Harry Lewis, Boston Globe, Nov. 5, 2008
SUPPOSE that government regulators proposed to read all postal mail in order to protect families from things they should not see. Anything not legally prohibited would be delivered. Any unlawful words, pictures, or videos would be thrown away.
Sound like Orwell’s “1984,” or China? Perhaps.
Yet change the technology from ink on paper to bits in wires—the zeroes and ones that flow through the Internet—and these are the plans of significant democracies. France is targeting copyrighted music and movies. Australian officials are going after child pornography—but may check for other bad stuff while they are at it. Objectionable snooping? Both governments say that law-abiding citizens have nothing to worry about.
Could such ubiquitous surveillance gain traction in the United States, with its Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches? A proposal pending before the Federal Communications Commission raises just that possibility. It would provide Internet service to all Americans—with a catch. Content would be censored, free of “any images or text that otherwise would be harmful to teens and adolescents” under 18 years old.
No one wants young children viewing pornography. But to enforce the FCC standard, someone would have to decide where the “harmful” line should be drawn. What about medical illustrations, or a Globe story about female genital mutilation in Africa? To be safe for all ages, censors would have to exclude vast amounts of useful, lawful content. And since only 57 percent of Americans have broadband connections today, the censored service would for many people be the only service.
Determining which ideas are “harmful” is not the government’s job. {snip}
The Internet censoring proposal follows other government efforts to limit speech in the digital world. In the 1990s, two US anti-indecency laws were found unconstitutional because they unnecessarily limited communication among adults. “Perhaps,” wrote one judge, “we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.”
{snip}
Nonetheless, encouraged by state attorneys general, businesses are developing aggressive child safety tools. One product tracks a child’s every keystroke, calling Daddy’s cellphone whenever Johnny googles a prohibited word. Bills before Congress would block Wikipedia in school libraries, sacrificing a useful resource in order to restrict unsupervised use of social networking sites.
Yet for every child caught talking to a pedophile online, hundreds would be discouraged from searching the Internet’s vast electronic library for truths their parents will not tell them.
Controlling every word children are saying and hearing, from birth to age 18, isn’t child protection; it’s the perfect preservation of prejudice and ignorance.
Moreover, Internet censorship does not work. {snip}
The Internet has revived ancient fears about the risks of curiosity. The story of Eden and the myth of Prometheus teach that open access to knowledge is what makes us human, for better and worse. A key principle of our democracy is that unfettered information flows bring public enlightenment. The Internet is the greatest information conduit ever invented. We should not dim its light to protect ourselves from what it may reveal.
Original article
(Posted on November 5, 2008)
Comments
From almost the day that the internet became popular, tech writers of all kinds warned about it’s censorship and the evil, and disrespect for the human spirit and its development that is behind those censors. I could dig up dozens of old books and show how concerned those writers were. There are a million and one excuses and reasons that not neccessarily evil people kind find for interfering with this media of free expression, but that doesn’t make it right to do so.
About a year ago some committee from the United Nations issued a report that the internet was too valuable a tool not to be regulated by that body ( read: censorship ).Now that the gutter has come to power, look for the imposition of the (un)Fairness Doctrine. That will be the end of Rush, Sean, Savage, Boortz, etc. Then the U.N. will take over the net. The media is all for this because they are losing circulation and ad revenues. With no opposition, they will be able to spew their half-truths and outright lies at will. Then where will you be able to get the truth ?
It is slightly more insane than the article suggests.
Supposing someone had talked to Henry Ford before he rolled out his first car from the garage. Maybe they would have warned him that thousands and thousands of Americans would be killed by his invention and many more maimed, disabled and injured. Maybe they would have told him how the use of gasoline would lead to foreign wars over oil. Maybe they would have told him how his invention would be a major cause of global warming, leading to the melting of the polar ice caps and rising levels of the oceans. Maybe they would have told him how his invention would have lead to the most successful labor union, the United Auto Workers.
