images before. Right. And been shocked at what you found. Yes. Imagine like having like a 10 year old kid seeing that kind of thing. Yeah. No good. No. And you can't stand over your kid and put your hand over their eyes or no hand over their ears or anything like that all the time. So there's software for this kind of thing. Yeah. And again, I don't think it's about like raising your child in a bubble where they think that the world is roses and rainbows. Right. But as a parent, you probably want to be in control of what kind of disturbing images they see at what age. Right. You know. So yeah,

there's things. Cyber sitter. There's programs called net nanny. And I know what they do is they have a series of options generally that you can select as a parent on what sites that your child can access. And then those options tell the program to enable certain filters. Then all of a sudden your kids goes to type in YouTube and a big frowny face pops up like a crying baby's face pops up. Shame on you. What did you want to do on YouTube? You're being busted. So what you're talking about is a web filter program. Yeah. It's a software add on. Right. And web filters use one of two techniques to censor the Internet. Right. Yes. They use black lists, which is a list of specific domain names that you are not allowed to access. Yeah. Keywords. Right.

And then there's also, well, no, that's different. That's the other one is keywords. Oh, okay. So a black list is like howstuffworks.com. Yeah. Yeah. On a list. And so if your kid tries to go to howstuffworks.com or any of its sub domains, it's going to be blocked. Yeah. Those are the filter options that I was talking about. But with the keyword. Yeah. It's a different type of filter option where there's keywords that if when the kid tries to go to a website, the web filter scans the page to see if there's any of these keywords. And if there are, then it'll block that site. Yeah. Because those keywords are put there so you can find those things. Like if you see the keyword to some porn video, it'll have a whole list of words

describing what you're seeing. And so if you have those keywords, it'll, it'll root it out and say you can't go because that site said had the keyword ejaculate. That's probably what it's funny. I meant to tell you when we did the mail puberty episode, I went on to the computer, the public computer at the clubhouse and my clubhouse, right? Why'd you do that? It's a print. Oh, I don't have a printer at home. You still don't have a printer? No. That's a good printer at the clubhouse. There's a big difference between printer at home and like a good printer. And a clubhouse printer? Sure. This printer is a good printer. You know what they say, can't be the clubhouse printer. Right. But I tried to go on and it was

like, no, you can't, you can't open this web page. Oh, really? Because it was had, I'm sure it was erection is what blocked it. And it said, Josh Clark and units. Can't go on to read about mail puberty. Wow. But then I tried it again. I refreshed and it was like, okay. And it let me on. Oh, really? So it wasn't the best web filter ever. But then you didn't get a strongly letter worded letter shoved under your door that night. Not that night. All right, that's good. So yeah, blocking out these keywords, these blacklist keyword blocking, that's a, it's a great way to filter out nefarious websites. There's also firewalls. And I've been trying to get to the bottom of the difference between a firewall and a web filter. I heard you and

Strickland talking about it earlier. Oh, yeah. You had to ask that the pro. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, it's pretty cool. I can go to the author of the article and ask. Yeah, I almost went down there and I was like, yeah, Josh will tell me. So a firewall basically protects the computer or the local network. All right. From the rest of the internet. Yes. Not just websites, but um, internet relay chats, like instant messaging, uh, email, all that stuff. It protects it. And it says you can come through, you can come through, but you can't come through and protects from viruses and malware and, and attacks and that kind of stuff. Whereas a web filter is, um, it more says you can't go on to these things. So they still exist, like technically on your

computer. Right. Is that the difference? Like the firewall is further upstream? No, no. Am I misunderstanding it? Yeah. It's, it's actually the nuance is, is difficult to understand. If you go and type in difference between firewall and web filter, it doesn't bring up a lot of stuff. And that stuff, it does bring up. It's, it's kind of hard to understand. So basically the firewall protects your entire computer or network from the rest of the internet. Okay. A web filter restricts access from your computer to the rest of the internet. It's almost directional, is the difference going out or coming in. We don't have to bring him in here, do we? I'm going to go get him. No, no, no. It'll be like the necronomicon episode all over again.

