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1996-03-18
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2/21/96, Pacific News Service
<pacificnews@pacificnews.org>
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24 Hours of Democracy:
Celebrating free speech on the Internet!
[24 HOURS OF DEMOCRACY] February 22 was George Washington's birthday, a
holiday commemorating the most famous of our
founding fathers and the leader in our war for independence. What does that
mean? Think about it. What does freedom and democracy mean to you? If you
have something to say, say it. Make your voice heard!
VOICES
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Free Speech Movement of the 90s --
Cyberprotestors Fight
Their Own Culture War
By Sandy Close and Nick Montfort
Date: 02-20-96
[This article is part of the 24 Hours of Democracy Project. If you have
comments, criticism, and/or questions about this news story, please sent
email to the PNS website manager. Your comments will be added to this web
page.]
A new generation of cyberprotestors is emerging to protect free speech on
the Internet. Like their counterparts in the Free Speech Movement of the
1960s, they draw their inspiration from a moral repugnance of governmental
authority and a utopian faith in the transformative power of the
counter-culture they are building. PNS editor Sandy Close writes on youth
issues; Nick Montfort, a former editor of the University of Texas student
newspaper, is a freelance reporter and longtime denizen of the Internet.
SAN FRANCISCO -- Thirty years ago a student protest at UC-Berkeley over
free speech sparked a worldwide chain reaction of youthful rebellion
against authority. Is a new generation of FSM agitators emerging now in
cyberspace?
Ever since the telecommunications act was signed into law, many denizens of
cyberspace have taken to the Internet to protest its censorship provisions.
But whereas FSM militants staged campus rallies, classroom boycotts and
street demonstrations aimed at bringing life at universities to a halt,
today's protestors have largely eschewed public action (apart from a rally
at San Francisco's South Park in December) in favor of quieter but
potentially far more subversive tactics on the Internet.
News reports have focused on the black backgrounds and blue ribbons posted
on thousands of World Wide Web sites and on a law suit brought by the
American Civil Liberties Union which last week won a temporary injunction
by a federal judge against enforcement of the law's ban against indecent
material. But far more indicative of the passions and fears driving
cyberspace agitators are individual spontaneous acts of civil disobedience
now being suggested and tested out by activists to protect free speech on
the Internet.
In language that reverberates with the moral fervor of the FSM protests, a
cyber-protestor whose screen name is Lizard compares the Telecommunications
Act to a "virtual declaration of war (or a declaration of virtual war) by
the U.S. government against the country's, and the world's, citizens."
Lizard urges users to resist the Act in the same way that "people fleeing
before an invading army would kill their cattle, burn their homes and
poison their wells to prevent the invaders from reaping any profit."
Lizard offers a Web page of ways users can subvert the Act, including
forging electronic communications to and from President Clinton, posting
lewd passages from the Bible, and (if you happen to be a system
administrator) blocking government-owned computers from any access to your
site. Another suggestion is that users scramble all their communications
using publicly available PGP (pretty good privacy) encryption to frustrate
would-be censors searching for indecent material. Finally, the page
promotes the use of anonymous remailers, which make it almost impossible to
trace E-mail messages back to their origin.
Nesta Stubbs, in an essay entitled "Cyberspace Hashishim Declare Jihad,"
urges activists to view the battle over regulating the Internet as "a fight
for your own body, your hypertext body, spread out over the globe .... You
may not physically bleed from the attacks ... but they are talking about
putting us in prisons and straightjackets, cutting off our tongues,
chopping off our hands, crippling us."
Stubbs calls for the establishment of underground networks, secret,
encrypted, anonymous, and riding upon the existing structure of the
Internet. He (or she) compares the Internet to Vietnam, terrain in which
the U.S. government will become ensnared if it tries to wage war there
against guerrillas.
If the rhetoric seems hyperinflated compared to the threat, it's because
the cyber-activists -- like their FSM counterparts -- have broader concerns
in mind. In the mid-to-late 60s the campus radicals who flocked to FSM saw
a George-Wallace-led hard hat constituency building in the country that was
hostile to everything they stood for. In their view the Democratic
presidency of LBJ had so corrupted its political principles over Vietnam it
was powerless to prevent it. Today cyber-activists see a political
landscape with eerie similarities to the 60s: the rising power of Pat
Buchanan and the religious right and a Democratic administration similarly
willing to abandon free speech principles in favor of political expediency.
To preserve the independence of the new cyberspace culture, many activists
are urging the Internet's 20 million users to wield their clout at the
ballot box. "Sometimes the best we can do is yell and scream, and make
symbolic gestures like the Paint the Web Black protest," advises the Voters
Telecommunications Watch in its latest Weekly Bulletin. "If that's all
you'll be able to accomplish at the moment, then you should do that. Other
times, we can affect elections and votes, as VTW has strived to do since we
started in April of 1994."
In fact, VTW warns its subscribers of the risks of becoming too insular in
their preoccupations. "Don't just write off the American political systemm
as not worth the effort; whether or not you help, someone will get elected,
and if you don't help, know that someone from the Christian Coalition will
be out there, whispering bad Internet policy in the candidate's ear ...
Only you can stop that from happening."
But cyberspace activists are ultimately more interested in being left alone
than in manipulating electoral politics. Like their FSM counterparts, they
share a moral vision that is radically egalitarian and a utopian faith in
the transformative powers of the new "global social space" they are
building. "We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or
prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force or station of
birth," writes John Perry Barlow in a "Declaration of Independence of
Cyberspace." A former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, Barlow urges
cyberspace denizens to "declare our virtual selves immune to (government)
sovereignty...even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies.
We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our
thoughts. We will cultivate a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace ...
more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before."
Cyberspace radicals represent only a fringe group of Internet's 20 million
plus users. But one thing is clear: the computer dominated world of the 90s
has produced its own generation of campus activists convinced that any
restrictions on their freedom of expression will accelerate a slow slide to
fascism in the real world.
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WEB SITES RELATED TO FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND THE INTERNET:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Banned Bookmarks Page
Josh Fuller's Censorship Page
Digital Shout, an online protest, formerly The Thousand Points of Darkness
[* * *]
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COMMENTS FROM OUR NET READERS:
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 1996 11:08:45 -0800
From: arf@europa.com (Adrian Russell-Falla)
Subject: Re: Pacific News Service's story on Freedom of Speech & the Internet
Not a bad little hook, but ultimately a bit clichΘd along the "quirky
cyberpunks" line, don't you think?
I'll lay $50 you are stunned & amazed by the breadth & passion of response
across income, age, ed. level, background, nationality. That's a whole
different story. This thing is touching a nerve, and it's only just begun.
You'll see that the Net is not longer about the tech pioneers, it's
beginning to hit the mainstream big time.
Regards,
Adrian Russell-Falla
President, Europa Software, Inc.
-----------------------------
email: arf@europa.com
vox: 503-222-1762; fax: 503-796-9135
snail: 320 SW Stark St., Ste. 427, Portland OR 97204
-----------------------------
"In Germany they first came for the Communists and I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't
speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came
for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me -- and by that time, no one was left to speak up."
-- Pastor Martin Niemoller
[* * *]
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Pacific News Service, 450 Mission Street, Room 204, San Francisco, CA
94105, tel: (415) 243-4364.
Jinn Magazine: <http://www.pacificnews.org/jinn/>
Email: <pacificnews@pacificnews.org>
This article was submitted to the 24 Hours of Democracy Project.
Please send your questions and comments about this page or the PNS web site
to Kevin Chan.
Thanks.
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