Mimi & Eunice: Limits to Speech
IP Law, Mimi & Eunice on IP, Nanny Statism, Police Statism
This is a syndicated post, which originally appeared at Mimi and Eunice » IP. View original post.
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Angels and Fools
Vulgar PoliticsThere are many responses one might consider for the vile and hateful Westboro Baptist Church, which plans to picket the funeral of Christina Green, the 9-year-old girl murdered along with five others in Saturday’s shootings in Tucson. My initial thoughts, admittedly not in keeping with my philosophy of non-aggression, involved swinging a baseball bat. Hard.
Fortunately I am nowhere near Tucson, and cooler heads have prevailed; one good approach, as organized by resident Christin Gilmer, is a so-called “angel action” — people wearing tall “angel wings” who surround and block out the Westboro slimeballs so that mourners will be able to grieve and say farewell to Christina in peace.
There are also not-so-good ways to handle this, as the Arizona legislature has demonstrated by attempting to restrict the Westboro picketers, who nonetheless are free to carry on their disgusting crusade in public areas. (The worst thing you can ever hear a politician say is “I’m gonna fix this,” as state senator Kyrsten Sinema did.)
If roads and parks were privatized this would not be necessary; I doubt many property owners would want to be associated with such demonstrations, and no cemetery owner with any respect for the dead would allow them near the entrance. But so long as the state monopolizes roads and other rights-of-way, we have to put up with these fools. Better to have them shunned and blocked from public view by private citizens than to have them silenced by the state.
Thrifty, Principled Republican Plans to Defund NPR
Taxation, The Right, Vulgar PoliticsIn a bold move that promises to prove the Republicans’ dedication to preserving the First Amendment and fixing up the federal budget, Senator Jim DeMint has introduced a bill to eliminate federal funding for NPR. This is following the great controversy over NPR’s decision to fire Juan Williams, who made some commentary on Muslims and air travel that his bosses at NPR didn’t quite like.
DeMint, I’m sure, of course has a heroic record of free speech advocacy. I assume, though I have not found evidence at the time of writing this, that he introduced bills and fought vigorously for an end to this ridiculous idea of “free speech zones” which were used during the Bush Administration to stifle free speech. Because, surely, Jim DeMint is all about free speech, and this latest move was not simply motivated by his approval of Williams’ commentary, but rather from a deep philosophical opposition to government restriction of speech.
Some might also think that the $420 million that defunding NPR (and PBS) would save is a bit on the paltry side as far as budget cuts go, given that federal spending for FY2010 was officially about $3.5 trillion, or, to use like-terms, $3,500,000 million. But hey, that’s something, right? And, after all, if you exclude Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt, all the other “mandatory” spending, and everything to do with the military, is there really that much else to cut?
So good on you, Jim DeMint. Keep up the good work.
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Pundits: Play Whack-A-Mole with WikiLeaks. Oh wait…
Anti-Statism, Imperialism, Police Statism, Technology, WarIn How to Mirror a Censored WordPress Blog, I discussed how the Mises Institute open-sourcing all of Mises.org and putting its entire literature and media library online as a set of torrents will help ensure the continued existence of this treasure trove of liberty in the event of a natural disaster or a future crackdown by the US government.
Here’s a practical example taking place before us. Some technologically and strategically-incompetent pundits are clamoring for the United States federal government to use its cyber capabilities to take out WikiLeaks before the organization puts online the remaining 15,000 documents of the leaked Afghan war logs.
Kevin Poulsen of Wired.com explains how a previous attempt to take down wikileaks.org has already failed in the past and how future attempts to take out WikiLeaks will fail as well.
In 2008, federal judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco ordered the WikiLeaks.org domain name seized as part of a lawsuit filed by Julius Baer Bank and Trust, a Swiss bank that suffered a leak of some of its internal documents. Two weeks later the judge admitted he’d acted hastily, and he had the site restored. “There are serious questions of prior restraint, possible violations of the First Amendment,” he said.
Even while the order was in effect, WikiLeaks lived on: supporters and free speech advocates distributed the internet IP address of the site, so it could be reached directly. Mirrors of the site were unaffected by the court order, and a copy of the entire WikiLeaks archive of leaked documents circulated freely on the Pirate Bay.
The U.S. government has other, less legal, options, of course — the “cyber” capabilities Thiessen alludes to. The Pentagon probably has the ability to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against WikiLeaks’ public-facing servers. If it doesn’t, the Army could rent a formidable botnet from Russian hackers for less than the cost of a Humvee.
But that wouldn’t do much good either. WikiLeaks wrote its own insurance policy two weeks ago, when it posted a 1.4 GB file called insurance.aes256.