So, um, one of the problems with web filtering software that, uh, opponents like to harp on is that they don't, um, it's just like keywords and things. They can't talk about context and filter in context. So you might not be able to get a recipe for chicken breast because as word breast in it, right? Um, which, you know, I guess if your kid wants to cook chicken breast, he's out of luck, right? You know, because it's only like, doesn't it work? It's just for the kid, right? Like they have to log on and that enacts the software. Like it's not for the whole probably on all the time. And then if you're the parent, you can be like, uh, no, I need this chicken breast breast recipe password or something. Right. Or you're, you have it on the one computer that

your kid uses, right? And you trust them to not use your, the leapfrog, your filthy computer. You know, uh, it's got flies buzzing around. That's, um, that's the home version when you're just trying to protect your kiddies from, uh, seeing the, the darkness that is the web. Yeah. A lot of people can't argue with that. Sure. Um, there's also business censorship, which, um, we don't have really here, uh, because we have to research all kinds of things. Uh, part of our job is to be on social media, but, um, if you work for a big corporation, you may not even be able to get on Facebook at work. Well, from what I could tell, Facebook is probably the most censored website on the entire internet. Yeah, I believe that. Um, like far and

away. Yeah. There, there's like, uh, there was this list from, I think it was like 2011, which is just totally out of date for this kind of stuff. Sure. But Facebook was like 14% and the rest of the, um, I think the next one was maybe my space or something like that. Oh wow. And like 10% of all businesses banned that or something. So like far and away, Facebook is the most banned, which makes sense because it's a time suck. Yes, it is. And if you, if your job has nothing to do with social, there's no reason for you to be on Facebook for any reason whatsoever. No, they're really hidden. Um, and, uh, since we're talking about Facebook for the followers of stuff you should know who are listeners to the show, I apologize for all the non listeners

that have invaded our Facebook page. Oh, what happened over there? Well, we just, we really grew a ton. Remember on that like one year span. Yeah. And I don't know how, but we got blasted out and a lot of people who have no idea who we are, that we even have a podcast just started following the page. I guess it's like, Oh, this is interesting things you know. Okay. And just follow the feed. And, um, are they a lot of fun to have on their jerks, man, and you can spot them a mile away. Cause the stuff you should know, army is well known to be very understanding, smart, compassionate, forward thinking people. Yeah. And these people are trolls. It's really stinks. Cause I have to heavily moderate it now. It sucks. And I used to,

it just used to be a fun place for open minded people to exchange ideas in a respectful way. And it's just not like that anymore. No, that's stinks. We can shut that one down and start over. No, shouldn't shut it down. But I was talking with someone on one of our fans on Facebook the other day, cause they were commenting about that. And I said, I wish there was a brief quiz you had to pass, um, in order to like, like this page. Yeah. Like, what's the largest manufacturer of tires in the world? No, even easier. Like, what's a podcast? Cause they'd be, they'd throw up some meme that says like, if you, you know, yeah. Anyway, I just want to throw that in there. I'm sorry for people that have had a bad experience there lately. That was nice. They've been attacks.

That is why our fans are so nice to us. Cause it's stuff like that. We care. Um, so anyway, it's a big time suck, uh, emphasis on suck. Uh, and so that's the reason they shut it down. The others to avoid harassment, which makes sense. Yeah. That's a big one. Um, your coworker might bring up a porn image. Uh, you know, some dude might say, Hey, check this out. Hostile work environment, hostile work environment and a company cannot risk that at all because they'll get sued, sued, sued. Yeah. And so the easiest thing to do is just to shut it down. Yeah. Restrict access. Restrict access. So that makes sense in a way. It does. And if you want to know more about your employer governing your work computer, go check out our episode. Is your employer spying on you?

Totes. That was a good one. It was a good one. Um, we're going to keep going right after this. I'm Mangesha Chikula and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology,

my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Attention Bachelor Nation. He's back. The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new Tell All podcast. The most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. But I promise you this, we have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all. And now he's sharing the things he can't unsee.

