We need to be silence! (sic)

Another day, another interesting development in Malaysian technology politics. I've recently come across a couple of articles in the news, about technology and it's role in politics.

Firstly, the letter on the right, has recently come to light. It seems that it's wrong for local television and radio stations to broadcast any speeches by opposition political party leaders. However, it seems that the MCMC had acted without the government's permission. According to TheStar, our Minister of Energy, Water and Communications has officially ordered the MCMC to withdraw the letter, effective immediately.

Wahlau, is that all that our minister is asking for, after a government body had acted illegally, contravening the law? I guess that the clown who issued the letter would just plead ignorance and apologise. But the last time I had checked, ignorance wasn't an accepted excuse for breaking the law.

Secondly, UMNO has formed a new taskforce to take on the political cyberwar that is currently raging in the bloggosphere. This is a much better approach than the brainless attempts at breaking other laws of our country by censoring blogs. The article says that UMNO is looking for an army of writers to assist the party in it's cause. It quotes the minister in charge as saying:

"We need to counter these blatant lies. If we remain quiet, our worry is that some of our members and civil servants will be influenced by all these nonsense."

The curious thing is that this isn't a governmental action, but individual action by a single political party. Maybe, the other component parties of the BN aren't being targeted enough. Either that or, there are just too many lies being told about UMNO by random bloggers. Whatever the reason, I do welcome the fact that they are at least, taking the right steps in tackling technology problems.

This was a question posed to me during my scholarship interview a few years ago. I was asked how the government should counter negative publicity by international media. This was with regards to the alleged anti-semitic comments made by our former PM. My answer was fairly simple. The Internet is a great leveler. If our former PM was quoted out of context, publish the full text of the speech online, and let people make their own judgement. File lawsuits against the lying media organisations. I've always wondered why none of these were done.

Anyway, I'm just happy to note that our government is spouting less technology idiocy recently.