The Daniel Pearl Murder Video (Page 2)
The Internet Routes Around Government Censorship
The government has not taken a shine to the idea of the video of Pearl’s murder being circulated on the Internet. Some of you may have caught the Wired story about the FBI’s attempts to limit the spread of the uncensored version of the video of Pearl’s death. Several sites were contacted and ended up removing the video. Did the FBI have the right to act in such a manner? I don’t believe that it did.
The video is clearly gruesome and graphic. It’s an overt piece of propaganda that uses the murder of a human being as recruiting fodder. But that does not give the FBI the right to stop sites from carrying it, there are plenty of disturbing and disgusting images at places like rotten.com and ogrish.com. But those images are allowed to stay up with no action whatsoever on the part of the government. So why the drive to stop the spread of the Pearl video on the Internet? I can think of a number of reasons:
1.The desire to avoid helping the terrorist’s recruiting efforts.
2.The understandable desire to spare the Pearl family from any more emotional pain and suffering.
3.The fear that the viewing of the Pearl video might spark outrage and possible action against muslims or arabs here in the United States.
I’m not sure exactly which of these points is right; perhaps it’s a blend of them and other reasons that has the FBI attempting to stop the spread of the Pearl video. But I do know that they have already lost the battle. The video of Pearl’s murder is being circulated on the Net but not just by web sites. Although I originally found the link to a site that had the video via a search on Google, the file has already hit the Gnutella file sharing network. A quick search of the Gnutella network using the Gnucleus client found multiple instances of the video. And Wired has reported that the file has appeared on usenet already as well. By the time this column appears the file will most likely have been downloaded and exchanged hundreds, perhaps thousands of times.
Ramifications and Responsibility
There are a number of ramifications for all of us from this situation. First, the government and mainstream media’s ability to control the flow of information in a time of war has been severely impaired if not completely destroyed by the Internet. The video that CBS recently showed was edited to remove the actual footage of Pearl being killed. In the end this simply did not matter. The entire video was put on the net and then spread from there. Close down one web site and the file will be posted on another. Close that one down and the information will be on usenet, remove it there and it will appear all over various file sharing networks. There is no real way for the FBI or anyone else to stop the flow.
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