I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward, and letting everybody care for me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this. And I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day. Truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, we've covered parents censoring the internet for their kids. Employers censoring the internet for their employees. Kind of difficult to argue with either one of those,

especially if the employer is censoring the internet for their employees' work computer that the employer provided. Yeah, you can't really argue with that. During work hours, it's tough to be like, no, that's wrong. It's wrong. But again, we're coming from a place where we have basically unrestricted access to the internet. So it might suck to work under those draconian measures. The stuff we look up. We're on some lists, man, for sure. We're totally on lists. The third censorship, the third level, I guess, is much greater. And this is the one where people really start to go berserk. And I think rightfully so. And that's government control,

government censorship of the internet. And pretty much every country that allows access to the internet, which is basically every country these days, there's some level of censorship to some degree. Some are much worse than others. But basically, all governments in one way, shape, or form censor what their citizens can access on the internet. Yeah. And even before that, like search engines themselves censor because if, like Google and Yahoo didn't censor anything, the search results you would get would just be no good. Right. It would be like 1996 or something. Yeah. So they do their own censorship. But that's, as far as the government goes, there's something called the OpenNet Initiative,

ONI. And they're an organization that their dedication is to inform the public about web filtering and surveillance around the world. I want to dedicate this to the public. And they have four categories of web filtering political, which is when you, let's say, you want to speak out against your leaders and your country may not allow that. You know, if you have a blog, they may censor your blog. Yeah. There's a pretty good example of this recently. In China and India, they both followed the same trajectory, but to different ends. In China, there was a documentary about Chinese pollution called Under the Dome. Yeah. It went viral and like it got 200 million

views in the first day or something like that. Yeah. And it was government approved. The documentary was. Right. But it took off and the Chinese government took it down. And they did so successfully. Like you couldn't find that anywhere in China after that. Yeah. In India, there was a documentary around the same time that was about that very infamous public transportation rape case. And it went viral and got a ton of views too. And it also got people talking in India about this again. And the government tried to take that down, but in a very clumsy manner. And it was very ineffective as well. But both governments tried to do the same thing. There was something that was going on. It was stirring up the populace. And they tried to censor it by taking down a

restricting access to it. Yeah. And the China one to me is just crazy because like I said, it was government approved. The documentary was. So they didn't even have a problem with the documentary. But in China, they will censor things. They will censor anything that seems likely to spur any kind of activism at all. Right. Well, there was a study that found that a post, if you have a couple of posts that are, say, critical to the government. But one, so both are critical to the government. But one of them advocates collective action. Yeah. Like getting people riled up, like let's go meet in Tiananmen Square or something like that. That's the one that's going to get taken down. Yeah. So they're really concerned, not necessarily just with

criticism, but more so about fomenting popular unrest. Yeah. China gets picked on all the time and rightfully so. They probably are the world's most prolific censor, at least biggest, because of the size of their population. Yeah, that's the measures they take. They have what's called the great firewall of China. But I think especially in countries in Western democracies, it's a bit of a red herring because it's kind of like, God, look at what China's doing. Look at how much of a censor. It really kind of detracts from the censorship that goes on here in the United States and other Western democracies that's just as pernicious, if not worse, because this is taking place in what's supposed to be an open liberal democracy. Yeah. You know?

Yeah, you're right. But it is kind of easy to pick on China. Well, of course it is. They also, well, there was a post in 2011 that there was a rumor that salt could stave off radiation poisoning from the Fukushima reactor. And China quashed that because people were going out and buying a bunch of salt. I remember that. So again, they just squashed that because people were buying up too much salt. Because it would supposedly pack your thyroid so full that your thyroid couldn't absorb the radiation. That was why? Yeah. And it basically just bounced off. If you're famous in China, you're going to be heavily scrutinized. You've got to watch what you post. Yes, but if you're Ai Weiwei. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. And then the thing I saw said

