Speech Control

At press time, it seems pretty clear that the most important issue facing the Internet community is that of censorship.  The Exon Bill, the telecommunications overhaul, the Christian Coalition, and panicking on the part of AOL and CompuServe among others tells us that this is the beginning of a long war involving individuals, big business, and governments.

Unless some sort of miracle happens, it seems all but certain that laws will be passed to regulate what we say on the Internet.  We can say it's ridiculous, we can say it's unenforceable, but there are many powerful people who simply don't like what the Internet has become.  It makes them nervous.  They want to be able to control it and they've demonstrated a willingness to do just that.  Most of these outraged politicians have never even logged in.  Yet they somehow "know" what is right on the Internet and what isn't.

There's nothing new here - governments have always subverted their citizens when they're on the verge of transcending into a more meaningful existence.  In a way, that's almost what governments are for.  The difference here is the utter magnitude of what they're about to destroy.  For the first time in the history of humanity, sheer, uncontrolled communication and exchange of information without regard to national borders or class distinction is a distinct possibility in the very near future.  What we've seen so far is only a taste.

Of course, this is not where the danger lies, they will tell us.  Unimpeded communication is good.  Freedom of speech is important and nobody wants to thwart that.  It's those evil people - the child pornographers trading pictures, the terrorists who use encryption, the hackers who reveal secrets - if we don't control them, the fabric of society will be torn asunder and everyone will suffer.

We've heard the same logic many times before, the digital telephony bill being one of the more recent examples.  And when it was recently revealed that the FBI wants to be able to put wiretaps on more than 74,000 phone lines simultaneously (the current level is under one thousand), few opponents to the bill were surprised.  It's what we expected all along - increased ability will lead to increased abuses.  And we're putting ourselves in the position where we won't be able to do a damn thing about it.

Then there are the "do-gooders," those hopelessly naive people who think of everyone as victimized children who need a guiding hand.  They just want to protect us from ever having to confront anything unpleasant.  This is how we wind up with groups like the CyberAngels Internet Monitoring Project who go on "Internet patrols" through the "dark alleys and dangerous cyberhoods" reporting people who do objectionable things on the Internet.  What is their definition of objectionable?  In one case they seem particularly proud of, they turned in a male teacher who was pretending to be a female student and using foul language.  Thanks to the alertness of the CyberAngels, that offense probably cost him his job and blacklisted him for life.  But the Internet is now a safer place.

This organization, affiliated with the Guardian Angels - a group that spends its time fighting real crime - obviously has its heart in the right place but by blurring the distinction between "speech crime" and the real thing, actually winds up doing more harm than good.  And by fostering an environment where we're all trying to report each other for various violations, the freedom of the Internet becomes meaningless.  But the CyberAngels should not lose faith - the National Information Infrastructure Forum (a government taskforce) wants to create a federal agency that will do nothing but police the Internet.

Recently, CompuServe cut off access to more than 200 erotic newsgroups because they were asked to by the government of Germany, which had just passed some kind of a law forbidding its citizens from reading them.  Because they were more concerned with losing German customers than allowing the newsgroups to continue, CompuServe decided to impose the German restrictions on all of its customers worldwide.  By so doing, they demonstrated how self-defeating such acts ultimately wind up being - what is condemned in one country is welcomed in another.  The Internet knows no boundaries and if somebody wants to read something on it badly enough, they will almost always be able to find a way.  It was a trivial matter for Germans to get around the CompuServe restriction as it was for CompuServe subscribers worldwide.  It would have been nice if it had been CompuServe's intention to demonstrate this.

In mid-1995, AOL admitted that it had allowed federal authorities access to users' private email in yet another attempt to track down child pornographers.  By looking at incoming mail, the authorities were able to figure out who was communicating with who.  But more than a few users pointed out that they had no control over who sent them mail and, what's more, they were unable to even delete incoming mail until it expired because of the way AOL's mail program worked.  So all someone had to do was send them a file they never asked for and they were suddenly drawn into whatever conspiracy the feds were trying to find.  But not many are likely to listen to this kind of logic when raids occur and names appear in the newspapers.  More lives ruined so that the Internet can be safe.

Most shameful, though, is the caving in of Internet providers and civil liberties groups who agreed to accept government restrictions they had once vowed to fight.  In so doing, they accept the role of the government in dictating what people can and cannot read and what they can and cannot say.  And no matter how you look at it, this cannot be considered a compromise.  It is capitulation, clear and simple.  These organizations and companies defend their actions by saying they chose the lesser of two evils, since the Christian Coalition was on the verge of getting even more restrictive legislation passed.  To us, it sounds like a cop-out.  Much of the Internet that is now considered "inappropriate for children" will either cease to exist or risk becoming a bloody battlefield in a free speech war.

Why all the fear and hysteria?  It's the same as it's always been.  People are afraid of losing control.  They don't want to see a world where radically different values or ways of expressing oneself are given a forum.  They will say its all about protection, that the controls they seek are for the good of society.  But one has to wonder if perhaps they're just afraid that their own values don't have the strength to stand on their own merits.  In that sense, they have less faith than the rest of us subversives.