Janet Reno and Kat Sunlove \nLOS ANGELES - A White House committee lead by Attorney General Janet Reno seems to think prosecuting cyber-crime may have to take precedence over freedom of the press. But a pair of online journalists would tell Reno not so fast, in different ways.
Scott Schalin, creative director of iGallery's VaVoom! E-zine, says it's "kind of disturbing" for Reno or the committee to be thinking in terms of compromising press freedom, especially during election season. Kat Sunlove, the Free Speech Coalition spokeswoman who also publishes an E-newsletter compiling First Amendment-related news, says it isn't just disturbing - it's dangerous.
"With the advent of the Internet and widespread computer use, the Reno committee says in a forthcoming report, "almost any computer can be used to 'publish' material. As a result, the [Privacy Protection Act of 1980 (PPA)] may now apply to almost any search of any computer… features of the Internet that make it different from prior technologies may justify the need for changes in laws and procedures that govern the detection and investigation of computer crimes."
The report is tentatively titled, The Electronic Frontier: The Challenge of Unlawful Conduct Involving the Use of the Internet. The committee is said to include no members of the cyber-industry nor privacy advocates, says Wired.
Schalin says politicians in election years try to find issues Americans "are pretty black and white with," suggesting one motivation behind the Reno committee's conclusion might well be to put an extra boost into Vice President Gore's hopes to capture the White House in November.
"You see issues like Net porn, sale of guns, drug enforcement, they become the hot buttons," Schalin says. "There could be some of that behind this, because cyber period is still a question mark on how to be policed, and because there's been so many issues or instances of hacker problems really recently that I'm sure they're looking at this as a noble way of going after the people bringing down the Yahoo!s and eBays of the world."
"This committee isn't just wrongheaded," Sunlove says. "It's dangerous, it's not wrongheaded form their point of view. There's a great tendency to be blinded maybe by their own rhetoric, but to the realities of what parts of our rights they are cutting into they seem to weigh it differently than we libertarians do. They weigh this control aspect as greater in value to society than freedom. And we say on the other side no, you have to maintain freedom at all costs and find other ways to set the limits you need to set."
She says that if the committee's apparent conclusion ever gets translated into law it would not hold constitutional muster for very long. But it illustrates a dilemna posed by the Internet's rapid rise - the hyperspeed of mass communication today, compared to before the 19th and 20th Centuries.
"If you think back to the de Sade era, his activities were certainly written about, outrageous, covered in the news, books and drawings, all sorts of contemporaneous materials could be found," Sunlove says, "but no one was alarmed by it because communications did not reach the masses. And every time, historically, we have a new communications vehicle, there's always a move to restrict it. The Church didn't want the Bible to be printed because the masses couldn't handle this complicated material."
Schalin thinks the issue of freedom of the cyber-press could become a livelier one in the next few years. "Forget adult (material)," he says, "they're talking also about sites telling you how to build a bomb. For me as an Internet journalist, I'm definitely troubled by Web sites kids can go to that can tell you how to build a bomb, how to fraud, plenty of sites telling you how to fraud other sites. Hacker newsgroups. The troublesome thing is, people who are the Internet crooks are proud of it."
Still, Schalin thinks the U.S. federal government might have a difficult time of pursuing the kind of censorship implied in the Reno committee conclusions for one salient reason - how could one government, he says, censor the world?
"With the Net as opposed to a newspaper, you're talking about a global medium," he says. "How could Janet Reno or the U.S. government halt something intended for Europe or the rest of the world as much as for the U.S.? Our First Amendment issues you can't apply to the Net as easily as you can to, like, books, where they say we as a nation don't want this book in our schools. That's censorship. Those are issues still being fought. With the Net, you can say we don't want adult sites in our libraries, that's the school's right, but ultimately the government cannot tell, let's say, someone in the U.K. he can't have a site that is adult in nature or a point of view may be threatening."
Could the U.S. government develop or deploy the means of blocking "unwanted" or "undesirable" Net communications from getting into the U.S.? Schalin dismisses the possibility. "If I have a U.K. business and a U.K. server saying Americans stink, how am I technologically going to block that site from coming into the U.S.? You'd have to go to all the ISPs and block this domain," he says. "And that's not going to happen. The only danger could be putting restrictions on American companies or American journalists, material produced in America. That would get to freedom of speech issues."
The Reno committee's concern would appear to parallel concerns raised in the late 1960s, when the underground counterculture press published, for example, a detailed story on how to manufacture Molotov cocktails. Schalin agrees.
"Once you think this through, and look at the purpose of the Net, you realize that - just like the 60s counterculture - a new medium is born, it's still evolving, you're going to have a rebellious faction to deal with," he says. "Ultimately, I think that you can create laws that establish criminal activity and prosecute it without crosscutting the First Amendment. I mean, there's a right for a hacker bulletin board, but that's different than them acting on what they talk about."
Sunlove is no great fan of computer hackers, but neither does she want to see basic freedom and privacy rights compromised in the effort to stop them. "I think that what we're seeing (with the Reno committee) is just the latest wrinkle," she says. "The Net is such a vast hyperleap in communications technology, that just boggles the mind. It's instantaneous, and extremely deep in vertical depth of information and it's going to be absolutely ubiquitous before you know it. So how we deal with it how we hang onto our freedoms as this new technology comes under attack, is going to be very important to our future… On the one hand we have our privacy that needs to be maintained. I'm really annoyed at these (hacking) guys. Leave my little shit alone, I don't know how to put it except that. I understand the Federal impetus to do something about it but we really do have to keep an eye out that what they do doesn't impair the rest of us in our ability to use the technology."
The Privacy Protection Act guards American journalists, scholars, and writers from searches by law enforcement agencies for working or documentary materials. The Reno committee fears that can also be used to shield child porn, stolen classified documents, "or other contraband or evidence of crime."
