(3089/898) Freedom of the Press

772) Just because freedom of the press [is] in the Constitution[doesn't] mean that people [are] able to stop thinking about what press freedom means in real life, and fighting about it and suing each other about it. We Americans have lots of problems with our freedom of press and our freedom of speech. Problems like libel and slander. Incitement to riot. Obscenity. Child pornography. Flag burning. Cross-burning. Race-hat propaganda. Political correctness. Sexist language. Tipper Gore's Parents Music Resource Council. Movie ratings. Plagiarism. Photocopying rights. A journalist's so-called right to protect sources. Fair-use doctrine. Lawyer-client confidentiality. Paid political announcements. Banning ads for liquor and cigarettes. The fairness doctrine for broadcasters. School textbook censors. National security. Military secrets. Industrial trade secrets. Arts funding for so-called obscenity. Even religious blasphemy such as Salman Rushdie's famous novel Satanic Verses, which is hated so violently by the kind of people who like to blow up the World Trade Center. All these huge problems about what people can say to each other, under what circumstances. And that's without computers and computer networks.

Every single one of those problems is applicable to cyberspace. Computers don't make any of these old free-expression problems go away; on the contrary, they intensify them, and they introduce a bunch of new problems. Problems like software piracy. Encryption. Wire fraud. Interstate transportation of stolen digital property. Free expression on privately owned networks. So-called "data-mining" to invade personal privacy. Employers spying on employee e-mail. Intellectual rights over electronic publications. Computer search-and-seizure practice. Legal liability for network crashes. Computer intrusion. And one and on and on. These are real problems. They're out there. They're out there now. In the future, they're only going to get worse. And there's going to be a bunch of new problems nobody's even imagined.

Bruce Sterling
"Good Cop, Bad Hacker" in
Wired (5/95)

[Note: Adapted from a speech given by Sterling at the High Security Technology Investigation Association (11/94).]

773) If the freedom of the press is to be determined by the judgment of the printer of a Newspaper in preference to that of the people, who when they read will judge for themselves, then freedom is on a very sandy foundation.

Thomas Paine
letter to a Philadelphia newspaper editor
quoted by Jon Katz in
"The Age of Paine" in
Wired (5/95)

[Note: cf. #489 Liebling]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 674 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.