that like small-time users and bloggers that complain about the government, it's not like such a police state that they'll take down all of that. If you have some influence, you're much more likely going to be censored. Okay. If you're not getting a ton of web hits and you're speaking out about the leadership, then you probably will just go unnoticed. Right. So that was the open net initiatives. That was just one of the four. Yeah, political. The next one is social. And that's web pages that have to do with drugs, gambling, sex, porn, all that stuff. That's very frequently censored. For example, like in a lot of Muslim countries, Iran supposedly is working on what they're calling a halal internet, which is very much sanitized version of the

internet with all of that stuff, the social censorship being enacted. And from what I understand, Iran is not so, I don't know if ambitious is the word, or deluded maybe, that they're thinking they can replace the actual internet in Iran. I think their ultimate goal of what outsiders are thinking, their ultimate goal is to create like a side-by-side internet. Yeah. Like here's the halal version that any practicing Muslim can access and feel good about. Here's the other one that is connected to the rest of the world economically and informationally. Yeah. And that was, you sent this great article, web censorship colon, the net is closing in, wherein the writer basically proposes that this is the future of the internet is a bunch of separate

internet. Yeah, it was Eric Schmidt from Google. Yeah, it was really good article. His BFF, Jared Cohen. He wrote it. Yeah. Yeah. And they basically envision a future where there isn't a worldwide web so much as there is a Russian internet, an American internet, a halal internet. And it used to be, I didn't even know this, there was an English only language standard for a while. Yeah. But that's all changing now. And now you have internationalized domain names that, you know, like they can have a SUNY only internet that they can read in their language and their characters and has no English whatsoever. So where are people going to go if they speak that language? They're going to go to that internet. Right. And Eric Schmidt foresees this time when

the internet very much resembles the world. So if you want to go on to another country's website, you're going to need some sort of virtual passport. Yeah, like an e-visa. Something like that. Yeah. Super interesting. And you may have to pay a fee to go on there and you're going to be subject to that country's rules and laws and regulations, just like you would if you were traveling physically to that country. Yeah. And that all of this is going to arise from censorship, from this society saying we value this and we find this evil. Some government saying this challenges our official stance. So we have to have that taken out. So all of these competing different international interests will ultimately fracture the internet and will still be interconnected,

but it will be compartmentalized. Yeah. Yeah. He even envisioned a future where someone would have to seek internet asylum, which was, I don't know, man, it's just, it's crazy. I mean, he basically says this is already underway in some former fashion. So where it goes, we'll see. Oh yeah, definitely. He was saying the ultimate outcome of this will be when some government or some country can figure out an alternate to the domain naming system, which is the directory for the entire internet right now. Yeah. If you can figure out a way to not have to use that, you can disconnect from the internet. Yeah. And you would basically create a separate internet just for your society. And that would lead to the ultimate censorship.

Yeah. It's not even the internet at that point. It's like a set of widely published guidelines and things. That's all it is. Yeah. It's just a big collection of articles and things they deem okay. Right. Because to me, internet means access to whatever. Yeah. I mean, but you grew up as the internet grew up. So you understood what it or you understand what it was originally meant to be. Yeah. Like you can't just publish the world book encyclopedia online and call it the internet. That's just a specific set of information. Right. Yeah. You know what I mean? Good point. Now there's anything wrong with world book encyclopedia. That's a great encyclopedia. They should sponsor us. All right. We're going to take another break. And right after we're

going to talk a little bit more about some of the countries that are the biggest offenders in internet censorship. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world

came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Attention Bachelor Nation. He's back. The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new Tell All podcast. The most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. But I promise you this, we have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all. And now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this,

moving forward, and letting everybody hear from me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this, and I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day. Truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. Before we left, we were talking about China. There's a group called Reporters Without Borders, and they cover much more than Internet censorship, but they do have a list of offending countries. And it reads like this, Belarus, China, Cuba, which has some more stuff

on Cuba. Iran, Minimar. Myanmar. What did I say, Minimar? Minimar. Apparently, they've gotten a lot better. Burma has. Well, they opened up big time their society. Yeah. And September 2011 is when they really made a bunch of big reforms. But the problem there is only 1% of the country are Internet users to begin with. Well, supposedly, those people that do use the Internet have screenshots taken of what their computer use every couple minutes by government censors. Yeah. I think that a lot of that's changing now, though, since 2011. A few more. Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Abhi, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, and Uzbekistan. That's where you're going to find a lot of censorship going on. And Cuba is really interesting. They used to not have

