The Singapore blogosphere has reacted pretty violently to the news that two bloggers were charged Monday with acts of sedition. But analyzing the reactions has proven to be complex and elusive. Nevertheless, I will attempt to wing it the way I see it, based on the limited publicly available knowledge.

Disclaimer: no attempt at factual accuracy or logical coherence was made here. Read at your own risk.

Update 20050913 1815: The article in the Lianhe Zaobao (my translation) has provided additional information, and this post is accordingly updated. Embarrassing spelling mistakes corrected. Factual correction due to Edan duly noted.

The relevant facts of the matter are:

  1. Two men are being charged with having made comments of a racist nature on an online forum, and on a blog hosted on a personal website.
  2. They were arrested under the Sedition Act and are currently out on bail.
  3. The original offending thread on the online forum has been almost completely erased, and the blog has been taken down entirely. No copies of these survive on the Internet Wayback Machine, Google cache or Yahoo! cache.
  4. People who claim to have been acquainted with the offending material report that their impressions of said material were made in very poor taste, and were clearly offensive and of a race-motivated nature.
  5. The authorities launched an investigation following the filing of a police report.

Everything else seems to boil down to FUD. I will try to enumerate the lingering (and hopefully relevant!) questions below, in the hope that as this case progress, at least one person will be able to check off the issues as they are raised and (hopefully) resolved.

To act or not to act?

The first issue, naturally, is the question of whether the government should have acted to charge the bloggers to begin with. Arguments for government action go along the lines of defending the fragile balance of racial harmony in Singapore, and that lack of active intervention will cause the social fabric to unravel and for society to descend into the chaos of post-colonial, pre-independent Singapore. Stands against government action base themselves on the self-regulating nature of the blogosphere and the belief that if such racist remarks were publicised, public outrage would seal essentially the same fate for these two fellas. But in order to resolve this question, we will need to make many, many detours.

Police response or active crackdown?

The question most left unspoken is thus: is the beginning of the end, that the Singapore authorities have decided that blogging reeks too much of dissenting activism to be tolerated any longer, and that this is part of a larger dragnet of shutting down all sorts of blogs that the governments decrees to be unsavory? Or is this a far more limited case, of the police responding to some kind of complaint filed with them?

This question has to be at the back of every blogger’s mind. And surely you will agree that this factor can completely change the interpretation of the government’s actions.

Somehow the thought of legions of ISD agents scouring Technorati and tomorrow.sg for links to racist/anti-govt/defamatory/whatever material is too ludicrous to take seriously. And the government has been at least quietly acknowledging that blogs are here to stay; witness the interschool blogging championships.

We now know that the authorities started investigating only after a police report was filed. Given this information, it seems that this incident is more an isolated case rather than indicative of a wider operation. However, we cannot be sure until we have more information about who filed the complaint. And the questions here remain unanswered: Yet how on earth did the police find out their true identities? Did the accused blatantly advertise their real names online, or was some kind of cyber-skullduggery successful in tracing down their IP addresses? ISPs are supposedly only allowed to reveal such data with the sanction of court action, so the idea of a liaison with GLCs is unlikely, albeit not inconceivable.Correction from Edan: Since Singapore ISPs are legally obligated to reveal such information when requested for by the authorities, this is perhaps not inconceivable. But still, this alone is insufficient to prove who was the person who sat down in front of that computer with that IP address, and at that time and date transmitted the allegedly seditious material for posting online. Then again, I suspect that this is something they teach in elementary police school, with the testing of alibis and whatnot. (Question to law students and lawyers: what are the circumstances and procedures under which the authorities can require the release of information such as IP addresses and traffic histories from ISPs?)

Is sedition an appropriate accusation?

In the sense that racist comments, if left unchecked, will destabilize a multicultural, multiracial society that has by and large maintained decades of quiet tolerance, this case will certainly bear some relevance to the context of national security. Yet can one really believe that the duo’s intent in making these remarks was to bring down the Singapore government? I find the logic hard to swallow.

