Editorial

 

The Internet Gestapos are casting their net wider. A stranger emails me: a message titled, "Unable to access your website by pulling up your name":

I used to be able to get you by typing in your name then your website will come up under "Real History." Now it no longer appears. Only maligning information on a different website. Are you aware of this?

We should be angry, even alarmed: but we are not. Our enemies, the traditional enemies of free speech, have forgotten one things, or rather two: People who sit at computer keyboards are usually cleverer than they are, and can outsmart even the cleverest censors.

Tip: If you can't access us via our main website at fpp.co.uk, try our American mirror-site, housed on a computer seven thousand miles away, at focal.org; it has a clever page (go to focal.org/proxy) that can thread a way for you to most any "censored sites." And vice versa: go to fpp.co.uk/proxy.

We receive constantly messages from all over the world -- that Australia has temporarily blocked access, that German police are frantically intimidating web servers, that Portugese servers have installed filtering software.

A visitor using his university computer and trying to reach our FPP website found himself switched automatically to the website of the Jewish Defense League (a body classified until recently by the FBI as a terrorist organisation). US army officers in Bosnia find that their taxpayer-funded computers have been secretly rigged so that anybody trying to read our website gets switched automatically to the hatefilled New York website of the ADL ("Anti-Defamation League").

It seems as though the US Army and more than a few American universities have forgotten what we fought World War II for: freedom of speech and opinion.

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