"Plague of Freedom" on G-7 from Internet Underground

[declan@well.com (Declan McCullagh)]

Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 22:35:45 -0500
To: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu
From: declan@well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Subject: "Plague of Freedom" on G-7 from Internet Underground

Yesterday in Paris government ministers from the G-7 countries met and
approved a 25-point plan calling for close cooperation in moving to
"intensify exchange of operational information," particularly "the use
of communications technologies by terrorist groups."

In a HotWired column, Kenneth Cukier writes: "In case there is any
question about the United States's position, Attorney General Janet
Reno said: 'We obtained the agreement of the eight (countries at the
conference) to develop means of lawful government access to and
decoding of scrambled or coded communication transmitted by
terrorists.'" German delegates also blasted the Internet.

The ACLU reports that: "Proposed measures apparently include
investigations of charities and political organizations with radical
political points of view -- threatening their rights to free speech."

I've attached part of a cover story I have in the latest _Internet
Underground_ magazine (http://www.underground-online.com/) that talks
about the G-7 process and how countries around the globe are moving to
stifle the Net. Pick up a copy of the physical mag for the full text of
this article, plus some wonderously horrific graphics including a mouth
shown shut with steel wire.

And for more info, check out my net-censorship archive at:
  http://www.eff.org/~declan/global/

-Declan

-----------------

Internet Underground
August 1996 / Issue 09

"PLAGUE OF FREEDOM"
The Internet's being disinfected for your protection
(pages 28-33)

By Declan McCullagh
declan@well.com


Call it an unlikely parable for today's Internet.

Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Years" isn't about cyberspace.
Written in 1665, the book sketches a ghastly picture of a London under
seige.

Defoe tells how rats from foreign ships have invaded the city, carrying
with them the bubonic plague. Authorities resort to desperate measures,
barricading families inside their homes in a desperate attempt to halt
the onslaught.

It doesn't work. "Setting watchmen thus to keep the people in was,
first of all, not effectual, but that the people broke out, whether by
force or by strategm, even almost as often as they pleased," Defoe
wrote.

So it is with the sprawling expanse of cyberspace in 1996. Governments
around the globe are rushing to barricade their borders, dam the flow
of foreign data, and create a new world information order. For good
reason: an uncensored 'net connection can be as deadly to a 20th
century government as the plague was three centuries ago.

And it may be just as infectious.

[...]

INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

The most influential international body involved in cyberrulemaking is
the G-7 group of industrialized nations. Truth be told, it's obscure
outside financial circles and is seen even inside them as becoming
irrelevant in a global financial system dominated by multinational
corporations, not by governments.

Yet the seven member nations have already started using the G-7
umbrella to engage in a sort of joint head-scratching about what to do
with cyberspace.

It started in February 1995 in Brussels, at a meeting called the "G-7
Ministerial Conference on the Information Society." There the telecom
honchos from G-7 nations and several smaller countries gathered to chat
about online copyright, cultural pollution, universal access, free
speech, and encryption policies.

At least the principles were lofty. "While the rhetoric of the
conference was progressive, there was no serious discussion of free
expression or other human rights concerns," wrote one American who
attended the conference.

Instead, the G-7 nations said they were considering how to deal with
inappropriate material on the 'net. Canada reminded the other countries
that it wasn't as permissive as the U.S. in dealing with
"hate-mongering materials," saying that when such publications appear
online "they are much easier to obtain but are more difficult to
monitor and take action against." The European Union decried copyright
pirates: "Some form of international cooperation is necessary to
supplement the existing legal systems governing intellectual property
rights." Saying the 'net is "not without risks," France stressed that
cyberspace "must not result in a standardization in content, or a
leveling of cultures."

Only Vice President Al Gore tossed a bone to cyber-rights advocates.
"[Cyberspace] is about protecting and enlarging freedom of expression
for all our citizens... Ideas should not be checked at the border,"
said Gore.

Gore didn't do this in a vacuum. "Our big victory at Brussels was that
we pressured them enough so that Al Gore in his keynote address made a
big point of stressing the importance of free speech on the Internet,"
says Ann Beeson of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Beeson should know -- she's been one of the few cybersavvy activists
who has been fighting globally for an unshackled Internet. Now a
principal attorney on the ACLU's legal team challenging the
Communications Decency Act, Beeson previously worked at Human Rights
Watch and crafted a letter the group sent to Gore before the Brussels
conference. Citing Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, it said: "Everyone has the right... to seek, receive and impart
information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Unfortunately, the only G-7 voices supporting this today are a silent
chorus.