private Internet at all. Like you had to go to an Internet cafe, government-run Internet cafe. Right. And everything was monitored, cameras in there, even. Apparently, Cuba is even coming into the New World a little bit because now 5% of Cubans have home access. But it is slow. Yes. This one writer went there and he said it took him an hour to upload a 30 megabyte image that took like five seconds at home on Google Drive. So they don't have broadband, obviously. For now, when that embargo gets lifted, there's no telling how fast things are going to change there. Well, the U.S. and the U.N. are already working with them to try and improve their Internet and their Internet access. But as a nation, they rank 125 out of 166 in telecom

development. So the nice way to say it is they're behind the curve. You know what I'm saying? Well, that raises kind of a good point. You're talking about how slow it is. You couldn't even buy a computer there until 2007. You could not purchase a computer. Man, a lie. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? But with very slow Internet, that in and of itself is considered a form of censorship. Yeah, I guess so. So, you know, this whole thing about net neutrality that was going on. Yeah. So that deserves its own show, of course. It does. But let's just briefly say, with net neutrality, the telecoms,

the Internet service providers managed to petition the Supreme Court to basically say that FCC can treat you guys in the same way that you treat websites as information services. And an information service is basically like an independent business that creates or provides content for the web. Under the Telecoms Act, the Internet service providers were what are called common carriers and were to be treated just like a telephone provider, which is you have unfettered, unrestricted access to the telephone lines. Yeah, not like I'm AT&T. I'm going to pay a lot for a phone line that works. Right. But this other company, if they don't pay as much, you won't be able to get your calls

placed. Exactly. Or I'm AT&T and I don't think you should be saying what you're saying or talking to this person. So I'm going to restrict your ability to call that person. Right. That's what was going on with this Supreme Court decision, with the idea that telecommunications companies were anything other than common carriers. So they were almost getting to the point where they were going to be allowed to restrict access to throttle speeds so that you could pay for a faster speed if you were, say, Netflix or something like that. But then a new startup company wouldn't have that kind of money and would be strangled in the cradle was how the idea went. Well, fortunately,

the idea was overturned by the FCC. The FCC said what amounts to we're going to treat the telecoms like common carriers from here on out. And that means that they have to provide unrestricted access to the internet for everybody. And it was a really big deal. It was very close. It was, it may be like the biggest thing moving forward in, well, clearly with like the internet. Right. But it touches all kinds of business and personal privacy and everything. Like, we need to do a show on that. I agree. In full. Yeah. That neutrality. But the point was is that if you throttle speeds, those things that load more slowly than others are going to, in effect, be censored. Yeah. Because, I mean, how long do you sit around

for a website to load before you just close the tab and move on? Six or eight minutes. What? No. Okay. I meant six or eight nanoseconds. You got me. So that in and of itself is a form of censorship that was avoided by the FCC adopting this common carrier approach to the ISPs. Well, would you just create monopolies? People would be squeezed out. Smaller companies would never have a chance. True that. Yeah. Well, I guess we should talk about some of the opponents of internet censorship. The ACLU is a big one, obviously. They have taken, they pretty much squashed the Children's Online Protection Act in its tracks. This was introduced, it was actually passed in 1998, but it was never implemented because it just was pounded on year

after year, basically. Yeah. And as unconstitutional. And that was a law that made it illegal to present materials that were deemed harmful to minors, even if it was valid for adults. Right. And they basically, time and time again, it was taken to court and they said, yeah, you can't do that. No. You can't. Another one that they tried was called SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. Yeah, I remember that. And it basically said that if you even link to somebody that provides pirated material, your entire website can be taken down. If you even link to that site. Right. And that came very close. And you think, well, I mean, what's wrong with protecting copyrighted material? Sean Austin's in favor of it, you know? Yeah, he was like the face of that campaign for

