Censorship & 9/11

The uproar caused by the terrorist attacks of September 11, was felt all over the world. However, it was the media in North America that blew it out of proportion. People began coming up with many conspiracy stories to answer the unanswerable questions that the attacks posed. People blamed the United Sates Government, saying they staged the attack, while others looked directly at the Middle East for the culprits. At one point it was impossible tell who staged the attack yet this did not stop anyone from making assumptions. With the fingers pointing all over and everybody getting blamed for something the government took the only action they could; seek revenge against one of their enemies, and shut down anyone who believed something different form their own point of view. This tactic spawned an entire wave of censorship. People in the media could not voice their opinions anymore without facing ridicule from government supporters. The censorship of people's ideas became ridiculous, and most people were now trying to uncover the real reason behind why the government censors certain information and opinions from the general public. The government was pointlessly censoring people's personal opinions; they were hiding the truths that the government did not want the general public to discover. Many tried to expose the government practices of censoring and the techniques they utilize to guard certain secrets and vital information that should not only be privy to high ranking government officials. As citizens of democratic nations our right to the freedom of expression are being trampled on by the same government body that is supposed to ensure and protect this right for reasons that the government does not and will not openly justify.

The media has always been heavily influenced by politicians and people with power because they can control, to some degree, the funding of these different media networks. In the months following the September 11 attacks, many major media outlets were asked to withhold certain articles, while others were told to simply not talk about anything pertaining to the terrorist attacks. Even large, companies like Google were privy to censorship and government influence. Google was again embroiled in a censorship scandal after being caught blocking information about Charlie Sheen's 9/11 comments, despite the fact that every other major search engine had indexed the pages. For days, major search engines like Yahoo and others contained tens of thousands of web pages relating to Sheen's comments first broadcast on the Alex Jones Show on September 25, a Monday afternoon. Many other news outlets took the story up in their even news, as many people were interested in Charlie Sheen's opinion on the topic, and his opinion happened to be an unpopular one in the states, with him pointing the blame at his own country. Google, later played off the censorship as a simple mistake, but other insiders later came out to say it was done after high ranking politicians put pressure on the company to filter certain web searches.

While some acts of censorship were done to save face for the government, and other powerful people, others acts of censorship were done to protect the citizens, and keep information out of the hands of the terrorists. In the days that followed 9/11, authorities revealed that terrorists also used the Web because they had access to the same technology. Government agencies suddenly scrambled to assess what they released into cyberspace, vetting it for any sign that it could be used to exploit structural or security vulnerabilities. A year later, a recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that "69 percent of Americans say the government should do everything it can to keep information out of terrorists' hands; even if that means the public will be deprived of information it needs or wants."

According to the same study, more than two-thirds of Americans said that the government should be granted wide privileges in deciding what information to post on its sites.

However, civil liberty advocates and government watchdogs said that while they understand why certain data must be shielded, they argue that the "sanitization" process is being done in a vacuum. They also fear that removing these informative documents from public view could jeopardize the well-being of citizens who cannot access them. What remains clear from all parties involved is that a delicate balance must be struck between public access and safety. "We definitely have our awareness up, our sensitivities up," said Beth Hayden, spokeswoman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, one of more than a dozen federal agencies that altered their sites. "If there's a question of whether something needs to be made public in the new environment, it probably won't be made public." Hayden said the agency's entire site initially was stripped from the Internet on October 11 but was restored October 17 as part of an ongoing redesign project. Gone from the site were schematics relating to 104 U.S. nuclear power plants, from access controls to details such as wall thickness. Today, Hayden said that information -- about 2 percent of the overall content -- remains off the site and likely won't be restored.

The safety of the American people was also at risk when government officials discovered another site that gave possible terrorists access to lethal information