However, I would love to be able to regulate the content of speech. The First Amendment prevents me from doing so, and that’s simply a function of the First Amendment, but I think over the long run, it’s better the government does not regulate the content of speech.”
Who is Lieu kidding. He knows the government can regulate free speech by regulating social media. They have been going in that direction for a long time. Democrats have to stop free speech because resistance to Socialism/Communism in America has been growing steadily, along with the growth of the Internet. Before the Internet, one seldom heard, or read, any criticism of the Left; hence, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton’s call for some kind of an Internet gatekeeper.
Then-First lady Hillary Clinton’s attack was the opening shot fired at freedom of speech:
Many will recall 1998, when the Lewinsky debacle broke on The Drudge Report. Hillary said in response:
“We’re all going to have to rethink how we deal with the Internet. As exciting as these new developments are, there are a number of serious issues without any kind of editing function or gatekeeping function…"
Bill, naturally, is on board as well. He recently called for a Ministry of Truth to help squash all the political 'rumors' on The Net.
And now most recently, The Heritage Foundation gives us this nugget from Hillary:
Clinton claimed that “both the United States and China are victims of cyber attacks. Intellectual property, commercial data, national security information is being targeted.… This is an issue of increasing concern to the business community and the government of the United States, as well as many other countries, and it is vital that we work together to curb this behavior.”
You can be sure that if the U.S. works with China and "many other countries" to stop cyber attacks, everyone will fall into the net as a possible target....Think cyber pat-downs.
The Clinton Bus keeps rollin'...rollin'...rollin'.
Then-First Lady Hillary Clinton did not want to defend her reputation —— she did not want to be questioned in the first place. Naturally, she wanted a gatekeeper who would work with her to keep bimbo eruptions off the Internet and out of the public domain. In her mind she did no wrong. It was Bubba who was doing dirty things downstairs while she was upstairs baking cookies for Chelsea. The truth of the matter is that she was overcome with self-righteous self-pity because Matt Drudge broke stories about Bill and the blue dress.
A political gate is a much stronger than a physical gate. Hillary Clinton has always been a nasty Socialist who would betray America’s sovereignty in a heartbeat; nevertheless, the idea of a political Internet gatekeeper —— empowered by Democrats —— was taken seriously. So serious that Senator Leaky Leahy piled on:
Leahy gave them COICA. That’s not the same of some new disease, it’s the abbreviation for Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, the biggest and more comprehensive internet censorship proposal in the history of this country. It would give Attorney General Eric Holder the power to create a blacklist of websites and force all companies that do business in the United States to comply with that blacklist.
The Clinton bus running over free speech kept on rolling.
Obama’s guy engineered a preemptive strike on freedom of speech. His attack got no coverage by television’s talking head pundits:
Just prior to his appointment as President Obama’s so-called regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein wrote a lengthy academic paper suggesting the government should “infiltrate” social network websites, chat rooms and message boards. Such “cognitive infiltration,” Sunstein argued, should be used to enforce a U.S. government ban on “conspiracy theorizing.”
Such “cognitive infiltration,” Sunstein argued, should be used to enforce a U.S. government ban on “conspiracy theorizing.”
https://www.justplainpolitics.com/sh...45#post2754345
I am not certain if message boards are in the same category as Websites and blogs. No matter. You can bet that Leahy and his kind want to shutdown free speech on message boards as much as on Websites and blogs. The latter two earn advertising dollars as does the operator of a message board, but those who post messages are not paid; so Di Fi came up with this attack on message boards:
Specifically, the amendment requires that a journalist meet one of the following definitions:
1. working as a “salaried employee, independent contractor, or agent of an entity that disseminates news or information;”
Message board regulars are average people talking to one another. So for Leahy and Di Fi to push for a law that punishes a message board’s operator is the same as punishing a tavern owner for the things his patrons say. Worse still, the government forces the tavern owner to act as gatekeeper censoring free speech.
When Senators give rah-rah speeches, they always say you cannot put a price on freedom. It turns out you can. You can actually put an exact dollar amount on the Constitution. And that amount is $335,906.
That’s the amount that Hollywood gave Senator Patrick Leahy. And in return, Leahy gave them COICA. That’s not the same of some new disease, it’s the abbreviation for Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, the biggest and more comprehensive internet censorship proposal in the history of this country. It would give Attorney General Eric Holder the power to create a blacklist of websites and force all companies that do business in the United States to comply with that blacklist.
Ever since the Clinton Administration’s Communications Decency Act, Democrats have been obsessed with censoring the internet. And that drive has kicked into high gear again. COICA is the most ambitious plan to enact government control over freedom of expression on the internet since the days of the CDA.
NOTE: Tying decency to the Clintons is one of the sickest jokes to ever come out of Loony Town. Communications decency means do not tell the public about me.
While this bill was crafted on behalf of the entertainment industry, the applications go far beyond that. Websites that feature collections of articles, such as FreeRepublic or DemocraticUnderground could easily be targeted under the terms of COICA. And so could many blogs, which list entire articles or cite extensively from them. Any site or blog that embeds videos or images which are not authorized by the copyright holder could be similarly targeted. And with the Attorney General of a highly politicized administration wielding the power to preemptively shutter and blacklist entire websites, it would be all too easy for COICA to be used as a club for suppressing dissent.
While on paper COICA is only supposed to apply to 0.01 percent of the internet, in its broadest interpretation it could apply to anywhere between 30/40 percent of the internet. And the damage can go even beyond that. COICA gives the AG’s office a billy club that can destroy any company’s business overnight. And will that billy club be used strictly for copyright oversight alone? When the Attorney General’s office has the power to shut down any webhost, costing its owners millions in revenues, what will the owners do when they’re asked to shut down a site that does not actually fall under COICA? Will they call the AG’s bluff and prepare for a legal battle to restore the site and hope their business survives, or will they do the practical thing and comply?
We already know the answer to that. Some larger companies with deep pockets will put up a fight. Maybe. Smaller companies will just go along. And this is not what free speech was supposed to look like in America.
COICA was written for Hollywood’s benefit
COICA is just the beginning. It’s the first step in transforming the internet into an environment completely controlled by the government. If the Senate can move along a law that creates a copyright blacklist, the next step is to create a blacklist for political extremism. Once we’ve established the principle that you can just pull a switch and blacklist sites that the government doesn’t like, where does it end?
Liberals screeched for years about the Patriot Act, but very little attention is being paid to COICA, which is primarily co-sponsored by Democratic senators. The endless Hollywood movies bemoaning the oppression of the Patriot Act, won’t give way to movies bemoaning COICA. But that’s because COICA was written for Hollywood’s benefit. And the forms of oppression that are practiced by the people who make movies about oppression, naturally don’t make it into movies.
Some conservatives are defending COICA as a means of protecting private property, but it’s not. It creates a privileged status for specific industries through government action, which those specific industries paid for. This is classic ‘Rent Seeking Behavior’ which uses government force to protect a bad business model. Hollywood is suffering from the plague of piracy because of its own convoluted structure and its need to negotiate every iota of every action with its own unions. Rather than adapt and evolve, it uses lawyers and lobbyists to protect its defective business practices. And having a ‘red phone’ to the AG’s office in order to protect defective business practices does the entertainment industry no favors in the long term.
COICA is a unconstitutional bailout of our freedoms and internet civil rights for a specific industry that has troubling implications for everyone. And it’s a demonstration of just how dangerous the intersection of corporate lobbyists and politicians can be. Some conservatives believe that supporting capitalism means blindly endorsing any corporate action. It does not. When corporations subvert public representation and harness government force for their own benefit, then they act like a part of the government.
Leahy is a perfect example, a Senator from Vermont, not exactly a major hub of the entertainment industry, with deep ties on the other coast. Leahy’s ties to big Hollywood studios like Time Warner go so ridiculously deep that he actually got a part in the last Batman movie and had the movie premiere at his own fundraising event back in Vermont. Carrying water for Hollywood has nothing to do with the needs of Vermont’s citizens. But this is what happens when corporations can buy themselves their own senators.
Leahy picked up that infamous 335,906 from TV and movie industry donors and PACs. He was the third largest recipient of entertainment industry money in the Senate. The top recipient, Senator Schumer is a COICA cosponsor. So is the 5th top recipient, Senator Gillibrand, Schumer’s own Trojan horse. And there’s plenty of overlap between top donors and cosponsors on the rest of this list. This isn’t unusual. This is how Washington D.C. does business all the time. And that’s the scary part.
This isn’t just about the entertainment industry. It’s about how the intersection of money and power, routed through a centralized federal government, can and does lead to tyranny. When politicians are given a legislative framework that allows them to exercise virtually unlimited powers, without regard to the United States Constitution or individual freedoms or the public will, and then allowed to put that power at the service of their biggest donors, the end result is not democracy, but oligarchy. And COICA is another product of that oligarchy.
Senator Leahy appearing in his fave company’s movie
When you can ante up $335,906 to a Senator in exchange for a bill that lets the government play croquet with freedom of expression on the internet, then freedom is dead.
Giving the Federal government unlimited legislative scope is why we will now be forced to buy health insurance from HMOs (an entity created by the Nixon Administration) whether we want to or not. Call it a tax, call it a fine, the bottom line is that the current position of the Obama Administration is that they have the right to force people to purchase services from their corporate donors. And most liberal judicial experts appear to agree with them, and see no civil rights violations or unconstitutionally in empowering politicians to force the public to buy a service from their own donors, for the crime of ‘breathing’ in the United States.
There’s no rhyme or reason to it. It’s justified by agenda politics and corporate profits. A combination that has torn the Constitution asunder, over and over again. The only answer is to take away that power, to tear it out of the hands of politicians that willfully, fanatically and greedily abuse it, and restore it back to its original owners. The American people.
As to copyright infringement: If Leahy is truly concerned about it he better have all of those copy machines removed from libraries, or fine libraries for copyright infringements.
The government is attacking freedom of speech not freedom of the press. Until the Internet came along free speech was an inactive Right. That is to say few people mounted a soapbox to talk to strangers.
Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. A. J. Liebling
The only people who exercised free speech before the Internet were the people who owned the printing presses. That is why freedom of speech and freedom of the press are often misinterpreted. Getting average Americans to defend freedom of the press is one of the most successful con jobs the government ever pulled off. In the real world, a free press protects the government’s free speech while zealously warding off everyone else’s free speech.
When radio and TV came along those who owned the transmitters controlled speech in those mediums; i.e., the government controlled electronic free speech with licenses issued by the government, and the Fairness Doctrine (1949) when TV was young.
NOTE: Television networks, including subscription TV, oppose free speech on the Internet as much as the government opposes it. Those people make their money by controlling the dialogue. In their minds the Internet is an upstart competitor.
Free speech for individuals came with the Internet. Freedom of speech is the gate Socialists will slam shut at the first opportunity.
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Political Gatekeepers
Originally Posted by Legion
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