a while. Let's get a goonie. Right. Or a Rudy. Yeah. Or he was, was he Frodo? No. He was Samwise Gamgee's, I think. Yeah, I think so. So you had the SOPA. You had COPA. You had SIPPA. You had all these things that were protecting the children or protecting intellectual copyrights. But a lot of people kind of saw through these as smoke screens and said, ultimately, what you're doing is creating a law that gives blanket rights to governments, to the U.S. government, to police what we do on the Internet. You're dressing it up to protect intellectual property rights or to protect children. But ultimately, what you're doing is setting in motion government censorship of the Internet. And it got stopped. But from what I understand, it's a there's no resting on your

laurels kind of stuff going on. Like this fight's not going away anytime soon. Yeah. I mean, that's how it always works, is that they'll sell it to you as something that you need and think you should have. Right. But what it really is, is something else. Yeah. So Chuck, there is this UN report recently, a special report that basically said Internet kill switches are a violation of human rights. Yeah, that was two days ago. Right. Or yesterday. Hot breaking news. Breaking news. Hot breaking news. Fresh from the oven. So an Internet kill switch is kind of a misnomer, because it's not like there's a button or a switch that any country or government can just turn off the Internet. Yeah. What you can do is especially say like with cell phone providers,

it's usually cell phone and Internet access that's falling under this. And in the United States, there is something called Standard Operating Procedure 303. Yeah. SOP 303. You might not have heard of it, because boy, it didn't have much fanfare around it. No, and quietly passed. The Department of Homeland Security is fighting tooth and nail to keep the details of it under wraps. Yeah, completely. But basically what happened is in 2006, the Bush administration, and it was later supported by the Obama administration, said the federal government needs to have the ability to turn off the Internet in some way, shape or form whenever it deems an emergency. Yeah. And the whole thing was born out of these London bombings, London underground bombings. Yeah. In 2005,

when the subway attacks happened, we actually did this. We threw the kill switch on in the Holland Tunnel and the Lincoln Tunnel in New York. On cell phones. On cell phones. Because these bombers used their cell phones to trigger the bomb. That's right. So the problem was... But that didn't work. No, it did. Like even the Department of Homeland Security, I mean, it worked. They cut them out. But the DHS even said there was disorder for both governmental and private sectors at the time when the use of communication infrastructure was most needed. Right. So that is one very big argument against an Internet or cellular kill switch. Yeah, it makes that chaos. It does. And like you really need to be able to get in touch with friends, family, coordinate. Absolutely. Get

to a safe place. What have you. So to just cut out that kind of that level of communication, that's one argument against it. Another one is that it can be very easily used by a government to quell popular unrest. To protest. Which happened as well. In San Francisco. Yeah, with the at the subway, the Bart shooting of Oscar Grant at Fruitvale Station. They learned in August 2011, there was going to be demonstrations going on. So they shut off cell phone service at the subway station so people couldn't organize. Right. And that was, you know, supposedly just going to be a peaceful protest. Right. So that was the United States, dude. We're talking about. Yeah. That same exact play was used by Hosni Mubarak during the popular uprisings in Egypt. Yeah.

I mean, like the same exact thing. So the upshot of this is that DHS is protecting the secrets of SOP 303. But it very much does exist. And the government does have the power and the capability to turn off the Internet in entire cities if it deems it necessary. Yeah. And there's very important really coming down here in the next couple of weeks, because in 2002, the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a suit in federal court seeking disclosure about the basic guidelines and policies of this SOP 303. And they're going to be ruling on it soon. And they're not saying, open the books on everything because we want to compromise our safety. They're saying, like, what triggers this decision is one big question. Yeah. And who is doing this? They're

not, you know, basically right now it says that there is, it can come from a state Homeland Security Advisor, their designees or representatives of the DHS Homeland Security Operations Center. Yeah. Not the president or anything like that. Yeah. And then there's a sub agency called the National Coordinating Center for Communications. And they are the ones that are tasked with a series of questions to determine if a shutdown is necessary. Right. And like, who are these people? And what are the questions? And what are the questions? And again, they're not saying this while some people are saying this should never happen under any circumstance. Including the UN. But and in the United States, it's a prior restraint and free speech. It's

