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MISSING PERSONSVersion 1.0 of this document written on 20 Oct 1996Today, I got my copy of Wired Magazine, November issue, and in the Electric Word news summary pages, the following quote appears in very small print: Maybe Not China: Or Singapore, either. These two countries are strenuously beating back the new economy with ever-more silly policies. While China blocked 100 or so sites purveying "spiritual pollution" from its national networks late this summer (including Playboy and CNN, but, proving its lack of taste, not Slate), Singapore one-upped the game by appealing to the police officer inside its citizens. Here's Ernie Hai, coordinator of the Singapore Government Internet Project, commenting at an Internet Society meeting on the proper interpretation of free speech on his "Intelligent Island": "In our society, you can state your views, but they have to be correct." We know, we know, War Is Peace, and Ignorance Is Strength." - Wired, November 1996This was intriguing, not least because I've never heard of any 'Ernie Hai' holding any such position in Singapore. Searching through the web using Altavista, Lycos and HotWired's own HotBot, I found the entire paragraph from the alleged 'Ernie Hai'. The quote was copied verbatim in several Freedom-of-Net pages and sites, including the EFF's own ASCII newsletter, EFFector: "The Singapore government isn't interested in controlling information, but wants a gradual phase-in of services to protect ourselves. It's not to control, but to protect the citizens of Singapore. In our society, you can state your views, but they have to be correct." - 'Ernie Hai', as quoted in EFFector Online Volume 09 No. 09This doesn't sound too different from the recent hammering that the Singapore Democratic Party has received from the Singapore Parliament lately regarding the accuracy of 'opinions' expressed regarding the subsidy of health costs. Perhaps the person responsible for the quote was trying to juxtapose recent developments in Parliament with the work that he is doing. And precisely what is he doing? A zip into the Internet Society Site finally yields paydirt. A paper for the 6th Annual Conference of the Internet Society entitled Rapid Deployment of the Internet by the Singapore Government has this paragraph under the heading 'Freedom of Speech': "While freedom of speech on the Internet will not be curbed or censored, measures will be taken to ensure that all parties are accountable for what they say on the Internet. Basically, the message is: With this freedom comes responsibility, and freedom of speech is not synonymous with freedom to make irresponsible remarks and be totally divorced from any implications or damage caused by those remarks." - Ernie Quah Cheng Hai, 6th Annual Conference of the Internet SocietyErnie Quah! So once again, the western press has gotten an Asian name wrong...thus, any searches for 'Ernie Hai' will only yield the name at the end for the second quotation. 'Ernie Quah', the correct name, yields some interesting URLs...this guy's been on the net since at least 1994, when HTML 1.0 was still the big thing. I think he probably understands a lot more than the press gives him credit for. So what does this mean? Why have I dragged you through an account of one day's surfing? Well, I just thought that the whole issue was sort of ironic and humourous. After all, we have Mr Quah stating the value of accuracy, we have the Freedom-of-Net pundits ridiculing it as some sort of Big Brother scheme, and they screw up with his name. Just shows how important accuracy is in your research...come to think of it, I don't know anybody with 'Hai' as a surname... Philip Tan aka FireHazard |