What does freedom mean to me?

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     I wrote a somewhat lame essay about what freedom means to me.
     Then I looked around at some of the other things people had done,
     and I was completely blown away. So, in true Web tradition, I
     offer you a couple of links promising to be better than what
     you've got on your screen now.

     To me, there are two main points. First, there is no real
     difference between the censorship imposed by a despotic regime
     such as China or Zambia and the kind we've just had signed into
     law. Declan McCullagh's Net Censorship and Zambian Dictators
     really drove that home for me.

     The second point is that there is a fear abroad in the land, a
     fear that reaches deep into the collective soul of Americans, a
     fear that the Internet contains dangerous information, a fear
     that has been manufactured almost out of whole cloth. Of course
     in any medium which really has freedom of speech, there will be
     some dangerous information. That used to be ok, but for some
     reason now it's not. I'm still struggling, trying to understand
     why, but in the meantime, Mike Godwin's recent speech on The
     Backlash Against Free Speech on the Net describes the fear better
     than anything else I've seen.

                          [24 hours of democracy]

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