Long ago, Americans answered with a resounding “Yes” the question of whether Matt Hale has the right to stand on a street corner and pass out pamphlets calling for race war.
Freedom of expression is among the most basic of all civil rights, guaranteed by the 1st Amendment to the Constitution. Almost everybody agrees that even an outrageous figure like Hale, head of the white supremacist World Church of the Creator in East Peoria, can distribute his hate-filled pamphlets.
But Hale has bigger plans. “You can only pass out so many pamphlets,” he said, while describing why he has taken to the Internet his dream of eliminating members of minority groups in the name of white supremacy.
He has made that message available to the 40 million people using the Internet’s World Wide Web in offices, homes and schools.
“There’s always going to be some people who don’t have access to the pamphlets,” Hale said. But the sole limit to spreading his message using the Internet is the number of people who use the computer network.
Never before has a single person had the power to reach out to the world at large.
Whether a terrorist, a pornographer, a confidence game operator, a child molester, a drug smuggler, a hate group leader or just an error-prone newspaper reporter, the Internet affords new powers to do things on a far larger scale.
This power has renewed calls for government regulation. The resulting fight has kindled anew a conflict as old as the Constitution itself, pitting those who champion freedom against those who insist that society needs to protect itself from those who would ruthlessly exploit those freedoms to cause harm.
Hale’s racist pamphleteering stands as a ready example of where the country as a whole has landed so far.
While he can say anything he wants in his cheap prints, until the Internet, he lacked access to any medium of mass-circulation because of a simple economic reality: He couldn’t afford it.
Among the Internet’s greatest strengths is that it knocks down such barriers and levels the playing field for those who want to proffer their hopes, dreams and views. Internet partisans like to boast that the Web finally puts an end to the saying coined by press critic A.J. Liebling that freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own presses.
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While economics pose one barrier to entry, federal regulations pose another.
Hale would never get his hate message on a television station or even on a licensed low-power radio station because laws that have withstood decades of challenges give the Federal Communications Commission the power to pull broadcast licenses of stations that veer wildly from community standards.
Other federal laws dating back to 1928, that have been often challenged but so far upheld, give agents powers to tap Americans’ telephones in efforts to police organized crime and terrorism.
Laws also exist covering the libel, slander and consumer fraud that goes on the Internet even as many in law enforcement say they want extended enforcement powers tailored specifically to on-line issues.
“The fact that Congress has been regulating (broadcast and telephone) communications for most of history tends to get lost in the flapdoodle over the Internet,” said Mike Kangior, a key Senate staffer involved in the recent effort to write laws criminalizing the use of the Internet to place pornography in reach of children. That effort, which resulted in the Communications Decency Act, was ruled unconstitutional late last month by the Supreme Court.
That fact is not lost, however, on Jerry Berman and Daniel Weitzner, leaders of the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology, major opponents of regulating the Internet.
The two men, who helped spearhead efforts to prevent implementation of congressional laws aimed at censoring the Internet, warned in a joint essay, “The interactive media market must not be regulated like telegraphs, broadcast radio and television and telephones thereby stifling the development of an important new communications medium with burdensome regulations.” The essay was published on the Center’s World Wide Web site at www.cdf.com
But Jean Bethke Elshtain, a University of Chicago ethics professor, noted that efforts to limit the effects of deviant speech fall well within the intent of the 1st Amendment.
“When the American founders and all the great democrats were writing the Constitution, they were talking about public speech. They were talking about politics. Over the years, we’ve stretched that to encompass private expression,” she said.
With the wild speech that occurs in such corners as the Internet, she said, “We’re at the breaking point. No historical equivalents have gone this far.”
Even 1st Amendment absolutists agree the Internet carries potential for mayhem.
But they tend to argue that national policy should change to focus on existing laws to ensure emerging media not be used for criminal activity.
Kangior, who served as a legislative aide for drafting the Communications Decency Act on the staff of the bill’s primary sponsor, then-Sen. James Exon (D-Neb.), said he agrees with many civil libertarians that much of the problem with computers may be solved with technology.
This is particularly true with regard to protecting children from Internet pornography by using software to filter out offensive Web material before it reaches children.
Kangior, who now works for a filtering company called Log-on Data Corp. in Anaheim, which markets a censoring product called X-Stop, said, “Unless people realize that they can use technology to solve this problem they can expect Congress to step in and solve it for them.”
Indeed, pressure is growing at local and national levels to write new regulations and laws with a laser focus on the Internet.
The Federal Trade Commission will return from the Independence Day holiday to resume hearings into Internet privacy issues. House and Senate committees are debating laws that would add criminal penalties to planning terrorism on-line.
The White House and civil liberties groups are at loggerheads over proposals to build automatic devices into telephones that would let federal agents monitor data passing over phone lines.
Furious debate over how to protect children from on-line predators and pornography rages from Washington to Springfield, where Illinois Atty. Gen. Jim Ryan says he is planning a major offensive this summer against the use of the Internet for gambling and child pornography.
Behind it all, say experts, are the huge new powers that the Internet brings to old troublemakers.
Terrorists find in the Internet a powerful new way to get out the word about how to build bombs, which targets to attack and how to avoid arrest.
Those who want to sell–or just wallow in–pornography of any stripe find on the World Wide Web new ways of distributing photographs, films, sounds and other material.
And as Patricia Kelly, chief of consumer fraud for Ryan’s office, noted, waves of hucksters adept at confidence games and fraudulent business schemes discover new victims by taking their cons on-line.
Civil libertarians like to point out that even if would-be censors were to prevail, technology would make the task somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible.
“The Internet wants to be free,” has become the first principle of the information revolution as society gradually realizes the realities of this global network.
The Web not only lets just about anybody put just about anything he or she chooses in front of a worldwide audience, but there is little anybody can do to stop that information from being promulgated.
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Those who must cope with the resulting fallout note the irony that the reason the Internet is so hard to stop is that it was designed by the Defense Department as a worldwide communications system that would survive any imaginable global holocaust.
The question becomes whether the Internet, which engineers agree is strong enough to survive nuclear war, will be powerful enough to survive the climate of fear and trembling it has brought to the society that created it.