I will leave this discussion, and its much more technical points, to much more expert voices whom you can find linked to on the wiki page, e.g. shades of sepia, singasingapore, Mr Wang Says So.

Court of law, or court of public opinion?

While no sane person will deny that the courts have a legitimate claim to jurisdiction in this case, I believe that this issue could have been resolved much more effectively by publicising the existence of such material. Minds accustomed to top-down action will find it difficult (at least, initially) to understand the self-regulating mechanism that the blogosphere works upon. While the process is decentralized, and therefore hard to trace, blogs as a whole do a pretty good job of spreading news of good writing, and ferreting out and vilifying dissatisfactory material. The incident of Brose’s cyberlynching following his remarks about Science faculty girls being ugly marks a case in point. Few people can resist the onslaught of hundreds of angry comments as a consequence of having written offensive material.

Which brings me to the next point:

Legislation or self-regulation?

Unlike institutions of the twentieth century, the blogosphere is a nebulous entity. There are people who claim, therefore, that the blogosphere is incapable of self-governance, and to the extent that there is no substantial hierarchical structure (apart from popularity), they are correct. Yet the fact that the phenomenon of blogging has survived more than 5 years should say something about how efficacious the system is. But they do have a point that since popularity is the order parameter of the blogosphere, munificent doyens/divas and their fawning sycophants can get in the way of more substantial content. (This is the “infantile” v. “serious” dichotomy invented by Steven McDermott several months ago, which has since spawned intense discussion until this time of writing.)

Institutions such as metablogs (Tomorrow.sg is an example) try to ameliorate this by offering structure, but they bring with themselves their own unique brand of issues. The editorial board of Tomorrow recently came under fire for approving a post linking a blog with racist content. Outraged readers castigated the linking policy of Tomorrow.sg and provoked angry responses on both sides. While nominally disconnected from this incident, I believe this is symptomatic of a larger problem.

Tour de force, or tour de finesse?

One cannot escape the feeling that the government has applied The Full Weight Of The Law and The Heavy Hand Of Government to this issue, a reaction which many feel to be severe overkill. I feel that this issue could have been solved with much greater finesse by simply making the public at large aware of the existence of these materials. If the remarks were really as self-damning as they are made out to be, public outrage then should not be feared, but expected, which should eventually lead to immense pressure on the authors to repent and take them offline. (If not, we would be in big, big trouble. See below.) The only expenditure on the government’s part would then be some press release to the effect of condemning such publications, rather than the expenses of incurring billable hours, court fees, and thousands of man-hours of background research.

It’s one thing to enforce the law, and another thing altogether to sledgehammer a problem, and in doing so, draw far more attention to it than is truly necessary. Add this to the general pattern of persecuting blogs, especially in recent months, and one comes up with a very worrying picture of a general crackdown.

Are the authorities trying to make an example out of this, as a warning to the general blogosphere? Because if they are, they are doing themselves a huge disfavor by acting so bluntly. Yes, racism is damnable, but should it be criminal?

International opinion

Even the most ardent advocates of government action will have to admit that justified or not, the arrests will go a very, very, very long way in reinforcing the image of Singapore as police state, at least in the minds of foreigners who care. And for an economy so dependent on globalized commerce as we are, such considerations are far from frivolous.

Isolated hate, or systemic disquiet?

Even as and when this case draws towards its (apparently foregone) conclusion, the issue whose surface it scratches refuses to go away.

Is legislated racial harmony working? One cannot deny the preciousness and precariousness of Singapore’s ethnic composition, especially not in a world where race has all too often been the provoker of armed conflict. Yet when “harmony” is dictated by law, can we truly say that we have a truly multicultural society? How many of us ethnic Chinese understand the meaning of those little colored dots that many Indian women wear, and how many of us have heard silly racist jokes about them? Who among us non-Muslims can say they understand the need to face Mecca and pray on a mat five times a day? How many of our own friends are not of our own skin color, especially when benchmarked against the national statistics of racial composition?