There are too many people who would get the warm, fuzzy feeling if a future traveler had discouraged Henry Ford from unleasing his new invention on America. The throttling of the free exchange of information (internet) is only a small fraction of what is wrong with the thinking in this country. Their morality is the morality of shared guilt and hyper accountability. I believe we have a serious problem.
I don’t believe in censorship, but a reasonable provision which targets only child pornography and requires probable cause before email can be investigated is fair. That’s not censorship, and no laws need to be made. Child pornography is a case of child abuse, and requires no censorship laws.
While government should not be able to decide what is acceptable (remember, the Fairness Doctrine and the banning of many Conservative writings are an example of this - we are most in danger here!), it is not only the right but the responsibility of parents to censor their kids, and if a parent of school district wants to put filters on their computers, by all means, don’t knock it. If kids want education, let them read books; Books cost money and present a barrier to trash, to some degree. Wikipedia should be blocked in schools; as a teacher, I say this because it is NOT an accepted academic source and is often gravely incorrect.
Remember, the Left pretends to hate censorship, but really they love it and practice it more often than any conservative.
I expect that the U.S. will become more like Britain where you can be arrested for saying the wrong thing, whether it is in print, the internet, or out of your mouth. Welcome to the machine.
I don’t believe in censorship, but a reasonable provision which targets only child pornography and requires probable cause before email can be investigated is fair.
Someone here, and I wont say who, has never heard of a slippery slope, and has no clue how governments and large bureaucracies work.
In retrospect, this seems a very small thing. We just voted into power, by an overwhelming margin, a president and congress (the judiciary fell to these people years ago, already) who fully intend to do away with ALL of our freedoms, not just freedom of speech. These people intend to exterminate 25 million or more whites who don’t think the way they do (ie who stubbornly vote wrongly come election time). Do you really think for one second that we have freedom in this country anymore.
Do you think we deserve it anymore?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9peonVh26A
Understand something. Obama was elected by an overhwelming mandate because people knew all the evil and insane things about him. They weren’t even close to be ignorant of his past or his real idealogy. He need not have even bothered to pretend.
Free speech? Hah….free speech no longer exists except as some vague historical concept. The people whose duty it is to preserve these things no longer care.
Memphomaniac: Good post.
This is one act I hope the antagonists don’t succeed in.
If we’re to have true fairness in AM broadcasting, for every hour of evangelical broadcasting I want sixty minutes of Wicca. Elites view internet bloggers as backward rubes, but when the death of Tim Russert (fine fellow though he may have been) receives infinitely more coverage than that of Mao, who is inward and parochial?
But do you know the question that has been rattling around my idle brain the last couple of days? Do conservative Supreme Court justices receive any kind of Secret Service protection?
The internet is like Halloween, people on both the left and the right want to get rid of it, for different reasons (The religious right: Halloween is demonic! Occultic! The left: Halloween postulates that there is a spiritual reality, instead of just materialism! And what is this individualistic accumulation of candy, this spirit of selfishness? Outrageous!)
The right wants to get rid of the internet because of porn and “occultic” material; the left because sites like this one are pro-White, and many are Christian.
I say: Long live Halloween! Long live the internet!
In the Union of Socialist Provinces of Canada (USPC), where they do have ‘hate crime’ laws and internet censorship, an aparatchnik of the Canadian Human Rights Commission recently estimated that at least 30,000 Canadians could be prosecuted under their existing laws for hate speech on the internet.
The U.S.A. has ten times the population of Canada, and if under an Obama administration, they pass similar legislation, which they’ve said they will, at least 3 million individuals in this country could be prosecuted for what they write about.
However, given how much more outspoken Americans are than Canadians, the numbers of prosecutable ‘hate speech’ offenders would be much higher than that. And websites like American Renaissance would be high on the list to be shut down for political incorrectness and ‘hate speech’.
