free speach and the government

[Stephan Mohr <stephan.mohr@uni-tuebingen.de>]

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 any
other fool, doesn't sound to right to me. I would like things like this
to be better put aside and locked up.

Well, maybe my imagination isn't strong enough to make my point. But do
you fighter for free speech, in principle, think that nothing, really
nothing, shouldn't be prevented of being published? And by being
published, I mean published in the net, not at loompanics (who knows
loompanics?).

I know, of course, that by accepting that there is something that
shouldn't be available on the net, we would need something to decide what
and how to ban. So I wonder what would be a more 'net'-like way of handling 
this type of thing and how to prevent that some 'strong-armed' governments
take the net over.

I do not see tokay's governments being prepared for the net (at least not
the German one). But I see them trying to put the 'old' laws onto the net.
Not because they are mean, but because they don't know any better. So, I
think it would be nice to have something to offer to them. I do not think though
that they will accept the totally right of free speech (yet). 

There is something that is closely related to the right of free speech but
not the same and that is the right of privacy. And I think there is a big
danger of the issue of free (public) speech been taken over to the right of
privacy. Governments may, by arguing to control the public net, start to
prohibit the use of strong cryptography. It seems important to me to
separate this two issues. Maybe it will be necessary to agree to some kind
of (hopefully self organized) control of the public net. But it is totally
unacceptable to allow whatever organization to look into someone's private life.

Comments and hints to information on these topics very much welcome

Stephan