The freedom of speech that was possible on the Internet could now be
subjected to governmental approvals. For example, China is attempting to
restrict political expression, in the name of security and social stability. It
requires users of the Internet an d electronic mail (e-mail) to register, so
that it may monitor their activities.9 In the United Kingdom, state secrets and
personal attacks are off limits on the Internet. Laws are strict and the
government is extremely interested in regulating the Intern et with respect to
these issues.10 Laws intended for other types of communication will not
necessarily apply in this medium. Through all the components of the Internet it
becomes easy to transfer material that particular governments might find
objectionable. However, all of these means of communicating on the Internet make
up a large and vast system. For inspectors to monitor every e-mail, every
article in every Newsgroup, every Webpage, every IRC channel, every Gopher site
and every FTP site would be near impossible. Besides taking an ext raordinary
amount of money and time, attempts to censor the Internet violate freedom of
speech rights that are included in democratic constitutions and international
laws.11 It would be a breach of the First Amendment. The Constitution of the
United Stat es of America declares that "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of
the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redr ess
of grievances" 12
Therefore it would be unconstitutional for any sort of censorship to occur on
the Internet and affiliated services. Despite the illegality, restrictions on
Internet access and content are increasing worldwide under all forms of
government. In France, a co untry where the press generally has a large amount
of freedom, the Internet has recently been in the spotlight. A banned book on
the health history of former French president Francois Mitterrand was
republished electronically on the World Wide Web (WWW). Apparently, the
electronic reproduction of Le Grand Secret by a third party wasn't banned by a
court that ruled that the printed version of the book unlawfully violated
Mitterrand's privacy. To enforce censorship of the Internet, free societies find
that they become more repressive and closed societies find new ways to crush
political expression and opposition.13 Vice - President Al Gore, while at an
international conference in Brussels about the Internet, in a keynote address
said that "[Cyberspace] is about protecting and enlarging freedom of
expression for all our citizens ... Ideas should not be checked at the
border".14
Another person attending that conference was Ann Breeson of the Ame rican
Civil Liberties Union, an organization dedicated to preserving many things
including free speech. She is quoted as saying, "Our big victory at
Brussels was that we pressured them enough so that Al Gore in his keynote
address made a big point of stre ssing the importance of free speech on the
Internet."15 Many other organizations have fought against laws and have
succeeded. A prime example of this is the fight that various groups put on
against the recent Communication Decency Act (CDA) of the U.S. Se nate. The
Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition on 26 February 1996 filed a historic
lawsuit in Philadelphia against the U.S. Department of Justice and Attorney
General Janet Reno to make certain that the First Amendment of the U.S.A. would
not be compr omised by the CDA. The sheer range of plaintiffs alone, including
the American Booksellers Association, the Freedom to Read Foundation, Apple,
Microsoft, America Online, the Society of Professional Journalists, the
Commercial Internet eXchange Association , Wired, and HotWired, as well as
thousands of netizens (citizens of the Internet) shows the dedication that is
felt by many different people and groups to the cause of free speech on the
Internet.16 "Words like shit, fuck, piss, and tits. Words of which our
mothers (at least some of them) would no doubt disapprove, but which by no means
should be regulated by the government. But it's not just about dirty words. It's
also about words like AIDS, gay, a nd breasts. It's about sexual content, and
politically controversial topics like drug addiction, euthanasia, and
racism."17 Just recently in France, a high court has struck down a bill
that promoted the censorship of the Internet. Other countries have attempted
similar moves. The Internet cannot be regulated in the way of other mediums
simply because it is not the same as anyt hing else that we have. It is a
totally new and unique form of communication and deserves to be given a chance
to prove itself. Laws of one country can not hold jurisdiction in another
country and holds true on the Internet because it has no borders.
Although North America (mainly the United States) has the largest share of
servers, the Internet is still a worldwide network. This means that domestic
regulations cannot oversee the rules of foreign countries. It would be just as
easy for an American te en to download (receive) pornographic material from
England, as it would be from down the street. One of the major problems is the
lack of physical boundaries, making it difficult to determine where violations
of the law should be prosecuted. There is no one place through which all
information passes through. That was one of the key points that was stressed
during the original days of the Internet, then called ARPANET. It started out as
a defense project that would allow communication in the event of an e mergency
such as nuclear attack. Without a central authority, information would pass
around until it got where it was going.18 This was intended to be similar to the
road system. It is not necessary to take any specific route but rather anyone
goes. In th e same way the information on the Internet starts out and eventually
gets to it's destination. The Internet is full of anonymity. Since text is the
standard form of communication on the Internet it becomes difficult to determine
the identity and/or age of a specific person. Nothing is known for certain about
a person accessing content.
There are no signatures or photo-ids on the Internet therefore it is
difficult to certify that illegal activities (regarding minors accessing
restricted data) are taking place. Take for example a conversation on IRC. Two
people could people talking to one another, bu t all that they see is text. It
would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain the gender and/or
age just from communication of this sort. Then if the conversationalist lies
about any points mentioned above it would be extremely difficult t o know or
prove otherwise. In this way governments could not restrict access to certain
sites on the basis of ages. A thirteen-year-old boy in British Columbia could
decide that he wanted to download pornography from an adult site in the U.S. The
site may have warnings and age restrictions but they have no way of stopping him
from receiving their material if he says he is 19 years of age when prompted.