Let’s be honest here. If we had a stable multiethnic fabric of society, we would no longer need the laws enacting Racial Harmony as national policy; it would be like passing a law saying that people have to drink water at least once a day. (Yet this being Singapore, such a law may not strike some as immediately ludicrous.) So let’s assume that legislators acted in a rational manner by keeping this law on the books; this implies that the “natural” (unimpeded) tendency is for our society to spontaneously segregate by race, much like it did in the colonial era of Raffles and the East India Company. Are we as a nation then able to admit that yes, we have issues surrounding race? Because as every psychiatrist knows, only by admitting that a problem exists does the avenue to recovery become possible.

Are we mature enough to admit our flaws?

No person is perfect, and by induction, neither will any society be. Yet why do race and religion continue to be on our (official) list of taboo topics? As mentioned above, progress can only come from being comfortable with our being flawed. Yet our government persists to maintain its infallibility, and with it the sparkling-clean perfection of our nation state. Are we fooling only the starry-eyed tourists with fat wallets, content to let those disgusted at the charades go unnoticed, since they don’t spend money in Singapore? Why should we pretend to be perfect when it is painfully clear that such pretensions blatantly advertise our own flaws?

Indeed, are we as a society mature enough to regulate ourselves, to look beyond the dictates of authority and know when to be properly ashamed, when to be properly proud, when to be properly indignant? It is clear by their actions that the authorities do not, and I am saddened to have to admit that for many Singaporeans, the authorities are correct in thinking that way. Yet history has shown that civic progress has to come from the people, from charismatic figures who are stubborn enough to say, “I won’t take this shit anymore. Someone has to stand up to this gross injustice.” Martin Luther King, Jr.; Mahatma Gandhi and Rosa Parks are but three names to the cause of civic activism. So why are the authorities maintaining their ironclad stranglehold on the expressions of its own citizens? Can it be because they themselves are not willing to admit their own infallibility, for fear of losing their mandate to rule?

Freedom of speech - a non issue

On a tangential note, I will write about one of bloggerdom’s most cherished misconceptions, that of the right to free speech, and why this issue is not about free speech, and why anyone who complains about the lack of freedom of expression has missed the entire point.

Contrary to popular belief, freedom of speech is indeed a constitutional right in Singapore, as enshrined in Article 14 of the Constitution. What is misguided is the notion of what freedom of speech really is. It does not mean the freedom to spout off say anything you want; just because one is given the liberty to say whatever he/she/it wants doesn’t mean he/she/it won’t be responsible for it. Spiderman said it best, “With great power comes great responsibility.” And as Ivan once pointed out to me, freedom of speech doesn’t mean that one gets away scot-free with saying all kinds of things. Accountability acts as the natural (and most powerful) counterweight to a freedom that would otherwise allow conversations to eventually dissolve into chaos.

The Wikipedia also has a very pertinent section on caveats on freedom of speech that are so often ignored:

The right to freedom of expression is not considered unlimited; governments may still prohibit certain damaging types of expressions. Under international law, restrictions on free speech are required to comport with a strict three part test: they must be provided by law; pursue an aim recognized as legitimate; and they must be necessary (i.e., proportionate) for the accomplishment of that aim. Amongst the aims considered legitimate are protection of the rights and reputations of others (prevention of defamation), and the protection of national security and public order, health and morals.

Concluding remarks

So is the situation as what an anonymous reader wrote, that “we want you guys to express yourselves, but only on an international arena so that we can show the world singaporeans are as cool and up to date with technology, but you can only do it on our terms and if you cross the line we’ll come down hard”? The FUD factor is very hard to deal with, and if anything will make the issue fester and linger even longer. Airing dirty laundry is distasteful, but a necessary first step in fixing a problem is to admit that one exists to begin with.

I will leave you with Steven’s comment on Little Cart Noodles:

Question: Post Sept 11, do we want Halal and non-Halal taxis?