The G-7 information ministers met again in South Africa in May 1996 and
plan to meet in Egypt later this year, but no international
'net-advocacy group has been tracking the proposals discussed at the
meetings. U.S. cyberliberty groups have been preoccupied with the CDA
battle, and they have no international counterparts.

That's finally about to change. Two global 'net-alliances are emerging
and have held their initial planning meetings at Internet conferences
this summer in Canada.

The ACLU co-founded one group, called the Global Internet Liberty
Campaign. "We have to face the fact that while ultimately it's
extraordinarily difficult for governments to control the 'net, they're
going to try," says Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the ACLU.
"The best thing that governments can do is to stay out if it."

Not so, says Bruce Taylor, the chief architect of the CDA and a
professional cyber-scaremonger. The former Federal porn-prosecutor
believes that "not all censorship is bad."

"Foreign countries have an obligation to restrict obscenity and child
pornography on the Internet by the treaty of 1911," says Taylor. "It's
an agreement between the states to cooperate and to use international
laws to prosecute obscenity." And to Taylor, books and copies of
Penthouse magazine can be obscene.

FUTURE REGULATIONS

David Post is a likeable, bearded fellow who once studied yellow
babboons in Kenya and wears tennis shoes with his suits. Now the
co-director of the Cyberspace Law Institute, Post is one of the
few lawyers who's made a serious study of the international
evolution of the 'net.

To Post, the 'net is at a fork in its development: the two paths are
self-regulation or an international government crackdown.

"It's the central problem the 'net faces today," says Post. "How does
it relieve itself of the conflicting claims of soverigns whose power is
based on geographical boundaries -- something the 'net doesn't
recognize?"

Eric Freedman, a constitutional law professor at Hofstra Law School, is
anything but optimistic. Freedman remembers how governments already
have crafted a complex constellation of little-known treaties and
agreements governing everything from satellite placement to the world
banking system and postal services.

"I'm worried that the governments are ahead of us," says Freedman.
"There's a humongous potential to get absolutely screwed here... If 100
countries agreed on this, they could get this done in a week. It's
easier for them to coordinate, agree, and implement than it is for us
to stop them from doing so."

That's why the ACLU/American Library Association lawsuit challenging
the CDA is vital. If the Supreme Court upholds the law, Congress and
the White House can craft international "decency" agreements for
cyberspace. But if the high court slams the law as unconstitutional,
Clinton would be barred from signing a CDA-type treaty. "It's a
principle of constitutional law that any treaty has to conform to the
Constitution," says Freedman.

A victory in the CDA case would, in a sense, turn the U.S. into a safe
haven for controversial content from all over the world.

Freedman urges 'netizens in every country to launch similar fights
against government 'net-censorship. "Win as many national victories as
possible to get ahead of the governments of the world," he says. "If
the German or Australian supreme courts were to rule that freedom of
speech principles apply to the 'net as they do to a newspaper, that
would be very helpful."

In the near future, that's the best way to forestall the world
information order. The first time a country proposes such a formal
treaty, it has to die from lack of support.

But pressure to regulate the 'net will always exist, and a new way of
looking at cyberspace may have to emerge. Some precedents exist.
Maritime law, for example, says that no single nation has jurisdiction
over the oceans. Medieval Europe recognized a separate law for
merchants that had its own judicial system. Antarctica is not governed
by any single country's laws. The Catholic Church is a multinational
institution that largely rules itself.

The Cyberspace Law Institute's Post argues for this model. "We should
treat cyberspace as a distinct location and allow our own distinct
legal and moral systems to evolve," he says.

He's right. As the 'net matures, no other solution will work.

Daniel Defoe described governments locking citizen inside their homes,
to no avail: "It was impossible for one man so to guard all the
passages as to prevent the escape of people made desperate... And that
which was still worse, those that did thus break out spread the
infection farther."

The infection cyberspace spreads today is far more virulent than the
bubonic plague. Anathema to government, the 'net carries the virus of
freedom.

###