Burke said that
there were three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters
Gallery yonder, there sat a fourth
Estate more important far than they all.
- Thomas Carlyle (1841)
In Britain, the three
estates of government referenced Parliament: The House of Lords (the
Lords Temporal and the Lords Spiritual - nobles and clergy) and the
House of Commons were the earliest system of checks and balances,
with each estate in place to ensure that neither of the other estates
became too strong. The clergy couldn’t dominate — but then again,
neither could the nobility, and neither could “the people,”
whether they were people of wealth or people of more common means.
The americans
established a unique, experimental and untested form of democracy,
which divided the powers of government among three branches. This was
a new concept of the “three estates.” They carefully crafted the
legislative, the executive and the judiciary branches with an
elaborate method of checks and balances. In a young nation which had
just won its independence from an authoritarian British monarch,
these checks and balances were of the highest priority.
But soon it turned out that
three estates were not enough - Someone needed to keep an eye on the
people in power. So the concept of a "Fourth Estate" —
what we know today as the press (the "press" includes all
news media, not just newspapers) emerged. Throughout the nineteenth
and the twentieth century the freedom of press was debated, but it
played a crucial role in influencing the msses. It was the only link
they had with the Government. In the later half of the twentieth
century the sanctity of the press became questionable due to
commercialization and political influence.
The Fourth Estate was
toppling.
Charles Darwin once said -
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most
intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable
to change.
It was high time we change,
so we took the things in our own hands. In the past fifteen years, the spread of the Internet
and other advanced technologies had a dramatic effect on the way
people access and perceive information. One of the most revolutionary
technological novelties that characterizes the modern "digital
revolution" has been the explosion of the world wide web. It
has impacted numerous facets of international politics
including elections, media reporting from zones of conflict, and
corporate and congressional policies. They also have potentially
significant implications for policy making of the future and for
national and global security. It has been suggested that the internet
deserves the title of the "Fifth Estate".
As a matter of constitutional
tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume
that governmental regulation of the content of speech is more likely
to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it.
The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic
society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.
-Justice John Paul
Stevens, in Reno v. ACLU, 1997.
The current debates on
internet censorship is nothing but analogous to the earlier debates
held on curbing the power of press.
Decades ago the press exposed the Bofurs gun scandal which involved
the then Prime Minister Gandhi who was accused of receiving kickbacks
from the Bofurs Company to the story of the Fodder scam which
involved embezzlement from the treasury of the Indian state of Bihar.
And today we have Wikileaks exposing the US Government. This is the
prime reason internet censorship is being talked about. But
supressing this new wave of the people is morally wrong.
Web censorship, is only part of the government's
efforts to control information flow. The more freely information
flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of
countries around the world can hold their own governments
accountable. They can begin to think for themselves.
It is high time we
say no to internet censorship.
Labels:
Geek Tales