The complexity in the way information is passed around the Internet means that
if information has been posted, deleting this material becomes almost
impossible. A good example of this is the junk mail that people refer to as spam.
These include e-mails ad vertising products, usenet articles that are open for
flames. Flames are heated letters that many times have no founding behind them.
These seem to float around for ages before dying out because they are perfect
material for flamewars.
Flamewars are long, drawn out and highly heated discussions consisting of
flames, which often time, obscenely, slander one's reputation and personae.
Mostly these are immature arguments that are totally pointless except to those
involved. The millions of people that partici pate on the Internet everyday have
access to almost all of the data present. As well it becomes easy to copy
something that exists on the Internet with only a click of a button. The
relative ease of copying data means that the second information is posted to the
Internet it may be archived somewhere else. There are in fact many sites on the
Internet that are devoted to the archiving of information including:
ftp.cdrom.com (which archives an extraordinary amount of software among others),
www.archive.org ( which is working towards archiving as much of the WWW as
possible), and wuarchive.wustl.edu (which is dedicated towards archiving
software, publications, and many other types of data). It becomes hard to censor
material that might be duplicated or triplic ated within a matter of minutes. An
example could be the recent hacking of the U.S. Department of Justice's Homepage
and the hacking of the Central Intelligence Agency's Homepage. Someone illegally
obtained access to the computer on which these homepages were stored and
modified them. It was done as a prank; however, both of these agencies have
since shut down their pages. 2600 (www.2600.com), a magazine devoted to hacking,
has republished the hacked DoJ and CIA homepages on their website. The magazine
ei ther copied the data straight from the hacked sites or the hacked site was
submitted to the magazine. I don't know which one is true but it does show the
ease that data can be copied and distributed, as well it shows the difficulty in
preventing material deemed inappropriate from appearing where it shouldn't. The
Internet is much too complex a network for censorship to effectively occur. It
is a totally new and unique environment in which communications transpire.
Existing laws are not applicable to this medium.
The lack of tangible boundaries causes confusion as to where violations of
law take place. The Internet is made up of nameless interaction and anonymous
communication. The intricacy of the Internet makes it near impossible to delete
data that has been publicized. No one country should be allowed to, or could,
regulate or censor the Internet.
2 Declan McCullagh, "PLAGUE OF FREEDOM" Internet Underground,
http://www.eff.org/~declan/global/reports/plague.073196.txt (31 July 1996).
3 Declan McCullagh, "PLAGUE OF FREEDOM" Internet Underground,
http://www.eff.org/~declan/global/reports/plague.073196.txt (31 July 1996).
4 Shari, Steele, "Taking a Byte Out of the First Amendment. How Free Is
Speech in Cyberspace?" Human Rights, http://www.eff.org/pub/Censorship/human_rights_960420.article
(Spring 1996).
5 Bryan Bradford and Mark Krumholz, "Telecommunications and Decency: Big
Brother goes Digital," Business Today, Spring 1996 : 12-16.
6 Bruce, Sterling, "Short History of the Internet," The Magazine of
Fantasy and Science Fiction, http://www.isoc.org:70/00/internet/history/short.history.of.internet
(17 Apr. 1996).
7 Bruce, Sterling, "Short History of the Internet," The Magazine of
Fantasy and Science Fiction, http://www.isoc.org:70/00/internet/history/short.history.of.internet
(17 Apr. 1996).
8 Shari, Steele, "Taking a Byte Out of the First Amendment. How Free Is
Speech in Cyberspace?" Human Rights, http://www.eff.org/pub/Censorship/human_rights_960420.article
(Spring 1996).
9 Bill Gates, "Searching for middle ground in online censorship,"
Microsoft Corporation, http://www.microsoft.com/corpinfo/bill-g/column/1996essay/censorship.htm
(27 Mar. 1996).
10 Bill Gates, "Searching for middle ground in online censorship,"
Microsoft Corporation, http://www.microsoft.com/corpinfo/bill-g/column/1996essay/censorship.htm
(27 Mar. 1996).
11 "Silencing the Net--The Threat to Freedom of Expression Online."
Human Rights Watch May 1996, Vol. 8, No. 2 (G).
12 Thomas Jefferson, "Bill Of Rights," The Constitution of the
United States, http://Constitution.by.net/uSA/BillOfRights.html (21 Apr. 1996).
13 "Silencing the Net--The Threat to Freedom of Expression Online."
Human Rights Watch May 1996, Vol. 8, No. 2 (G).
14 Declan McCullagh, "PLAGUE OF FREEDOM" Internet Underground,
http://www.eff.org/~declan/global/reports/plague.073196.txt (31 July 1996).
15 Declan McCullagh, "PLAGUE OF FREEDOM" Internet Underground,
http://www.eff.org/~declan/global/reports/plague.073196.txt (31 July 1996).
16 Steve Silberman, "Defending the First Amendment," Hotwired.com,
http://www.hotwired.com/special/lawsuit.
17 Heather Irwin, "Geeks Take to the Streets," Hotwired.com,
http://www.hotwired.com/special/indecent/rally.html
18 Bruce, Sterling, "Short History of the Internet," The Magazine
of Fantasy and Science Fiction, http://www.isoc.org:70/00/internet/history/short.history.of.internet
(17 Apr. 1996).
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