Why censoring The Malaysian Insider is useless

Before Joss Whedon directed "The Avengers" and "Avengers: Age of Ultron", he made a movie of his one-season television series called "Firefly".

The movie, named "Serenity", is a space/cowboy flick which involves a newly-introduced character whose spends his life secluded and monitors communications.

In one scene, he scoffs at one main character, and says the following: "You can't stop the signal, Mal. Everything goes somewhere, and I go everywhere."

It is with this same mindset that I know many Malaysians will not be fazed by the wasteful actions by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), which recently decided to block The Malaysian Insider.

They will find a way to access the sites they wish, even going online and Googling how to bypass the thin film of censorship the MCMC put up. They had already started doing it previously when MCMC decided to block access to whistleblower website Sarawak Report and even medium.com.

What the commission has done, without giving prior notice, just goes to show that they have abandoned their structured, procedural enforcement of the law. If anything, this just reeks of desperation.

I do hope that The Malaysian Insider team does take the authority to court as a matter of principle because the MCMC seems to be too keen to please our leaders.

However, there is something larger at stake, a bigger question that needs to be contemplated by authorities and readers alike when it comes to the issue of "national security".

The question goes: if simply by changing a DNS setting, or even subscribing to a VPN, allows Malaysians to breach whatever legal censorship the MCMC puts in place, does it even matter anymore to block a website?

In this day and age, where even social commentating websites, such as Cilisos, is coming out with articles to bypass the block, what exactly is the objective of this law, and is it even enforceable on a general public that is getting more and more aware of network configurations to render the MCMC useless?

It is even more interesting when the justification for such blocking is to stop Malaysians from accessing terrorist websites and child pornography. Well, it doesn't work that way.

And if the major objective is state security, would you block a website teaching you how to make a bomb or join a terrorist cell, or instead monitor it to raise red flags so you can actually conduct preventive and rehabilitative arrests before they carry out their so-called mission?

If the Malaysian idea of Internet security is to just block a website making it harder to access and just leave it at that, then it is small wonder why our nation is still "supplying troops" to the Islamic State (Isis) militant group.

But more to the point, it really yells out that "national security" is merely an excuse to stop people from reading a viewpoint that is counter-productive to the government – and that is in fact a move of a dictatorial government.

It was dictatorial when former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad did it in the 1980s, and it is just as dictatorial when our current prime minister's supporters do it now in 2016. The only difference now is that since it is online, blocking it from access in Malaysia would just mean citizens will opt to use proxies based everywhere else in the world.

Adding to that, even subscribed news sites like Malaysiakini find their pay-per-view pieces shared on social media by subscribers who feel it is important enough for everyone to read. In fact, some have gone so far as to share news pieces all the way to their family in rural areas simply by using messaging systems like WhatsApp and Telegram.

So this government may block Asia Sentinel, it may block Sarawak Report, it may even go so far as to block Medium. But it won't stop the signal. The Malaysian Insider may be blocked, thus becoming The Malaysian Outsider, and subsequently that will be blocked too.

But Malaysians will find a way. They will configure their DNS to 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4, they will subscribe to VPNs, they will even go find The Malaysian Insider on Wordpress or even Facebook and Instagram, and read the news that this government and its agencies consider "confusing" and "a threat to national security" – which is only confusing to themselves because it is countering their ability to govern.

Because this government is suffering a trust deficit, it is leaking support and it knows this. Thus, they try to use an iron fist to kill a mosquito and end up contracting dengue.

If there is one thing I know absolutely, it is this, you can't stop the signal. Malaysians will find a way. They did it for the porn websites, the Sarawak Report and even go so far to torrent content off the Internet.

And they will do it even for The Malaysian Insider. – March 1, 2016.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer, organisation or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.