Anonymous - CloudFlare - ISIS - Internet Censorship

Posted: April 29, 2015 Anonymous Charge CloudFlare: Justice or Hypocrisy? Activists Protest ACTA Proposal Anonymous — the group of hacktivists — has launched a campaign called Operation Isis several months ago. The members of the group did not just identify and attack websites that are somehow connected with the Islamic State, they also searched for the companies in U.S. and in U.K. that host such websites and published their lists on the Internet. The cause for such attention from Anonymous is terrorism promotion. Recently, Anonymous focused on CloudFlare, which is not even a proper hosting company, because it protects over 50 Isis related websites against DDoS attacks. The hacktivists launched a petition to the U.S. government so that the company would be criminally charged for supporting terrorism. According to the comment, given to the International Business Times by company’s CEO Matthew Prince, CloudFlare is not going to fulfill Anonymous’ request and block its services to the Isis websites, because, firstly, it would not make a difference anyways, for the content would not be removed, and secondly, such actions could be evaluated as censorship.     “We’re the plumbers of the internet… We make the pipes work but it’s not right for us to inspect what is or isn’t going through the pipes. If companies like ours or ISPs (internet service providers) start censoring there would be an uproar. It would lead us down a path of internet censors and controls akin to a country like China.” Discrimination and censorship is something CloudFlare couldn’t be blamed for — just a few weeks ago, while analyzing the causes of Pirate Bay going down, the Inquisitr mentioned that this website also uses CloudFlare’s services.     “It is quite possible, and what is worse is that Pirate Bay’s CloudFlare service is not working, either.     CloudFlare is the website caching service Pirate Bay uses to keep visitors on their site even when it experiences downtime.” Basically, the fact that CloudFlare provides services to such controversial websites, as Pirate Bay is, should have been sufficient to certify that the company is not going to deny any of its customers. The petition, however, is unlikely to be a success — till the present moment, it got 185 signatures and needs to get 99 815 more before May 25 to actually make the government take action against the company. And perhaps it is for the best, because in this case hacktivists seem to act hypocritically. After all, it was Anonymous who waged a huge Operation Payback campaign against PayPal and Amazon for cutting off services to Wikileaks without a legal decision — and that’s exactly what they request from CloudFlare. http://www.inquisitr.com/2053153/anonymous-charge-cloudflare-justice-or-hypocrisy/ COMMENT Censorship always freaks me out, so this caught my attention.  Censorship of ISIS doesn't freak me out as much the implications for everyone else.  If censorship of one group can lead to a 'path' of censorship by providers of internet 'pipes' or whatever, it doesn't sound too good overall. Not sure why material that various groups broadcast on the internet is seen as such a threat that it cannot be countered by alternate broadcasts (ie alternate ideas, arguments, ridicule, other responses etc), rather than by censorship that eliminates the opposing/undesirable message in its entirety. Anyway, this is just something I found interesting.