Re: free speach and the government

[dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr. Dimitri Vulis)]

Eric Murray <ericm@lne.com> writes:
> Stephan Mohr writes:
> >
> > Well, I feel that I agree with the people on the right of free speech for
> > i.e. the neo-nazi stuff or other political, ideological and/or religious
> > ideas. But there is still something that leaves me uneasy: imagine there
> > would be a way to easily make a powerful poison, easily applicated to
> > your town's water-reservoir, or a very easy way to build some strong
> > explosive device. etc. Actually, I think that stuff like this does exist
> > already.
> >
> > But the idea that one day I just put 'easy made deadly poison for millions'
> > into my webcrawler and whoop there it is on my screen or on the screen of a
> > other fool, doesn't sound to right to me. I would like things like this
> > to be better put aside and locked up.
>
> You can't put the genie back into the bottle.
> Once something is invented or described, the knowledge
> is out there.  Someone who wants to use that knowledge
> for "wrong" purposes can find it.

Either some information is being suppressed, or no information whatsoever is
being suppressed. Whether it's the knowledge how to made strong crypto, or how
to make the A-bomb, or now to make Sarin, or _Mein Kampf_, or uuencoded
pictures of naked kids, really doesn't matter. E.g., many people perceive the
dissemination of Nazi teachings to be as dangerous as the dissemination of a
Sarin recipe. One can't be "a little big pregnant".

I believe that any exception to unlimited free speech, be it libel, or
copyright violation, or child pornography, or Nazi propaganda, or Chinese
dissident materials, just isn't compatible with the cpunk agenda. No censorship
is acceptable. That's an absolute.

[...]
> In the US the media is by and large controlled by huge
> media conglomerates with a vested interest in maintaining
> the status quo and delivering up their audience to their
> advertisers in tidy packages.
>
> The government is along for the ride, being part and parcel
> of the same system.  They won't rest until net-speech is
> by and large controlled by huge media conglomerates all
> busy delivering up the net-public to advertisers in tidy
> packages... I'm not saying that there's a Black Heliocopters
> type conspiracy, or any other for that matter.  There doesn't
> have to be, there are huge political forces moving things
> this way.  So there might as well be a conspiracy, as the
> end effect on us is the same.

There's a widespread misconception that most journalists support freedom of
speech for non-journalists. I deal with journalists occasionally, and my
impression is that the attitude of some of them can be summarized as follows:
"I'm an important guy because I can say something that hundreds of thousands of
people will see/read; and I can libel another person and s/he won't be able to
respond". People with this attitude are very threatened by the Internet. I'm
not saying that all journalists are this way; I'm just pointing out that it's
foolish to assume that just because a person works in the media, s/he's in
favor of free speech, especially unlimited free speech.

> I think that any compromise with government censorship is a bad idea.
> All we'd do is give them a little more while on the way towards the
> inevitable.  If we don't give them all the censorship power they
> want they'd just take it anyhow.  Better to hold out as well as
> we can while we can.

>From the technology point of view, there's no difference between helping
Chinese dissidents circumvent their government's restrictions on the net,
and helping neo-Nazis in Germany and helping child pornographers in the
U.S. No one can determine which of the countless bits of information that
travel over the Internet every second are false, or harmful, or subversive,
or otherwise not worthy of transnmission.

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<a href="mailto:dlv@bwalk.dm.com">Dr. Dimitri Vulis</a>
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps