by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka — (Ver. 1.0 — Summer 2009)
We are attempting to articulate the core principles of cyber-libertarianism to provide the public and policymakers with a better understanding of this alternative vision for ordering the affairs of cyberspace. We invite comments and suggestions regarding how we should refine and build-out this outline. We hope this outline serves as the foundation of a book we eventually want to pen defending what we regard as “Real Internet Freedom.” [Note: Here’s a printer-friendly version, which we also have embedded down below as a Scribd document.]
I. What is Cyber-Libertarianism?
Cyber-libertarianism refers to the belief that individuals—acting in whatever capacity they choose (as citizens, consumers, companies, or collectives)—should be at liberty to pursue their own tastes and interests online.
Generally speaking, the cyber-libertarian’s motto is “Live & Let Live” and “Hands Off the Internet!” The cyber-libertarian aims to minimize the scope of state coercion in solving social and economic problems and looks instead to voluntary solutions and mutual consent-based arrangements.
Cyber-libertarians believe true “Internet freedom” is freedom from state action; not freedom for the State to reorder our affairs to supposedly make certain people or groups better off or to improve some amorphous “public interest”—an all-to convenient facade behind which unaccountable elites can impose their will on the rest of us.
I personally encourage the president to establish a White House commission on public media.
and then:
A truly free and independent press is the red beating heart of democracy and freedom.
He’s right that the free press is a “watchdog on power.” But that’s not compatible with the idea that, as reported, “the government makes an effort to ensure the survival of the free press.” A press funded, promoted, propped up, subsidized by government is not a free press. Nor is it in any position to be a watchdog; it’s more likely to become a megaphone for the states preferred ideas and expansion of government in other spheres, like health care, energy, finance, telecommunications, scientific research and policy and so on.
Democracy as a concept and political system is not at stake, as Rather thinks, when a particular business model engaged in public communications and broadcasting suffers at a particular point in history. It’s been beaten to death, but everyone knows the transformative importance of the Internet and its role in making voices heard that never had a chance when Rather and his two rival channels dominated the news and airwaves for 30 minutes each evening.
What Unites Advocates of Speech Controls & Privacy Regulation? [pdf]
by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka
The Progress & Freedom Foundation, Progress on Point No. 16.19
Anyone who has spent time following debates about speech and privacy regulation comes to recognize the striking parallels between these two policy arenas. In this paper we will highlight the common rhetoric, proposals, and tactics that unite these regulatory movements. Moreover, we will argue that, at root, what often animates calls for regulation of both speech and privacy are two remarkably elitist beliefs:
People are too ignorant (or simply too busy) to be trusted to make wise decisions for themselves (or their children); and/or,
All or most people share essentially the same values or concerns and, therefore, “community standards” should trump household (or individual) standards.
While our use of the term “elitism” may unduly offend some understandably sensitive to populist demagoguery, our aim here is not to launch a broadside against elitism as Time magazine culture critic William H. Henry once defined it: “The willingness to assert unyieldingly that one idea, contribution or attainment is better than another.”[1] Rather, our aim here is to critique that elitism which rises to the level of political condescension and legal sanction. We attack not so much the beliefs of some leaders, activists, or intellectuals that they have a better idea of what it in the public’s best interest than the public itself does, but rather the imposition of those beliefs through coercive, top-down mandates.
That sort of elitism—elitism enforced by law—is often the objective of speech and privacy regulatory advocates. Our goal is to identify the common themes that unite these regulatory movements, explain why such political elitism is unwarranted, and make it clear how it threatens individual liberty as well as the future of free and open Internet. As an alternative to this elitist vision, we advocate an empowerment agenda: fostering an environment in which users have the tools and information they need to make decisions for themselves and their families. Continue reading →
I’ve spent a lot of time here deconstructing and criticizing the proposals set forth by the Free Press, the radical media “reformista” group founded by the prolific Marxist media theorist Robert McChesney. I have been trying to shine more light on their proposals and activities because I believe they are antithetical to freedom of speech and a free society. That’s because, as media scholar Ben Compaine has noted, “What the hard core reformistas really want, it seems, is not diversity or an open debate but a media that promotes their own vision of society and the world.” That’s exactly right and, more specifically, as I argued in my 2005 Media Myths book, the media reformistas want to impose this control by taking the fantasy that “the public owns the [broadcast] airwaves” and extending it to ALL media platforms and outlets. In other words, McChesney and the Free Press want an UnFree Press. To cast things in neo-Marxist terms that they could appreciate, they want to take control of the information means of production. And it begins, McChesney argues, by all of us having to give up this “sort of religious attachment to the idea of a ‘free-press'” from which we all suffer.
Some people accuse me of “red-baiting” or “McCarthyite” tactics when I use the “M-word” (Marxism) or the “S-Word” (socialism) to describe McChesney, the Free Press, and the movement they have spawned. But these are labels with real meaning and ones that McChesney himself embraces in his work. In his 1999 book Rich Media, Poor Media, he says that “Media reform cannot win without widespread support and such support needs to be organized as part of a broad anti-corporate, pro-democracy movement.” He casts everything in “social justice” terms and speaks of the need “to rip the veil off [corporate] power, and to work so that social decision making and power may be made as enlightened and as egalitarian as possible.” What exactly would all that mean in practice for media? In his 2002 book Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle against Corporate Media with John Nichols of The Nation, McChesney argues that media reform efforts must begin with “the need to promote an understanding of the urgency to assert public control over the media.” They go on to state that, “Our claim is simply that the media system produces vastly less of quality than it would if corporate and commercial pressures were lessened.”
If you want additional proof of his intentions, then I encourage you to read this lengthy interview with McChesney that appears in the new edition of The Bullet, an online newsletter produced by the Canada-based “Socialist Project.” (If you ask me, there’s something strangely appropriate about a socialist newsletter named “The Bullet” in light of the millions of people who diedwhile living undersocialist tyranny!) Anyway, let’s ignore that and focus on what neo-Marxist media reform entails according to McChesney. Because never before has he laid his cards on the table as clearly as he does in this interview. Continue reading →
Last year, my PFF colleague Adam Thierer asked whether State AGs + NCMEC = The Net’s New Regulators? Adam noted that NCMEC, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a private non-profit organization, was playing a law enforcement role in regulating child pornography—but without any clear mechanisms for ensuring its accountability and effectiveness. Adam’s point wasn’t just that transparency is a good thing, but that when it comes to a cause as important as protecting children from exploitation, it’s vital to ensuring that we’re that we’re actually doing a good job at it!
Yesterday, Emmanuel Lazaridis commented on that post:
Given the increasing regulatory and investigative powers of the NCMEC, it is no longer clear whether or not the [Freedom of Information Act] applies to NCMEC records. We are about to find out. I am right now bringing a case against the NCMEC in federal court for access to records under the FOIA and, failing that, for discovery under 28 U.S.C. § 1782(a).
Mr. Lazaridis’s complaint in the D.C. District Court claims that Lazaridis (a Greek national) has been unfairly deemed a fugitive from U.S. justice for having taken his daughter to Greece over the objections of the girl’s American mother, Lazaridis’s ex-wife. NCMEC got involved by placing the girl on their MissingKids.com registry of abducted children. Lazaridis wants the court to recognize his custody, deem him not to be a fugitive, and to order NCMEC to turn over all their records on the girl.
This is, of course, just one side of the story (and such cases are usually so complicated as to be indecipherable to outsiders). But even if Lazaridis’s case were wholly without merit, his basic argument would be a sound one: Why shouldn’t NCMEC, in exercising any of its essentially governmental functions, be subject to the same accountability requirements through FOIA as the FBI would be?
When the issue is the Lazaridis family’s trans-Atlantic custody battle, it may seem easy to ignore this question. But when NCMEC is essentially making policy regarding filtering Internet content, blacklistingwebsites, turning over user logs to law enforcement, or “cleaning up” Craigslist, the question of NCMEC’s accountability under FOIA cannot be avoided as a critical decision about the future of Internet governance. Continue reading →
The Economist magazine has just released an important feature article entitled, “Sex Laws: Unjust and Ineffective.” In an indirect way, the article makes a point that I have been trying to get across in my work on this issue: If you want to keep your kids safe from real sex offenders, we need to scrap our current sex offender registries and completely rethink the way we define and punish sex offenses in this country. That’s because, currently, a significant percentage of those people listed in sex offender registries pose almost no threat to children, making it difficult for us to know who really does pose a threat to our kids and what we should do about them.
Simply stated, we’ve dumbed-down the notion of “sex crimes” in this country. As a nation, we have foolishly come to equate almost all sex offenses equally. While sex offender registry laws vary from state to state, many basically say that that two teens caught engaging in consensual oral sex in high school belong on the same list alongside child rapists. That is insanity. And it leaves many in the public, especially parents, thinking that the whole world is full of predators lurking on every corner just waiting to snatch, rape, and kill their children. [For the actual facts, see the appendix I have included down below: “Is America Suffering from a National Child Abduction Epidemic”?] In reality, as The Economist feature story points out, the truth is quite different: Continue reading →
This video from a puppet maker in Australia has an interesting take on the fear-mongering that often drives public policy for Internet safety. The video does a good job of putting into perspective the real risk to kids of online predation.
For instance, we often hear the scary statistic that “1 in 5 children are sexually solicited online.” This was based on data originally released by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). It’s since been updated to 1 in 7, which still sounds bad, but not so bad in perspective — what does solicitation mean, and by whom? Well, “solicitation” is broadly defined to mean “unwanted contact.” In the study, it encompasses any unwanted discussion of a sexual nature. But the real perspective comes from learning 90% of this unwanted contact comes from other peers or young adults! So, it’s rarely the creepy perverted middle-age man in a wife beater t-shirt — even though the messaging from many policymakers focuses almost entirely on this scenario.
I’m not sure how I missed this, but someone just pointed out to me that in late July, the city of Amherst, NY, “failed to approve a game license for [Chuck E. Cheese’s] the kids-themed food and entertainment venue… citing concerns about violent video games and bad behavior by patrons that require police intervention.” That is according to this article by Sandra Tan in The Buffalo News. Tan reports that the Amherst Town Board deadlocked 3-3 when considering the license for Chuck E. Cheese’s, apparently meaning that the pizza and arcade hot spot for kids will no longer be able to offer games at their Amherst venue. According to her article, game content considerations drove the move:
Council Member Shelly Schratz said she was disturbed by several “action-packed shoot-and-kill games” that were accessible to children as young as 4. “When I see 6-year-olds, 8-year-olds playing those games, when all the time we’re opening the paper and seeing those stories on youth violence, do we need those games to make money?” she said. Schratz was one of three board members who voted against renewing the establishment’s game room license, which is necessary for the business to legally run its arcade games, a major draw for families that patronize the chain’s 500-plus locations from coast to coast.
I find the actions of Amherst in this case to be quite troubling. Here are a few quick thoughts about this incident: Continue reading →
The new Maine law I blogged about on Sunday is much worse than I thought based on my initial reading. If allowed to stand, it would constitute a sweeping age verification mandate introduced through the back door of “child protection.”
The law, which goes into effect in September, would extend the approach of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998 by requiring “verifiable parental consent” before the collection of kids “personal information” about kids, not just those under 13, but also adolescents age 13-17. Unlike other state-level proposals in New Jersey, Illinois, Georgia and North Carolina, Maine’s “COPPA 2.0” law would also cover health information, but would only govern the collection and use of data for marketing purposes (while the FTC has interpreted COPPA to cover to essentially any capability for communicating personal information among users).
But the Maine law would go much further than these proposals or COPPA itself by banning transfer or use of such data in anything other than de-identified, aggregate form. Still I took some comfort in the fact that the Maine law, unlike COPPA or these other proposals, lacked the second of COPPA’s two prongs: (i) collection from kids and (ii) collection on sites that are directed at kids. It’s because of the second prong that COPPA applies not only when a site operator knows that it’s collecting information from kids (or merely allowing them to share information with other users), but also when the operator’s site is (like, say, Club Penguin) targeted to kids in terms of its subject matter, branding, interface, etc. Because I initially concluded that the Maine law would apply only to knowing collection, I supposed that it would be less likely to require age verification of all users, as other COPPA 2.0 proposals would—something that would be unlikely to survive a First Amendment challenge based on the harm to online anonymity.
But I was quite wrong. During the PFF Capitol Hill briefing Adam and I held on Monday, Jim Halpert, one of our panelists, noted that the bill imposed “strict liability.” Continue reading →
The Obama administration has been greeted with enthusiasm by scientists who see the potential for “research-based policy.” Reason, not ideology, will govern. The New Scientist, among other zines, headlines “Let Science Rule: the Rational Way to Run Societies.” (May 28, p. 40-43) This is part of a larger theme: Behavioral economics is taking off. Continue reading →
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by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka — (Ver. 1.0 — Summer 2009)
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.