Malaysia Stops Blocking Opposition Blog... But Arrests Its Founder

from the not-very-comforting dept

Over the last few years, we've followed the ongoing efforts of gov't officials to figure out the whole "blogging" thing. It started off poorly with gov't officials insulting bloggers and trying to pass a law that would have required all bloggers to register with the government. After that failed, the ruling party looked, for a bit, as if it might be trying to understand and embrace blogs. It set up an agency just to respond to blogs and even told certain of its own candidates for office that they needed to blog themselves. However, apparently it was the opposition party that embraced blogging much more -- and even a few of the bigger name bloggers got themselves elected. In response? The government demanded that ISPs block certain blogs, including the very popular Malaysia Today.

The latest news is that the government has rescinded the ban... but has arrested the site's founder. That doesn't seem like the best way to get bloggers on their side. It never fails to amaze me why politicians seek to shut up those who oppose them. What's wrong with actually responding and letting people understand the multiple positions? If you're confident that your position is the correct one, then why not convince people that's the case?

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Opposition to REAL ID Continues to Grow

from the state-legislators-say-no dept

My colleague Jim Harper points out that the National Conference of State Legislatures has called for the repeal of the REAL ID Act. We last noted that the Department of Homeland Security was pretending that all 50 states were on schedule to implement the law, despite the fact that several of them had explicitly said they wouldn't implement it. Now it appears that a lot of state legislators are ready to take things a step further and call for the outright repeal of a law that many of them have refused to implement in their own states. The NCSL letter makes an excellent point that can't be emphasized enough: the worthwhile parts of REAL ID, such as making driver's licenses harder to forge, can be accomplished at the state level without getting the feds involved. States can take what's good from REAL ID and voluntarily incorporate it into their state identification systems without participating in a massive federal database that would become a magnet for identity theft.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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