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Asia Buzz: Anything Goes!
Singaporeans know a thing or two about porn
By ERIC ELLIS
September
14, 2000
Web posted at 3:00 p.m. Hong Kong time, 3:00 a.m. EDT
Hypocrisy is a wonderful thing to behold. And there seems to be a fair bit in Singapore when it comes to the vexed questions of pornography and access to the Internet. For a place that purports not to have any, I've never heard or seen as many references to porn as I have in the 18 months I've been based here. Singaporeans seem to know a thing or two about it.
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It's pretty hard to have a generic conversation about information on the Internet and not somehow touch on porn. It can be a bogey employed by authorities here in the same way that the Malaysian Government utilizes the specter of globalization, or the evil agenda of the foreign press.
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Asked at a recent conference whether Singapore can truly prosper as an information center with its muzzled domestic media, the woman who charts Singapore's I.T. policy fudged an answer and mumbled something about protecting the nation from porn. Authorities are right to be concerned about porn, but pluralism and a free flow of information has virtually zero to do with it. A free press doesn't suddenly mean topless page-three girls in the Straits Times.
Singapore censors spend days blocking porn sites, starting with Playboy.com, one of the most tame sites out there. Determined Netheads in the republic say you can get around the ban by using proxy servers based outside Singapore. But you don't have to be too determined. Porn sites are more often than not published via domain names that give little clue as to their real content.
I hear of many examples where porn pervades the Singapore workplace. There was the prominent headhunter, an ethnic Malay who publicly had the traditional values of a devout Muslim, including a pious wife swathed in mufti. When he moved on, his ex-colleagues routinely went through his computer. But the files they found weren't so much of deals done but of the hardcore porn he'd downloaded for viewing in the confines of his office.
Then there was the currency market analyst who was openly using his corporate e-mail address to access sex chat rooms. His story is an Internet spin on the old cliche of the train commuter who reads Penthouse magazine inside the publicly displayed exterior of The Economist. The trader was accessing porn sites on his office computer and viewing them through a specially adapted broadsheet newspaper. He looked like he was reading the Asian Wall Street Journal editorials when he was really examining Pammy and Tommy Lee's aquatic adventures. He was caught out when an outraged female colleague set him up by responding to his solicitations by using a dummy e-mail address. The result? He was sacked on the spot.
But porn is only part of it. Naturally a line should be drawn at porn in the office, but these days the Internet is so much part of corporate life. It can't be banned because that speaks so poorly of a company's dynamism. In the funky e-world office, where anything purportedly goes, companies risk losing some of their most talented staff if they prevent access.
Alarmingly, it's not hard to get a collection of porn sites logged on to a hard drive, which might give the impression that one is a recidivist visitor to such trash. As any surfer who has accidentally visited a porn site will know, exiting can be tough. You click out of one and another spawns in a programmed sequence. And all of a sudden you've visited half a dozen sites. Imagine that type of information in ruthless hands.
Eric Ellis is the Southeast Asia and Technology Editor of the regional
finance portal AsiaWise.com
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