Slashdot Mirror
Online Freedom of Speech Act Introduced in House
Fox Cutter writes "Today in the House of Representatives, Congressman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) introduced a companion piece of legislation to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's bill (S.678) to exclude the Internet from the definition of 'public communication' in the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002." If the bill passes, this would free the internet from FEC regulation.
I tried searching around, but was unable to come up with the full text of the act this is proposing to amend. Call me paranoid, but without seeing the context, I can't feel jusified in having an opinion on the proposed amendment.
The Wikipedia article did link to a partial report, but I profess ignorance in how to decipher where Paragraph 22 is, if it's listed. Other links I've found seem to rely on a couple 404's at Cornell, subchapter I and subchapter II.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
It's spelt Israel, not Isreal.
" Sorry but... why pass a law to establish the first fucking amendment?"
Because they've already passed laws involving political speech that violate the 1st amendment in the name of "fairness" in political campaign finance. Now they're writing laws to exclude the internet since the older laws would otherwise include the internet.
Vote for Pedro
Actually from that story, people just don't want blogger's posting people's home addresses and such. From that very survey 52% of those asked said that they thought that bloggers should have the same protections as traditional journalists (27% did not). My guess is that if you ask people if newspapers should publish people's home addresses when they write stories about them, they'll say no there as well. I hardly think that people just feel that way about blogging. Personally I think that ZDNET story was poorly titled and sensationalist.
It says simply
Now, let's google a little further for the bill that this bill amends. Strangely it's missing from any of the summaries I've seen. Ah, here it is (warning: large PDF).
Here's the text of the section being amended (431:22):
The last bit of emphasis I added. Just as an exercise, let's see how this would look as amended:
So, this bill would exempt all campaign regulation relevant to advertising spending so long as it was on the internet.
Actually, it is both. It is a freedom of speech campaign, that is trying to get past PAC restrictions.
Political parties, political organizations, issue groups, and the like should be free to give whatever money they want, to whoever they want, for any reason they want. That is freedom of speech and expression.
The campaign finance laws are not there to protect the American people, they are there to hurt alternative political parties. A smaller political party like the Greens, or the Libertarian party, need extra cash in order to compete with the big boys who control the government and the media. A few big donations from generous people is what those parties need in order to grow. However, limiting funding means that the largest parties can rely on their huge base to make smaller donations, and small parties are forcefully silenced.
Any restriction on speech, or the funding of such speech, destroys free speech, period.
Strictly speaking, it's doesn't free the internet from regulation. What it does is free registered campaigns from regulation of spending on the internet. Your rights as a slashdotter or blogger aren't really affected by this.
"Ol Jugears" does not have anywhere near the power his dictatorial predecessors had, his influence is comprabe to any other rich celebrity. Politically and religiously he is a mere figure head who travels around in funny costumes cutting ribbons and rasing money for charity.
Being born in a palace in "the much older days" was only part of the road to power. To get to the throne you had to outlive your parents, uncles, aunts, and older siblings/cousins that were an obstacle due to pedigree or influence. The routine path from palace crib to palace throne was via murdering your relatives. This is also why Europe's royal families suffer from inbreeding. Once you had fought (and fucked) your way to the throne you then had to fend off all internal usurppers and external invaders to stay there.
"Ivan the Terrible", (First Tzar of Russia), had a large frypan specifically made for executing his political enemies in a public stirfry. More often than not, "nobility" were not executed, "a king's ransom" was far more lucrative. Modern democracy is often said to have started with the Magna-Carta, since it handed substantial power to the Parliment. Parliment at the time was, (some say still is), a group of wealthy merchants who's power was derived from the wars and ransoms they chose to finance.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You put that well, although I disagree.
Every time the government imposes censorship on election speech, it undermines the integrity of the election process.
Let's be clear here that the bill would not prevent the FEC from censoring the internet. It would amend section 301 of BCRA, to clarify the issue in Shays-Meehan v FEC, which requires the FEC to revisit rulemaking on applying section 301 to the internet.
The public comment period for that rulemaking is now under way, and we need slashdotters to take part and be heard. www.fec.gov.
There are other placs in BCRA, such as 311, that attempt to censor campaign speech, and this bill will not fix those problems. Even before BCRA, the FEC, relying on 317 of FECA, has been trying to censor the internet, and we've been fighting it.
This bill is typical of what congress does. It passes a stupid law under pressure from special interest groups. Here the special interest group was the Pew Charitable Trust, which spent ~100 million to pass BCRA (McCain-Feingold).
This turned out to have unforseen consequences on another special interest group, in this case bloggers, so a bill is being introduced to cater to that interest group. And so it goes.
It's not about making sense or doing the right thing - it is about responding to stimuli, like an amoeba does.
By all means let's support this bill. Whether it passes or not, the support it gets is a measure of how much clout we have.
But it doesn't fix the problem, just provides some grease for the squeakiest wheel. Kudos to Declan at cnet and Commissioner Brad Smith and Mike (Krepanski?), Michelle Malkin, the instapundit,
the three thousand of you who have signed the coalition's petition.
But there's much more work to do to free the internet from state and federal regulation of political speech.
I blog about this stuff at ballots.blogspot.com.
One of the best sources to keep up with these issues is Rick Hasen's http://www.electionlawblog.com.
I try to do what I can, but frankly I need either help from other lawyers, or somebody with deep pockets, before I take on the FEC in court.
Of course, another group in Washington decided to pass laws that impose limits upon how much political free speech you can do about any particular federal candidate, and later passed more laws saying you couldn't do so much free speaking when it comes to the party of your favourite candidates.
But they get around that by allowing you to send an unlimited amount of free speech to a licensed-by-the-government organization to spread it around TV and radio stations, so long as no one can tie the control of those organizations back to the political parties or candidates. Which is going to get very interesting here soon, since one of those organizations, MoveOn.org, is now claiming they're going to "take back control" of one of those parties...
And, of course, none of this takes into account money spent by people hiring relatives of political office holders to sit in Washington and lobby congress, getting very favourable legislation passed with the help of their personal Senator or Representative.
Actually the Supreme Court on many occasions has allowed Congress to limit speech in certain context. For example, copyright law, hate speech, slandor all limit our scope of our free speech. The campaign finance law is similiar.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.