Web inventor: Surveillance threatens democracy
Source: AP-Excite
By SYLVIA HUI
LONDON (AP) - The scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web spoke out Friday against what he called a "growing tide of surveillance and censorship," warning that it is threatening the future of democracy.
Tim Berners-Lee, who launched the Web in 1990, made the remarks as he released his World Wide Web Foundation's annual report tracking the Web's impact and global censorship. The index ranked Sweden first in Web access, openness and freedom, followed by Norway, the U.K. and the United States.
"One of the most encouraging findings of this year's Web Index is how the Web and social media are increasingly spurring people to organize, take action and try to expose wrongdoing in every region of the world," said Berners-Lee, 58.
"But some governments are threatened by this, and a growing tide of surveillance and censorship now threatens the future of democracy," he said, adding that steps need to be taken to protect privacy rights and ensure users can continue to gather and speak out freely online.
FULL story at link.
Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20131122/DAA7PLQ82.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
SORRY! I just couldn't resist.
Not the "Gore" reference but nobody's responsible for the Web because it was really because of a the government's funding.
How did he build it if we all, using the US federal government as our proxy, share the praise for building it equally?
Esp. since the Web wasn't really a US initiative.
The first network was the idea of a couple of researchers who were assisted with government money. Then a lot of individual researchers, some funded by the US and some by industry or schools (said funding often called "salary"
made changes.
The Internet was originally a private proposal, a protocol for linking individual networks (hence the "inter-" part). And the Web was a protocol, really, for making file types compatible for information display with a set of protocols for how to share the files across platforms.
When it's important for one of them to be a personal, private initiative because it suits the argument, it's the unmitigated truth. When it's important for the opposite to be true to suit the argument, it's also the unmitigated truth. Shifting facts and truths make for bad communication. It's jako smeshenie das linguagems en vez de die waehrliche communicazione. Unless you know the code and roll with the shifts, it's meaningless but sounds really, really silly.
