# Week 11. Example of censorship and privacy in today's society

On this week’s blog, I will talk about one curious case about censorship and another concerning privacy when it comes to fight organized crime or terrorist groups. 

Regarding censorship I will talk about the Streisand effect. The singer Barbara Streisand gives the name to this social phenomenon that occurs when a censorship intention has the unintended effect of propagating further the event that is trying to hide. The term alluded to Barbra Streisand, who in 2003 sued photographer Kenneth Adelman for distributing aerial pictures of her mansion in Malibu. But Adelman was no paparazzo—he operated the California Coastal Records Project, a resource providing more than 12,000 pictures of the California coast for scientists and researchers to use to study coastal erosion. Of course, news outlets around the world reported on Streisand’s outrage, and before long, the photo on Adelman’s website (below) had received well over a million views. At the end it was a calamity for the artist because she even lost the lawsuit and had to cover photographer’s legal fees.

Another example that clarifies this concept is what happens in 2014 when the user @VictorUgas of the social network Twitter published photos of the corpse of Venezuelan deputy Robert Serra in the morgue. This 27-year-old deputy was assassinated ten days earlier at his home in Caracas. The publication of the images caused a stir among Venezuelans. The Argentine media Infobae echoed this controversy and published an edited version of the images of Serra's corpse in an article on its website . A few hours later, Delcy Rodríguez, Minister of Communication and Information of Venezuela, used the same social network to communicate that the Infobae website had been blocked in Venezuela. The censorship mechanism used by Venezuela consisted of applying a law that obliges Internet access providers (ISPs) to block web addresses at the request of the Government. ISPs run a process so that the DNS of a given domain name is not resolved.

Infobae built a tool to bypass the censorship and this is a software that checks the availability of the domain by sending pings automatically using a proxy server with a Venezuelan IP address. In case the domain is not available a new domain is activated. So they bought a large amount of different domains and many Venezuelan tweeters, forums,… help to announce the new web address through different channels. As consequence the censored content was amplified.


In regards privacy, we have lately seen as the privacy of citizens has been somehow restricted on behalf of security. Despite of the new regulations and awareness to protect privacy, we should know that there are mechanisms that have been sooner of later activated in many democratic countries that can bypass these laws for national security reasons. This has been enabled to fight these groups that are not democratic and often have very powerful economic and military structures that makes the security forces very hard to prosecute otherwise. So in certain circumstances the security forces can intervene communications without the authorization of a judge.   


1. https://www.cuadernosdeperiodistas.com/media/2015/05/110-118-ANTONIO-DELGADO.pdf

2. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/67299/how-barbra-streisand-inspired-streisand-effect

3. https://www.unodc.org/documents/organized-crime/SpanishDigest_Final291012.pdf


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