Just Who Controls the Internet?

Just as predicted and hotly denied by special interest groups who are desperately courting your Internet "vote," censorship IS at the core of what might happen to the Zundelsite. "Emergency!" is the cloak the tyrant always wears.

At stake is ". . . who controls the Internet," and once again, the Zündelists are center stage - the Zündel struggle at the forefront of the imminent censorship battle now shaping up in Canada.

Increasingly, individuals and groups collectively known as "The Holocaust Lobby" and busy protecting their shady extortion endeavors by peddling sentiment about the Holocaust, are once again trying to silence their opposition, partly by courting mob response.

In an article by K.K. Campbell, (The Toronto Star, September 28, 1995) the writer states authoritatively : "Thus will the likes of Ernst Zündel be banished from cyberspace."

Opposition to the Zündel voice addressing world-wide Internet audiences comes from expected quarters, such as Sol Littman's of Toronto's Simon Wiesenthal Center and other previous players on record as being in favor of curtailing Canadian Free Speech.

Please read the Toronto Star excerpts and my responses carefully - for if the stated recommendations should be implemented, the consequences would be chilling for both providers and consumers:

In a segment "Fast Forward: Your Guide to the World of Technology," Section J, under the article title "Censorship and the Net," the following is summarized as "Ottawa's Position" regarding censoring the Internet and sub-headed as "Recommendations from the Information Highway Advisory Council's Report":

1. "Educate the public, businesses and police that current law applies in cyberspace."

Here is one sentence that slides like a hot knife through butter. As if any sensible person could disagree with such broad and benevolent standards as stated here so neighborly!

What follows, though, does not stick by its own stated rules.

To wit:

2. "Develop federal "legislative measures" to determine legal liability for postings. In other words, if a user posts something from an account on Toronto's Free-Net, is Free-Net legally responsible for that post, along with the actual writer of it?"

Could Fed Ex be made "legally responsible" for words transported in its envelopes? Would MCI hold still to "legislative measures" for what is carried on its optic fibers? Is Steven Spielberg liable for spreading anti-German hate with films like Schindler's List?

If not, then why would Internet providers be "legally responsible" when they might merely wish to serve their customers and their consumers and responders on the Internet without having to censor their content?

3. "Encourage organizations that combat hate propaganda on-line. This is the "Ken McVay clause," recognizing the efforts of the B.C. resident who maintains the Internet's largest repository of Holocaust documentation to refute Holocaust deniers."

The "Ken McVey clause," means that "watch groups," financially subsidized and working at the behest of special interests who have not-so-hidden agendas, would be groomed, stroked and egged on into vicious and libelous actions to vilify and lord it over others who hold a different point of view.

More crudely put, it means the electronic mob can be "encouraged" - read, mobilized! - to do the work for special interest groups by following the "PC party line" and shrieking its inflammatory and insulting slogans about "hate mongering" across the Internet. And, not so incidentally, people supporting them financially would get a tax deduction.

One preview of what this might mean, translated into cyberspace, can be already sampled in alt.revisionism, a news group set up initially with every good intention as a 'debating platform" which has become dysfunctional under the onslought of a handful of Internet terrorists who made it into a pit bull-dominated arena of intolerance.

By whom? For what? This is "democracy in action"?

One thoroughly disgusted reader has aptly described such groups as ". . . a foul ghetty run by slum lords at the behest of the mind control mafia." Why keep such news groups going in the name of "democracy" yet threaten to shut down the Zundelsite where reasoned argument can have a place to be judged on its merits for readers to embrace or to discard as they may freely choose?

4. "Develop a "model code of ethics and practices reflecting community standards" - i.e., create a new "netiquette," probably out of the old one."

Do the telephone companies or the various post offices need a "code of ethics and practices" reflecting "community standards" before a Canadian citizen can write a letter to let his views be known or deal with friend or foe by picking up the phone?

More to the point, who will set those "community standards"?

In Canada, unfortunately, self-righteous Human Rights Commissions have elbowed into this area of communications already, and people have gone to jail for up to a year for hotline messages.

5. "Develop "guidelines for complaint handling and a resolution mechanism." A speech watchdog and central authority - items the Internet was premised to exist without."

"Guidelines for complaint handling?" A "resolution mechanism?" A "speech watch dog" and a "central authority"?

Consult your friendly KGB. Read Orwell's classic, "1984."

6. "Create a technical committee to

a) find a way for users to restrict material they personally can receive,

b) find a way to identify technical solutions which will ensure that all material distributed via the Internet from Canadian sources can be attributed to a verifiable person and site. This could include both the requirement to authenticate individuals for whom system access codes are established and the maintenance of logs required to trace information distributed via anonymous postings and redistribution services.

Availability of this information must be subject to the expanded privacy guidelines previously recommended."

This is THE recommendation most chilling. We're talking electronic thumb screws here - and the targets, in good time, are everyone's thumbs.

No doubt the technological means alrady exist. To stifle debate and the free flow of ideas across frontiers can be accomplished most effectively by exactly such watchdogs-like domestic intelligence agencies whose function would be tracing, storing and, if needed by your friendly government, retrieving who says what to whom.

In olden, gentler days, compared to what now lies ahead if censorship succeeds, this was called snooping and done by steaming open letters. We have since come some distances.

Here the insidious suggestion is that key server businesses be required to "keep logs" on their customers' activities for the government. I ask my readers please to draw their own conclusions about this kind of "devolution" of democracy - no pun intended here!

7. "Pursue international agreement to deal with problems controlling harmful/illegal material."

You heard it on the Zundelsite. Welcome to yet another indication of the emerging New World Order!