An interview with the Singaporean minister of information and the arts, mr. George Yeo.

Going up in the elevator itâs impossible not to think about George Orwell nightmare future vision 1984.

Singapore is about as close as you can get anywhere to the realization of Orwellâs vision: A strong State, a small society built on strong discipline. A government, which provides itsâ citizens plenty of economic growth but in return demands to work undisturbed on doing itâs best for the peopleâs good - if necessary by imposing censorship, heavy fines and prison.

It's a society which these days first of all considers information technology to be the key to future wealth, and therefore is installing a range of electronic applications that would have amazed even Orwell.

Implementation of the IT masterplan "The intelligent island" is governed from the Ministry of information and the arts. The ministry has a dual role: Not only shall it support the spread of information and arts, it takes care of censoring it as well.

The ministerâs office is on the 30. floor in a hi-rise that could have been the headquarters of some large multinational corporation.

The minister is not old, 42 years, but heâs held the title for 6 years; the 6 years where it has gained itâs central position.

Thereâs nothing apologetic or evasive in his words when minister George Yeo explains Singaporeâs policy of censorship. Heâs not trying to defend some official partyline, rather, he clearly speaks with conviction and an assurance that he can argue for his views.

Itâs also evident that heâs a man of unusual intelligence. A look at his CV confirms it: An engineering degree from Cambridge, an MBA from Harvard - both with outstanding grades. Returning to Singapore he had reached the rank of Brigadier General in the airforce when he was handpicked for the government by prime minister Goh Chok Tong.

He has headed the ministry of information and the arts since 1990, at the moment leading the ministry of health as well - besides being the father of four children.

For George Yeo the primary goal is to strengthen and protect the values, that Singaporeâs wealth and growth is founded on.

- By itself information technology may create nothing, it may cause harm. I think what is crucial is not that which is physical or external. What's fundamental is that which is within, inside the individual: The things which develop a man, the things which parents transmit to their children.

Take internet for example. There's a lot of hype about what the internet can do, but even if you were to have the entire library of Congress in your own study, books all around you, computer terminals all around you... would it make you a better person?

You can give it to a monkey, the monkey will remain a monkey. Now, whether all of this is an advantage depends on the nature of the being whom you surround with the technology.

- What's critical is what's inside, not what's outside. So yes, we are laying the foundation for the intelligent island, but whether or not we become intelligent depends entirely on our educationsystem on our ability to transmit the right values to our young. That is far more important than the physical infrastructure.

- We censor for symbolic reasons, for educational reasons. We are strict with matters concerning pornografi and on matters which may inflame religious hatred.

For example when Salman Rushdie released his book The Satanic Verses we banned it - not that you canât get it, because you can always mail it, you can bring it through the airport, you can fax it, you can internet it - it's available... But you can't get a copy in the bookshops, because that is our way of telling the 15% who are muslims in Singapore that we respect their views and we understand their feelings.

We also control pornography in a very conservative way. You can't find Penthouse or Playboy in our bookshops. Again; it doesn't mean that they are not available in Singapore, and I am quite sure that if you are determined to get them in Singapore you can - , but at least they are not in the open areas where children are easily exposed.

- It is completely against our own interest to prevent a free flow of informations, because we need that to make a living. We are a financial trading center, and if you for instance are trading the on the futures market, I don't think you can afford to be even a nanosecond behind other financial centers. So as a trading community, our entire economy has to be bathed in informations

There's no way we can deny our people choices, cause if we deny our people of sources of information that they need, they will defeat the government. They will find ways to get around the government.

But as parents, as citizens, they support the government in our censorship policy.

A few years ago for the first time we introduced film classification, and we allowed R rated movies to be shown to those who are over 18 years old. There was a public outcry!

As the minister responsible I had to pull back. I have no doubt that if we were to put it to a referendum the great majority of singaporeans are in support of the governments censorship regulations.

?The Internet is tricky. On the one hand, the Internet is central to Singaporeâs strategy for the use of information technology and the government is itself an avid user of the Internet.

