It's time we added the first 21st Century amendment to the Constitution -- an amendment that parallels the First Amendment but explicitly prohibits the government from ever shutting down the Internet. Freedom of the Internet in today's world is just as important as freedom of the press, religion or speech.
As revolutions spread around the world questioning dictator after dictator, it is clear that the Internet has been the same kind of catalyst that a free press has been in past democratic revolutions -- it has given people an easy way to share their experiences, a tool for organizing, and served to publish atrocities in cases where the press was blocked.
Dictators and governments around the world are busy studying this phenomenon, trying to understand how they can control it. Governments refuse to give Blackberry contracts unless they have the ability to snoop on its traffic. Even in the U.S. the Internet has to be available for government monitoring and supervision -- justified quite fairly on the basis of the need to catch criminals and terrorists who use the Internet as they used the phone system in the past.
And the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has given a series of speeches on Internet freedom. She has said clearly that other countries should refrain from cutting off access to the Internet and social networks when besieged by protesters, noting that "those who clamp down on Internet freedom may be able to hold back the full expression of their people's yearnings for a while, but not forever."
But what if we were facing some significant discontent in the U.S. today or in the future? Imagine if anti-Vietnam protesters had the internet as a tool then and their marches had doubled and tripled in size -- would the U.S. have considered curbs on the internet? Imagine if during 9/11 the government became convinced of a wider operation and conspiracy in play. Would President Bush have considered shutting down the Internet? Would those presidents have pushed such a button if they had it? And what would have prevented them from doing it -- a constitutional amendment from 1789?
Right now all of our broadcast media are supposed to react to encoded government messages to play them to the exclusion of anything else in the event of an emergency. This is the successor to the Emergency Broadcast System I grew up with, listening to the endless sound of "just a test." It has been a given that there is nothing in the Constitution that would prevent the U.S. government from commandeering all communications in whatever they deemed an emergency. That emergency could be a threat from the outside or within.
So the question is whether we are prepared, as we tell others to keep their hands off the Internet, to live our values with an ironclad constitutional amendment committing to do the same. I'm not talking about an amendment that would weigh into the complex economic questions of net neutrality and tiers of Internet speed. Those are commercial issues that will surely be settled appropriately over time.
I mean the kind of amendment that would make it illegal for a state legislature, Congress, the president or the military to shut down or otherwise restrict access to the Internet for political or so-called national security reasons. You can see it developing in the future -- fear of attack -- shut it down. Out of control demonstrations, shut it down. You see it in country after country now, and always we think it could never happen here. And yet we did inter the Japanese, the CIA has had a string of abuses over the years, and Nixon did use the FBI and other government agencies for his own benefit -- and these things happened in the last 40 years.
In such national security questions, there are always difficult cases like the "ticking time bomb" scenario where it seems to make perfect sense to use extreme measures. And there could always be a cyber-attack that requires some action to prevent the spread of a virus that could destroy millions of computers or take over our power grid.
But despite these hard cases, it is time for the U.S. to take the lead with a model constitutional amendment on preserving and defending internet freedom. The First Amendment has withstood the test of time, but it does not explicitly cover social networking or the Internet any more than it covers shut downs of the phone system or TV broadcasting. And especially as agencies like the FBI and NSA are pushing to further their Internet oversight through stricter data retention laws and a more-efficient online wiretap system, it makes no sense to leave these things to chance.
Such amendments are rarely about today and their impact here and now -- they are about an unexpected situation and an unexpected president bending the law to the maximum to preserve their own power. Anything as powerful as the Internet is something that governments irresistibly will try to control over time -- they are at the heart of our communications here and abroad. We have urged others to say hands off -- how about committing the US to the same position for the next 200 years in the only ironclad way we have -- a 21st Century Constitutional Amendment on Freedom of the Internet.
Robert Koehler: You Can't Kill an Idea
Personally I think an amendment like that might have a better chance in Libya after the change in management is complete.
Yaeh, I know.. no internet in the constitution. And that is exactly the point. The constitution is amended to GIVE federal power, not to LIMIT federal power.
But go on with your living document bologna, and keep letting more and more power slip to the Federal government by a simple majority. I have a bit of an anarchist streak in me and I will LAUGH MY BUTT off if they do take it, and use it to squash debate.... It's not like the debate is even on the right footing, and it's not like the majority of voters can even comprehend it.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/10-ways-to-stop-corporate-dominance-of-politics
Silly response---they will never shut down the internet and "put it back in the box"....it's here to stay....and you better believe that every government in the world that is acting in underhanded and stealthy ways is scared of it and it's power to connect and divulge important information quickly...