Anonymous at 7:40 PM wrote:
“Child pornography is a case of child abuse, and requires no censorship laws”
Correction: child pornography can be a case of child abuse but can also simply be evidence of child abuse. Owning a photo that depicts a person being murdered is not the same as actually murdering somebody. This is a very important distinction to make. As for “Reasonable” provisions - they are a slippery slope; what is “reasonable” for you may not be “reasonable” for me and, if you ask the Canadian authorities, they will tell you that “hate speech” laws are perfectly “reasonable”. Let each individual, and each parent, decide what is reasonable for themselves. If a photo depicting actual child abuse comes to light, that’s when law enforcement steps in and uses that photo as evidence to apprehend and punish the perpetrators.
Plenty of Western countries have already sacrificed free speech in the holy name of multiculturalism. The USA will inevitably follow suit. We already accept financial ruin and pariah status for speaking the smallest heresy within earshot of the workplace. Why should vile hatemongers be allowed to hide behind pseudo-anonymity to run amok on the internet? Parts of the left will oppose it at first, but once it becomes clear the censorship is not to apply to them, they’ll get with the program.
“When the death of Tim Russert recieves more coverage than that of Mao…”-Robert Binion The one incident that most awakened me to the power of televison and the media was the death of John Denver,a.k.a. Gilligan. The nightly news showed a clip of him shortly before his death, white haired and elderly, visiting children at an elementary school. He was dressed in his uniform of red polo shirt and sailor hat. The entire auditorium was singing his theme song to him in salute. I told my buddy, “Check it out! Gilligan is the new Chairman Mao!” And my buddy goes, “No! He`s bigger than Mao! He`s the new Sinbad! For the next ten thousand years, as long as mankind remembers how to excite an electron, they will know the words… Just sit right back and you`ll hear a tale.”
This would fail here on Constitutional grounds. Child pornography is already illegal, whether online or not, the reason being that the demand for it directly causes the sexual abuse of minors in a way that the desire to look at pictures of dead bodies (war pictures, autopsy photos, etc.) does not create murder.
The would-be censors are power-hungry, and merely want to add more power to the state, while pretending it is for “our own good”.
I’ve long been suprised these statist freaks haven’t taken up the issue of automobiles the way they have with firearms. The highest speed limits anythere in the US are 75 miles per hour. Most passenger cars sold in the US can go considerably faster. “Why,” our statists - who operate from day-to-day mostly on envy - might ask, “does anyone really need a car that can exceed 75 miles per hour? It would be a simple matter,” they might continue, “for the government to require every vehicle sold in the US be fitted with an engine governor that would prevent the vehicle from exceeding 75 mph, and their retrofitting in all older vehicles.”
I’m suprised they haven’t tried it. They’d need to come up with a silly smear word as an equivalent of “assault weapons”, but “race cars” would probably do nicely.
Note that the proposal involves the government providing everyone internet service for “free”. The government doesn’t have any money - they have to extort it away as taxes - really just a Mafia-style protection racket - from people who work to earn it. What this proposal really boils down to is that the internet would be censored, and those of us who like it just the way it is now, would all be forced to pay for it.
Huh. I wonder how long it would take for the views and opinions of all us eeeeevil white racist here at AmRen to be deemed “harmful to teens and adolescents,” and be shut down. After all, we might cause them to have an incorrect thought, and warp their fragile little minds.
To Michael C. Scott:
While you are certainly right about the unconstitutionality of this proposal, the constitution seems less and less of a barrier to bad legislation and programs as time goes on. Think Kelo v. New London, the Patriot Act, the draft, the Department of Education, almost any other Department, the list goes on.
As to why no one has seriously tried to ban “race cars” yet, well that’s simple: statist freaks like to drive fast too.
To Tim McHugh:
Tim, I think you meant to say, Bob Denver aka Gilligan.
Speaking of celebrity deaths, remember when Anna Nicole Smith kicked the bucket (on February 8, 2007)? You’d have thought it was Marilyn Monroe all over again!