On the other hand it constitutes a large hole in the fences of censorship. As the saying goes: The net interprets censorship as a technical problem and reroutes around it.

It is not easy to control the Internet, George Yeo admits.

- My objective is to gradually bring the Internet under the Singapore broadcasting act, which means that it will be regulated as broadcasters. For instance, political parties with webpages will be required to register with the Singapore Broadcasting Authority, so we will have names and people behind the webpage who take responsibility for what they put out.

My feeling about the Internet is that because of anonymity, people lose responsibilty and their civic sense. When you stand up in a crowd, and state your position, you state it in a social context. But when you are masked and people do not know who you are, you can be very irresponsible.

If you look at Usenet and the newsgroups on the Internet, they are like grafitti on a wall and the views that are stated tend to be extreme and very often obscene. If people have to show their names and account for what they say, then the quality of the discussion goes up.

For certain pages pertaining to Singapore, we will require all owners of these webpages to register themselves, so that everyone knows who they are and what they stand for. This is not a censorship, it is to ensure a higher quality of public discourse.

In other areas like libel, obscenity and pornography, the present laws of the land apply which means that if you produce obscene materials in Singapore and we find out, then we can prosecute you in court under the present laws.

- When we first talked about regulating some aspects of the Internet many journalists laughed at us, saying that we were being unrealistic.

I remember MITs Negroponte saying that singapore decieves itself into thinking that it can censor bits and bytes.

But since then many countries have decided that there must be some regulation; Germany, Britain, America. After a while different societies will come to the conclusion that civilization can only be maintained if there are certain restraints, if there are certain kinds of responsibility for what you put out. There must be some requirements that if you do certain things, you must be responsible for it.

?But cyberspace is everywhere and nowhere, there are no geographical boundaries. If I abroad and published a webpages that would be of high interest to certain Singaporeans, how could you possibly make me register?

- You don't have to register if you don't want to, but then we reserve the right to tell our national Internet providers to blank you out.

Of course you can always access through Indonesia or Malaysia, or you can dial through other websites. But we can make access more difficult. We are not concerned with narrowcasting, we are not concerned with Internet communication which is only to a few people, thats more like telephone conversation and things you send through the mail.

Our concern is with broadcasts, it's with webpages which reach out to large numbers. And if these webpages are against the law or are problematic or socially disfunctional, then we can require Internet providers to stop those pages.

?Another area where Singaporeâs policy of control seems to run contrary to the very nature of digital information is the law, that prohibits regular privat persons to put up a satellite dish in order to recieve the many TV-channels overhead.

Contrary to other countries that have outlawed dishes, you actually donât see a single private dish anywhere in Singapore, so presently, the law seems effecient.

Never the less, Citizens are starting to demand access to satellite TV and they will soon get it - by cable.

Already, many housing complexes have installed cable, and the official plans calls for all households to be cabled within the next two-three years, a plan which seems on track. That would answer the demand for satellite channels, while assuring that the government can continue to control the stream of information into Singapore.

- We allow dishes for embassies, for banks, for all corporations, if they apply for it. We do not allow it for private households - for two reasons:

One is to give us some control over broadcasting. This is important because if everyone has a satellite dish then everyone is listening to different stations and there is no sense of what is common

We will always want to keep out within the means we have, pornography and broadcasts that inflame religious or racial hatred.

As you know we are a mulitreligious, multiracial society and these tensions are never far below the surface. It is important that every day we try to forestall conflicts.

Also, in a national emergency, say, if there is a war or a terrrible accident involving chemical gas, then immediately people can be informed on the TV screen whatever channel they are watching.

The second reason is for commercial protection. We are constantly being swamped by foreign broadcasting, and by limiting access to our local market, we are in fact protecting our local stations which is something that we have to do because if we don't have our local stations, then singaporeans will lose their sense of themselves.

We are very exposed here, because we use English as our common language and all young people speak English which means we don't even have a language barrier in accessing Hollywood and the magazines from America.