simple as that. So it's automatically unconstitutional to do this. But the fight right now at least is for more transparency and an understanding of the policy at least. Yeah. So we'll see where that goes. But man, that is scary. Yeah, it is. San Francisco shutting down. I mean, it sounds like China or Egypt. Yeah. Yeah. It's unbelievable. And no one knows about this stuff much because I don't know. People are on Facebook or actually Facebook is not publicized. Yeah. They might be where you learn about something like that in fairness. But plus I would say the national media is at its lowest point as far as being a public service in its history in the United States. It's just shameful where the popular media is. Yeah. They're just lap dogs

and stenographers. It's disgusting. Yeah. It's pretty bad scene these days. Really is Chuck. I'm waiting for the pendulum to swing in the other way toward responsibility. And yeah, that's happening soon. I detected sarcasm. You never know, man. Sometimes things go bad in one direction and people wake up and go back to it's like a farm to table now, you know. People like trash for so long and now it's like the complete opposite. People really care about the food they eat and where it comes from. Some do. Well, that's true. You got anything else? Internet censorship is just like the farm to table movement. Exactly. That's the takeaway. Did I just make that connection? And you're John Hockenberry. Yes. If you want to know more about

Internet censorship, you should type those words into the search bar at howstuffworks.com. You should just type those words into some search engine somewhere and learn more about it. Absolutely. You can visit stuff youshouldknow.com and the podcast page for this episode and it's got tons of links to good stuff about this. And I said search bar in there somewhere so it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this, you saved the beginning of my honeymoon. Guys were from Seattle and we just got married a week ago. This is a man and a woman. He said we left right away after the wedding for a honeymoon flew to Maui on a six hour flight. Boy, that's not bad for Seattle, huh? No, that's nice. Like, what do you got to fly?

That's like 10 hours, 12. You got to stop in California probably. I think there's direct flights from Atlanta. That's a long flight. Yeah, it's about like 12 hour flight. One of the many benefits of living in Seattle, I might add. Nice town. So we flew to Maui and during the flight out to seated in front of us was a Russian family with three one year old triplets. I don't know why it matters. They were Russian. They were crying in Russian, I guess. And he said they were very disturbing. One would set the other one off and it led to the mom rocking the kids and then the kids would start crying and kids didn't like being rocked and they ended up kicking me in the head. He said, did I get mad? No, guys, because I was listening to you, the entire flight.

On the return flight, a woman in the row in front of us proceeded to get more and more drunk throughout the entire flight and ended up drunkenly shouting and other passengers talking politics and religion, pushing other people's seats and staggering to the bathroom every couple of minutes. What is wrong with people? Wow. You're on a plane. You're not in your home. Put your shoes on. Don't get drunk. Hey, hey, there's nothing wrong with taking your shoes off on a plane. Yes, there is. You're not in your living room. There's nothing wrong with taking as long as your feet stay in your little section while your feet are dry. You should never take your shoes off in public. I disagree with you. All right, that's fine. My shoes are off right now.

I'm disgusted. Again, my stress level is at zero because I was still learning about snakes and waterslides and clowns. Other than saving my sanity, I want to, I think you save several lives without your calming voices. I would have undoubtedly thrown the woman from the plane halfway over the Pacific Ocean. It would have been like the Good Shepherd. What's that? That Matt Damon movie about the beginning of the CIA or he throws his sons. Oh, yeah. Soon to be wife out of the plane. Yeah. And that was disturbing. What's wrong with Matt Damon? Man, that was disturbing. I hope you guys realize the public service that you do. Thanks, Jesse and wife. That clown episode was one of our better ones, if you ask me. Yeah. I had it all.

Agreed. Chills, thrills. Clowns. If you want to get in touch with us like Jesse and... His wife, he didn't mention her because Jesse's selfish. Well, congrats to you guys. Yes, regardless. You can tweet to us at SYSKpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know, especially if you're not a troll. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never,

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