I have read that Obama is already preparing an internet "kill switch".... this is one of the most important issues mr. Penn could EVER address and I thank him for his thoughtful blog and I hope progress is being made on this front for all the reasons he has outlined...
part of ending the corruption is exposing it to the biggest disenfectant ---- the light of day ---governments including our own, have carried out much work in secretive ways that has worked against we the people... our tax dollars, our government ----their should be no secrets from us and they should not usurp our rights, our freedoms subversively....
It is bad enough that Congress voted to pass an extension of "The PATRIOT ACT", we need to insist Congress defeat this law once and for all....it's clearly against our rights...
Americans need to take this issue seriously, our freedoms and rights were greatly curtailed under Bush using 9/11 as a springboard towards ending our freedoms...fearmongering served Bush/Cheney very well and now Obama is full speed ahead on the same issues....this is not good for our liberty and freedom, and once they have used Homeland Security (think Germany 1939), to get us used to being policed and spyed on and controlled --- Americans will regret that they destroyed the freedoms that were hard won and then cleverly, carefully, guietly undermined by the govt to take MORE and MORE control...
best book on the subject : The End Of America by Naomi Wolf ----a must read for every American interested in preserving our freedoms as our govt eats away at all of our rights...
The free and open internet is a supreme test for protecting our freedoms from govt intervention and control---shame on Obama for wanting to have a kill switch ----- it's nothing more than tyranny all over again...
And like, the guy who suggested it is Mark Penn, whose business is all about getting paid to get candidates elected and legislation passed. Like, he's trying to get you all hot and bothered so he can make more money and get even richer and fatter than he already is at your expense.
"The First Amendment has withstood the test of time, but it does not explicitly cover social networking or the Internet any more than it covers shut downs of the phone system or TV broadcasting."
Doesn't the first amendment cover the internet already? And, certainly, even if we had an amendment that covered the internet, wouldn't the "reasonable limit" doctrine still apply as it does already to free speech in general ("free speech does not extend to shouting 'fire!' in a crowded theatre")?
Mr. Penn also invokes 9/11 and George Bush as an example of how the internet could have been shut down. I suggest that he and all reading this should be more concerned with someone like Robert Kennedy Jr. who on the very pages of this website from a few days ago is applauding Canadian Government regulators for rejecting a proposal that would bring "Fox-style News" to Canada. Kennedy actually believes this to be a GOOD thing. I see it as being in direct conflict philosophically to precisely the kind of thing Mr. Penn is warning us about.
See: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/fox-news-will-not-be-moving-into-canada-after-all_b_829473.html
I'm not letting CNN or MSNBC or CBS or CBC or CTV or any other network north or south of the border off the hook on this, either. They all do similar things. But FOX is the unequivocal leader, and any news network that proudly -- Proudly! -- claims to be modeled after FOX's style isn't good.
Above and beyond all this, nothing stopped Sun TV News from becoming a channel. As far as I know they *are* becoming a channel. They just can't lie or distort the news. The abolishment of a law preventing news organizations from lying was the rejected proposal, and I'm not sure anyone who knows that can really argue that its rejection was a bad thing.
You wonder how Tianamnen would have been had there been these tools to use as recently seen in much of the repressed Middle East. Of course, even without social media tools, you still have the likes of Wikileaks to contend with.
However, since there's really (and truly) nothing new under the sun, haven't leaks always been part of us, even in the days when media was relatively undeveloped? Media houses still used to get wind of information, e.g. Deep Throat, the Washington Post and Watergate.
Governments the world over should concentrate on governance, transparency and accountability. Shutting down the media and related tools doesn't make anyone safe. Zip drives alone can cause untold damage to security of information.
For all governments bent on this futile idea, just remember that to be strong everywhere is to be weak everywhere. Only the Deity has capacity for omnipresence and omniscience. No human regime will ever achieve this. It's a chasing after the wind.
The constitution is a viable document and a constant of this great country, it needs only minor adaptations through time. The ideal of adjusting an amendment and not writting a new amendment preserves the continuality of the first amendment and since the new add on would simply fall under freedom of press, its still the 5 freedoms, not 6.
There is a time and place for progressive regulation. The internet clearly is not one of them :)