FC: Testimony before Democracy Online Task Force on May 22

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[Yesterday's meeting was chaired by former Reps. Pat Schroeder and Rick 
White. White seemed to be the most interested in engaging in debate, and 
seemed somewhat more pro-regulation than I had expected. Other speakers 
covered other issues, so I focused on just two: public spaces and 
anonymity. The debate after prepared remarks was much more interesting, and 
I'm told a cybercast will be available at http://democracyonline.org/ 
eventually. --Declan]


http://www.mccullagh.org/speeches/democracyonline.052200.html

   Democracy Online Project
   National Task Force testimony
   May 22, 2000

   Declan McCullagh
   Wired News
   Washington, DC
   declan () wired com

   Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this morning's
   discussion. It's an honor to be on a panel with such distinguished
   guests. I hope my perspective as the Washington correspondent for
   Wired News and a longtime Internet user proves helpful.

   We were asked "How do we create a public space online?" I think the
   answer is we don't need to create one. We already have one, and an
   unexpectedly wonderful one at that.

   Think of the Internet as an unlimited expanse of public park, where
   soapboxes are available for free to anyone who wants one. You can set
   up your own web site on any of scores of free hosting services,
   including places like Geocities and Tripod, with little effort. These
   companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in making it
   easy for you to say whatever you want - you don't have to a programmer
   to be heard.

   Once your site is online, it's discovered by search engines and people
   looking for information on your topic can find you. I launched one
   political web site in March, and it only took a few days before search
   engines like Google found it and began steering visitors toward it.

   You can start your own mailing list for free as well, on sites like
   onelist.com. I run one called politech in my spare time that has
   thousands of subscribers.

   If you don't like the idea of free hosting services that usually place
   ads on top of your web pages, you can do it yourself. Pay web hosting
   services start at around $10 a month - less than the cost of cable TV
   or telephone service. And you can say whatever you want.

   It is true that obscure sites may not get the same number of visitors
   as more mainstream ones. But that's true offline as well as online:
   More people read Tom Clancy than Hemingway. More Americans will be
   watching Ally McBeal this evening than tuning in to this cybercast or
   CSPAN, for that matter. More people will go to Disney's new dinosaur
   movie than listen to that street preacher on the corner of Connecticut
   and K streets. But there are no structural barriers to being watched
   or heard online.

   In fact, exactly the opposite is the case. For the ultimate in public
   spaces, there's Usenet. Usenet is a distributed collection of tens of
   thousands of discussion areas devoted to everything in the world you
   might want to talk about. It's been around for a few decades, and was
   already well-established when I first got an Internet account in 1988.
   Nobody controls it, nobody owns it, and nobody can censor it.

   According to the most recent statistics from yesterday, the average
   number of individual messages people post each day is 791,377. That
   amounts to 46,800 megabytes a day. To put this into more realistic
   terms, most of the folks in the audience have seen the size of books
   with the complete works of Shakespare. Usenet messages, if printed
   out, would fill about 5,200 of these books. A day.

   This is one reason the U.S. Supreme Court in 1997 called the Internet
   a "new marketplace of ideas."

   ANONYMITY AND FREE SPEECH

   We were also asked "Is it possible to create an online public space
   for political discourse? What are the constitutional and legal
   issues?"

   People feel comfortable engaging in public discourse online if they
   can do so without their privacy being violated. Anonymity is an
   important part of that, and I'd like to make you aware of some legal
   threats to anonymity on the Internet:

     * The federal government must take steps to improve online
       traceability and promote international cooperation to identify
       Internet users, according to a report commissioned by President
       Clinton and released in March. The document, written by a
       high-level working group chaired by Attorney General Janet Reno,
       says that police should be able to determine the source of
       anonymous email in some situations.
     * Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder told the House Judiciary
       committee at the same time that Internet malcontents are "often
       wearing the equivalent of Internet electronic gloves to hide their
       fingerprints and their identity."
     * U.S. Customs has suggested that Internet providers keep records on
       what their users are doing, according to a CNN report.
     * Some think tanks are suggesting that in response to the
       controversy over Napster, Congress should require Napster to
       collect addresses and credit card information of users before they
       can use it. The people most affected would be the young, the poor,
       and those in developing nations with limited access to credit
       cards.
     * A Council of Europe draft treaty, crafted in part by the U.S.,
       would require websites and Internet providers to collect
       information about their users, a rule that would potentially limit
       anonymous remailers. The treaty is expected to be finalized by
       December 2000 and voted on by participating nations next year.
     * Yahoo inappropriately disclosed information about the true name
       belonging to a pseudonym of a user in response to a subpoena,
       according to a federal lawsuit filed earlier this month in
       California.

   Anonymity has long been a shield from the tyranny of the majority. It
   protects individuals from retaliation for having unpopular views, and
   it prevents controversial ideas from being suppressed. Shakespeare,
   James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Mark Twain, and Ann Rice used
   pseudonyms. In the McIntyre case, the Supreme Court struck down a law
   that requred pamphleteers to identify themselves, saying there was a
   right to anonymity in a democracy. Journalists rely on guarantees of
   anonymity to shield their sources from disclosure.

   Anonymity protects whistleblowers from being fired when revealing
   corporate malfeasance or government wrongdoing. Without anonymity and
   pseudonymity, some communities could not exist. Alcoholics Anonymous,
   AIDS support groups, drug addiction support and other mutual help
   organizations rely on anonymity to protect the identity of their
   members. Anonymity reduces the risk of social ostracism, and promotes
   democracy online. Legal attempts to restrict it should be rejected.

   Thank you.

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