Proposed US Internet bill is full of holes

IN THE NEXT FEW months a significant bill will be under discussion in the US Senate and House of Representatives. The proposal is that US government authorises $50 million in 2003 and 2004 for the "funding for a new Office of Global Internet Freedom to counter Internet jamming and blocking by repressive regimes". (The full proposal can be found in PDF format at this address)

The document which detailed the proposed GIFA (Global Internet Freedom Act) bill lists those repressive regimes as "Burma, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, the People's Republic of China, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Vietnam, among others" and goes on to claim that "All people have the right to communicate freely with others, and to have unrestricted access to news and information, on the Internet."

One supporter of this bill even stated, somewhat grandiosely "America cannot afford to allow repressive regimes to black out information and silence free expression of their citizens by jamming the Internet."

The bill also states "Nothing in this Act shall be interpreted to authorize any action by the United States to interfere with foreign national censorship for the purpose of protecting minors from harm, preserving public morality, or assisting with legitimate law enforcement aims." and this is a point we will return to shortly.

This all might sound fine on the surface but what are the arguments against such a proposal?

Firstly there are the technological issues that might render these efforts useless. Most approaches at bypassing any form of web censorship use either variable IP addresses or the transfer of data via some innocuous gateway machine. Depending which report (or marketing material?) one reads, the same methods might be highly successful or attempts to counter them may have been successful.

Some commentators hold the view that it will ultimately be futile to attempt to bypass the censorship because countries could simply introduce their own web-browsers with built-in filtering (and perhaps logging) or that the countries' gateways to the Internet world at large could themselves become filters for incoming material as indeed the Chinese are believed to have introduced.

Secondly the bill assumes that censorship is a bad thing and it fails to accept that countries and cultures will vary in their attitudes and tolerance to pornography, racism, religion, violence, sexism and many other matters. Note that we are expected to believe that the techniques to bypass Internet censorship will somehow be able to distinguish these matters from genuine news and information - but at the very least we need to ask who would decide which items should not be blocked and which should be.

The USA already has censorship policies in place that restrict access to violent, pornographic, racist or sexist material in printed material, in movies and music. Shakespeare has been banned from some schools, as has Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and even The Diary of Anne Frank.

In the bigger picture the US has a record of imposing severe censorship of certain political beliefs and has tried to ban the sale of certain products.

For some time now the government has also insisted that filtering tools be used on Internet access in public libraries and for schools. This decision is being challenged at the present time but as one sensible statement has pointed out, no library or school is compelled to carry printed matter that is restricted to adults and yet this is equivalent to what the removal of such filters would bring.

It is somewhat inconsistent of the USA to impose restrictions on some forms of media but not to impose restrictions on the Internet. Other countries have tried to be consistent in their censorship - and by necessity adopting a "lowest acceptable level" for the Internet -- but now, with the GIFA proposal, the US government may take it upon themselves to undermine these efforts.

Thirdly the US government is being remarkably hypocritical because it is trying hard to increase the amount of surveillance and logging of Internet activity in order to protect its own domestic interests but the proposed GIFA bill is intent on removing the capability of other countries to perform similar functions to protect their domestic interests.

Perhaps it can be argued that the approach in the USA permits access to sites even if it does log this access but if domestic security is the issue, then this method is like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted whereas the methods of other countries are like ensuring that the door is always shut and that the horse can never take flight.

Fourthly, those proposing the bills claim "All people have the right to communicate freely with others, and to have unrestricted access to news and information, on the Internet." This wonderful assertion is sheer sophistry because there is simply no such right for all people in all countries. It does not even apply in the USA where one cannot falsely shout "Fire" in a crowded public place - it might be free communication but it is illegal and punishable. In a similar fashion there is no right to access to news or other information on the Internet, just as there is no right to any Internet access whatsoever.

Fifthly, and most importantly, one interpretation is that the GIFA bill will defy the basic principles of international law and try to impose US law in other countries.

US companies and organisations have several times attempted to punish people in other countries for activities which may not be illegal in those other countries. Fortunately such attempts have been rebuffed.

The targets of the GIFA bill are all sovereign countries and as such they set their own laws. This policy of mutual respect is defined by august bodies such as the United Nations and is not something to be dismissed lightly. Without this policy we would see only chaos as any country would theoretically be free to provide the citizens of another country the means to circumvent the laws of that other country.

If the US government adopts the GIFA proposal we would have the situation that one government would be actively undermining the legal authority of the government of another country. This would be tantamount to a declaration of war in that despite international agreements, the US would be refusing to accept that other governments have legal jurisdiction and authority over their own people.

The other interpretation of the GIFA bill is that it will do no such thing because by its own words it has no authority to take any such action.

To repeat an important statement from the introduction to this article, the bill states “Nothing in this Act shall be interpreted to authorize any action by the United States to interfere with foreign national censorship for the purpose of protecting minors from harm, preserving public morality, or assisting with legitimate law enforcement aims.” The international community would argue that "the protection of minors from harm" and "preserving public morality" is something that each country handles in its own way. Even more importantly it would be argued that any censorship of the Internet that is done by any country is done with "legitimate law enforcement aims". It is just that the applicable laws are those of the target countries and not those of the USA.

Apart from undermining the authority of other countries this bill seems to be yet another attempt by the USA to exert their jurisdiction right across the Internet, regardless of the sovereignty of other countries and the norms of other cultures.

If this GIFA proposal is approved by the US government then it could well mean the end of the Internet as we know it. It would not be at all surprising if various countries or even groups of countries created "private" Internets of their own, as has been proposed by other -- predominantly European -- commentators. It could be a serious impediment to international trade and relations but it might be the only way for countries to exert control over the Internet in the manner that they see fit and not have their authority undermined by another country. µ