check out this hilarious joke in today's Straitjacket Times
ST 21 Jun 2007, pH9
'Light touch' on new media, but Govt alert to radical
websites
By Leslie Goh
THE Government is prepared to restrict access to any website with
radical content that poses a threat to Singapore society, said Dr
Lee Boon Yang, the Minister for Information, Communications and the
Arts (Mica) yesterday.
Referring to the recent detention of a Muslim polytechnic lecturer
for planning militant activities, he said it showed how
self-radicalisation could take place on the Internet, even among
well-educated individuals.
Governments had to be vigilant against this new threat, he said,
adding that till now, Singapore had adopted a 'light touch' when
regulating new media.
'Despite the risks and threats, we believe that this is still the
most practical approach to managing new media,' he said.
However, the Government has to be alert and, 'where necessary',
would restrict access to websites which threaten society with an
online 'vortex of lies and distortion'.
Speaking at the inaugural New Media @ Arts House forum, he raised
the issue of the social impact of new media, and pointed out that
radical sites posed as much of a problem as pornographic sites and
sex predators in chatrooms.
The half-day forum, organised by the Media Development Authority
(MDA), coincides with the Infocomm Media Business Exchange, the
largest telco and media trade show now on.
The forum panel, comprising media specialists and Internet gurus,
also took questions from the floor.
MDA's chief executive Christopher Chia,
referring to the Government's 'light touch', said there was no plan
to 'hire people to police websites'.
His deputy, Mr Michael Yap, added that monitoring of the Web would
be an ineffective exercise in any case, because 'if one site was
outlawed today, something would replace it the next day'.
-----------------------
Suddenly, Mr Brown is something like the al-Qaida
