The new Democratic line

Today the Democratic National Committee had some shills out in Harvard Square, and I went up to one of them to talk to him. (Uncharacteristic of me, I know.) I asked him, in a reasonable tone, why I should support a candidate who favors shielding companies that conspired with the government to break laws from legal liability. He asked if I had had my rights violated; I told him the government violates my rights in numerous ways. Specifically with regard to the actions the Bush administration has undertaken, though, I said there's been so much secrecy that people can't know what has been done to them or why. I mentioned that I have cut back on my flying because of what people have to experience routinely, and that a friend who sharply criticized a member of Congress to his face, and has been hassled in airports ever since. His response was that people aren't being arrested for their political views. He obviously wasn't comfortable about that position; it may have been the line he was told to take.

This response was remarkably similar to one reported on Universal Hub a little over a week ago. A DNC shill in Central Square asked Jay Levitt, "Does it really affect you personally?" The difference is that that person didn't even know about the immunity issue. But both responded the same way: We need national security. You don't have to worry personally about it.

This looks like the new line from the Democrats. Their outrage at abuse of Presidential power has vanished now that their candidate is favored in the polls. Whether this comes from explicit coaching or from tacit agreement, I don't know. I believe that the anger they've expressed at Bush in the past is real, but it isn't principled anger. It's the anger a Red Sox fan feels when the umpire makes a call that favors the Yankees.

When Clinton was in the White House, a favorite epithet of the left against conservatives and libertarians was "anti-government." We haven't heard that much during the Bush years, as the Democrats found religion in civil liberties. But if Obama wins, there's little doubt they'll drag it out again.

Iranian bill proposes murdering bloggers

The Citizen Media Law Project reports that the Iranian Parliament has approved a bill that would provide the death penalty for "establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy." Maiming is also a permitted punishment. The Council of Guardians still has to approve the bill before it becomes law. There are already laws which let the government kill people for saying things the ayatollahs don't like, but this bill would significantly broaden their reach into online speech.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran insists that Iranians are "the freest people in the world." If you don't agree with him, you may end up in jail, short a hand, or dead.

Cuomo's campaign of lies

Andrew Cuomo, the attorney general of New York State, has decided that the Big Lie is the path to success. In his new website, he smears Usenet, referring to it as "a major source of online child pornography known as Newsgroups, an online service not associated with websites." According to a press release issued this week, "Cuomo last month secured agreements with Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint that for the first time completely block access to all child porn Newsgroups."

Note that he said "completely block access," not "stop carrying." Blocking newsgroups across the board is easy; blocking specific ones requires analyzing packets and is both a technical headache and an invasion of users' privacy. As far as I know, no one is doing group-specific blocking. If Cuomo's claim is true, it means that these companies have agreed to block access to Port 119, which is used for NNTP. There are conflicting claims on various websites, but I haven't found any reliable reports of port blocking. Declan McCullagh confirms that Cuomo's claim is a lie.

What he has done is to get some major ISP's to drop all newsgroups, or all except the major eight hierarchies. This is a win for Google, whose badly-run Google Groups will pick up most of the users left in the lurch. It's also a win for independent newsgroup servers, many of which charge for access -- at least until Cuomo sets his sights on them. It's no great loss for the major ISP's, which for many years have considered Usenet an inconvenience rather than a revenue service; they like having an excuse to drop it. (It's also quite possible that, in the case of service providers that are also telecommunication companies, they agreed not to fight anything labelled an anti-porn measure in exchange for the blanket immunity from snooping lawsuits that Congress just granted them.) The immediate losers are the shrinking but still large number of users who find Usenet one of the best formats for carrying on long-term discussions.

But all of us are long-term losers. Cuomo's smear and censorship campaign has already spread to California -- and observe in that article that headline writers are already echoing referring to Usenet as "child porn." This outcome will make every future attack on free online speech that much harder to fight against.

On his website, Cuomo has provided a form letter that ignorant people can send to their ISP demanding that it subscribe to "the principles stated by Attorney General Cuomo," which means to stop carrying newsgroups. If you value your liberty, I suggest that you send a letter urging resistance to Cuomo's campaign of lies. Here's the one I sent to my provider:

Politicians in New York State and California have started a war against Usenet, smearing it as "a major source of online child pornography known as Newsgroups," strong-arming ISPs to make them drop their news servers, and claiming apparently fabricated successes at making service providers block the NNTP port.
 
I know from many years' experience that you'll fight any attempt to make you drop your news server. I also know that it will be easier for you to fight if you're backed by the users. So, for the record, I read newsgroups almost every day, and I consider them an important part of my connections with the world. I am not, as Andrew Cuomo claims, engaging in "child pornography" by doing this. I do not recognize the right of any government to intimidate service providers into dropping newsgroups.
 
You may quote the above statement in any way that helps to oppose Usenet censorship, identifying me by name.