The file’s contents are encrypted, so there’s no way to know what’s in it. But, as we’ve previously reported, it’s more than 19 times the size of the Afghan war log — large enough to contain the entire Afghan database, as well as the other, larger classified databases said to be in WikiLeaks’ possession. Accused Army leaker Bradley Manning claimed to have provided WikiLeaks with a log of events in the Iraq war containing 500,000 entries from 2004 through 2009, as well as a database of 260,000 State Department cables to and from diplomatic posts around the globe.
Whatever the insurance file contains, Assange — appearing via Skype on a panel at the Frontline Club — reminded everyone Thursday that he could make it public at any time. “All we have to do is release the password to that material and it’s instantly available,” he said.
WikiLeaks is encouraging supporters to download the insurance file through the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay. “Keep it safe,” reads a message greeting visitors to the WikiLeaks chat room. After two weeks, the insurance file is doubtless in the hands of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of netizens already.
We dipped into the torrent Friday to get a sense of WikiLeaks’ support in that effort. In a few minutes of downloading, we pulled bits and piece of insurance.aes256 from 61 seeders around the world. We ran the IP addresses through a geolocation service and turned it into a KML file to produce the Google Map at the top of this page [go to the Wired.com article or view it on Google Maps — GAP]. The seeders are everywhere, from the U.S., to Iceland, Australia, Canada and Europe. They had all already grabbed the entire file, and are now just donating bandwidth to help WikiLeaks survive.
Cross-posted at Is-Ought GAP.
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CrunchGear vs. the Tea Party on Net Neutrality
Business, Corporatism, Nanny Statism, Technology, Vulgar Politics
Yesterday, in All Your Tubes Are Belong to Googlizon, I blogged about the Google-Verizon proposal for regulating the internet and why libertarians should oppose both it and any net neutrality laws and regulations. Today, I came across a post on CrunchGear, a tech and gadgets site, by Nicholas Deleon, that criticizes the Tea Party for opposing net neutrality on the basis that it will violate the right of ISPs to free speech. I left a comment on his post, but I’ll reproduce it here.
I’m a libertarian, not a Tea Partier, but I’ll take a stab at explaining this.
Both free markets and the right to free speech are based on the right to private property. Net neutrality, insofar as it involves regulation, violates private property rights. That said, not every violation of the right to property is a violation of the right to free speech.
“But really, to expect the ISPs to do “right” by you is laughable. If it could, Comcast and the nation’s ISPs would offer 1 mbps (down, mind you) and call that SUPER FAST INTERNET, then charge you $100 per month for the privilege of using it.”
If they could? Maybe. Maybe not. But in a free market, they could not. Restrict competition through regulations, monopoly franchises, and whatnot, and then maybe they could.
“But to oppose Net Neutrality in order to defend the free speech of ISPs is pretty laughable.”
Umm… I don’t see in the letter where they defend the free speech of ISPs. I don’t see it in the quoted soundbite either.1 More likely the speaker was concerned about the free speech of users who could be prevented by net neutrality regulations from purchasing services that otherwise might have been available, services they could have used to express themselves more effectively.
In any case, the fundamental reason to oppose net neutrality laws or regulations is that they constitute a violation of property rights.
Then I realized I had made a small mistake, so I left a second comment:
Okay, I see that in the linked article on Radtke’s quote, the reporter writes:
“The free-speech objection to net neutrality has also gained some ground recently. The National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) and AT&T began citing First Amendment objections to net neutrality in public discussions and in filings with the FCC this year.
“The free-speech argument holds that, by interfering with how phone and cable companies deliver Internet traffic, the government would be thwarting the free-speech rights of providers such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.”
This is the reporter’s interpretation, but let’s say it’s accurate. Is it not possible to imagine how net neutrality regulations could interfere with even the free speech of ISPs? And as “browse” at 1:58 pm UTC pointed out:
“The EFF has some great pieces on Net Neutrality. One of the issues is the Trojan Horse issue: whereby a more activist commissioner could abuse powers won in the aims of Net Neutrality to stifle free expression online. Even if they current FCC has no inclinations to regulate the Internet beyond Net Neutrality, regimes do change pretty frequently, and agendas change with them. If you look at it from that perspective, the argument you quoted above sounds a bit less crazy.”
In any case, as I mentioned in my previous comment, the fundamental reason to oppose net neutrality laws and regulations isn’t free speech but private property.
To wrap things up: That Nicholas finds the Tea Party’s free speech argument so laughable on its face betrays a leftist anti-corporate bias. Corporations are often not the good guys, such as when they seek government protection from competition. But at least corporations are not intrinsically evil. To turn to government as our savior, when it is government that is the primary enemy and source of man-made problems in the world, now that’s more than slightly misguided. In any event, Nicholas hardly gives the Tea Party a fair shake, focusing on their free speech argument as he does and not even bothering to give that a charitable interpretation or serious counterargument.
Cross-posted at Is-Ought GAP.
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