The Limits of Freedom

In the course, Professor Moglen has placed an especial emphasis on the idea of freedom in the internet society. This involves the freedom to remain anonymous, and once, when the professor was questioned in class about the implication this had for child pornography, he said that this was a drawback of freedom, but that in the final count, freedom had to prevail and this was just part of the price for it.

I would like to question in my essay the value of this notion of absolute freedom on the internet that results from online anonymity. This anonymity creates a mask behind which people can hide, and thereby absolve themselves of wrongs committed. In other words, anonymity removes an external check--shame--to a person's bad behavior, thereby freeing him to do things he would not normally do in real life. At the very least, anonymity, ceteris paribus, raises the likelihood of crimes being committed, such as identity theft, fraud, various kinds of harassment (cyberstalking, cyberbullying, hate crime, threat, intimidation), and child pornography. Now, the counterbalance to (individual) freedom most commonly cited is (communal + individual) security, and this check on freedom might be said to become all the more relevant in a dimension where other forms of opposing forces are done away with. Security is especially pertinent in such a case because it is a prerequisite of freedom to start with. Otherwise, who would care about freedom when his basic sense of security is not met in the first place? Thus, perhaps it would be more prudent and realistic to think in terms of freedom and security being complementary and co-existent instead of mutually antagonistic and exclusive.

Furthermore, I would like to question the fundamental premise that online freedom is or should be a given thing. Freedoms granted online are not a kind of inalienable right universal to all mankind. I am aware that there are some countries where access to the internet is a right, but this is hardly the same thing as making online freedoms a right, much less an universally inalienable right. Rather, I would like to consider the notion that duty is a counterpart to freedom, and that duty should be part of a larger picture consisting of education regarding the uses of the internet. Insofar as we may analogize democracy to freedom (after all they are not concepts that are completely divorced from each other), we can see from history that democracy without the prior education of the population has consistently led to disaster--it was like that in Europe, and so it was the case as well in many Asian countries. Former Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew, in a speech that he gave, pointed out that from his experiences and observations during his lifetime, democracy has more often than not been associated with regression. He cites the example of Sri Lanka, which, during his student days, was often touted as having all the preconditions for a functioning democracy--and yet, when it came to the crunch, it still failed the democratic experiment. My point in raising this analogy is not to go against the idea of freedom (or democracy for that matter), but rather to qualify an unbridled form of it with education. Democracy did not work at its optimum without education, and so, in my opinion, it shall be in the case of online freedom. Furthermore, this will change internet users from within, rather than focusing on external checks which will probably fail in the long run if we depend exclusively on them. It thereby serves as a complement to security regulation. Internet users thus have to realize first that online freedom is not an entitlement nor a birthright, nor should it be (in my opinion). Freedom as such is not something with an inherently positive value; rather, it is neutral good that can be channeled as well as mis-channeled, used as well as abused.

However, the difficulty in this is that I also believe that the internet should be used as a tool for education through the propagation of information and knowledge. This is especially since the cost of this is reduced when and if we use the internet as a means or vehicle to advance education. Therein lies the paradox.

-- EugeneThong - 13 Jan 2013