I was wondering when they were going to wake up to the "danger".
http://www.uniontrib.com/news/uniontrib/thu/index.html
Why the elites are oh so eager to muzzle the Internet
Samuel Francis
December 30, 1999
Few topics concentrate the minds of the American ruling class better than the Internet. With the possible exception of smoke signals, all other forms of communication have been regulated, restricted, made too expensive or professionalized beyond the reach of grass-roots activists, so it makes sense that the ruling class never gives up trying to muzzle the webmasters.
The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, has just released a brief study by attorney Jonathan Wallace of efforts to muzzle the Internet through laws that try to constrain the use of "anonymous and pseudonymous" communications. Despite a fairly strong record in federal courts of striking down state laws that restrict them, law enforcement and assorted busybodies keep coming up with proposals and worrying over what will happen when people can talk to each other without the government knowing about it.
Some people seem to be terrified that somewhere somebody is having a thought or writing a sentence and that the identity of the somebody might remain undiscovered. That, of course, is exactly what the Internet does, by allowing private individuals to write and speak to each other all over the country and the world without bothering with state-controlled postal services, establishment-managed newspapers and magazines, or expensive telephone systems.
Hence, defenders of the status quo have fabricated all sorts of phony reasons why the government ought to regulate the Internet to make sure they can know who's talking to whom.
One such argument for control of the Internet is, in Wallace's words, that "anonymous speech is more dangerous on the Internet because of the lack of gatekeepers -- such as publishers, editors or television producers -- who may know the identity of the anonymous speaker or filter out anonymous speech." You see, without the gatekeepers -- essentially establishment agents whose job it is to keep writers and speakers from straying off the ideological reservation -- people might actually start writing or saying things the ruling class hasn't approved and won't like.
Indeed, the danger is real. Wallace recounts a long list of anonymous or pseudonymous writings from American history, almost all of it revolutionary or radical, that challenged the power of earlier ruling classes. The examples include the Cato Letters, written by English radicals John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, which were highly influential in the American colonies in the early literature of liberty and independence.
Others include Thomas Paine's famous pamphlet, "Common Sense," originally signed "An Englishman," and The Federalist Papers themselves, originally published under the pen name "Publius" before it was known they had really been written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay.
Then there's the famous article in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1947 arguing that the United States should contain the expansion of Soviet communism. It was signed by "X," who soon turned out to be foreign policy savant George Kennan.
Had the Internet existed when any of these famous and influential documents were drafted, their authors would have made full use of it, which is why the American ruling class doesn't much care for the Internet and the opportunities for privacy it offers.
In 1997, a group of law enforcement
officials from the United States and seven other industrialized states issued a joint declaration demanding that information transmitted on the Internet be "tagged" so the globo-cops could determine who was sending it.
Of course, the communications the cops say they want to track are those of drug dealers, pornographers, international money scammers and similar criminals, but the tracking won't necessarily stop there. There are also the purveyors of "hate speech," which usually means communications the ruling class doesn't like and wants to suppress, and if the cops can track the hoods and thugs, they can also track serious political dissidents.
The Internet, in fact, offers the best available means for the building of nationwide and worldwide networks of information and ideas that can challenge the emerging New World Order and its elite, and much of the pother you hear about the dangers it presents for allowing kids to get hold of pornography or such is designed to build a case for Internet control.
Parents have every good reason to control what their kids can see on the Internet, as they do for every other kind of medium of communication, but neither the parents nor the kids need the globo-cops and the transnational state they work for to tell them who they're talking to or who they can talk to on the web.
When everyone can talk to everyone else without worrying about who's listening or taking notes, the elites of the New World Order will have more dangerous threats to worry about than bomb throwers and gun owners.
© Creators Syndicate
Copyright 1999 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
------------------
The New World Order has a Third Reich odor.
http://www.uniontrib.com/news/uniontrib/thu/index.html
Why the elites are oh so eager to muzzle the Internet
Samuel Francis
December 30, 1999
Few topics concentrate the minds of the American ruling class better than the Internet. With the possible exception of smoke signals, all other forms of communication have been regulated, restricted, made too expensive or professionalized beyond the reach of grass-roots activists, so it makes sense that the ruling class never gives up trying to muzzle the webmasters.
The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, has just released a brief study by attorney Jonathan Wallace of efforts to muzzle the Internet through laws that try to constrain the use of "anonymous and pseudonymous" communications. Despite a fairly strong record in federal courts of striking down state laws that restrict them, law enforcement and assorted busybodies keep coming up with proposals and worrying over what will happen when people can talk to each other without the government knowing about it.
Some people seem to be terrified that somewhere somebody is having a thought or writing a sentence and that the identity of the somebody might remain undiscovered. That, of course, is exactly what the Internet does, by allowing private individuals to write and speak to each other all over the country and the world without bothering with state-controlled postal services, establishment-managed newspapers and magazines, or expensive telephone systems.
Hence, defenders of the status quo have fabricated all sorts of phony reasons why the government ought to regulate the Internet to make sure they can know who's talking to whom.
One such argument for control of the Internet is, in Wallace's words, that "anonymous speech is more dangerous on the Internet because of the lack of gatekeepers -- such as publishers, editors or television producers -- who may know the identity of the anonymous speaker or filter out anonymous speech." You see, without the gatekeepers -- essentially establishment agents whose job it is to keep writers and speakers from straying off the ideological reservation -- people might actually start writing or saying things the ruling class hasn't approved and won't like.
Indeed, the danger is real. Wallace recounts a long list of anonymous or pseudonymous writings from American history, almost all of it revolutionary or radical, that challenged the power of earlier ruling classes. The examples include the Cato Letters, written by English radicals John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, which were highly influential in the American colonies in the early literature of liberty and independence.
Others include Thomas Paine's famous pamphlet, "Common Sense," originally signed "An Englishman," and The Federalist Papers themselves, originally published under the pen name "Publius" before it was known they had really been written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay.
Then there's the famous article in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1947 arguing that the United States should contain the expansion of Soviet communism. It was signed by "X," who soon turned out to be foreign policy savant George Kennan.
Had the Internet existed when any of these famous and influential documents were drafted, their authors would have made full use of it, which is why the American ruling class doesn't much care for the Internet and the opportunities for privacy it offers.
In 1997, a group of law enforcement
officials from the United States and seven other industrialized states issued a joint declaration demanding that information transmitted on the Internet be "tagged" so the globo-cops could determine who was sending it.
Of course, the communications the cops say they want to track are those of drug dealers, pornographers, international money scammers and similar criminals, but the tracking won't necessarily stop there. There are also the purveyors of "hate speech," which usually means communications the ruling class doesn't like and wants to suppress, and if the cops can track the hoods and thugs, they can also track serious political dissidents.
The Internet, in fact, offers the best available means for the building of nationwide and worldwide networks of information and ideas that can challenge the emerging New World Order and its elite, and much of the pother you hear about the dangers it presents for allowing kids to get hold of pornography or such is designed to build a case for Internet control.
Parents have every good reason to control what their kids can see on the Internet, as they do for every other kind of medium of communication, but neither the parents nor the kids need the globo-cops and the transnational state they work for to tell them who they're talking to or who they can talk to on the web.
When everyone can talk to everyone else without worrying about who's listening or taking notes, the elites of the New World Order will have more dangerous threats to worry about than bomb throwers and gun owners.
© Creators Syndicate
Copyright 1999 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
------------------
The New World Order has a Third Reich odor.