March 4, 2005

FEC and Blogs, Cont.

Yesterday's blogswarm on threats posed to blogging by FEC regulations was a much-needed reminder of the need to protect our cherished right to free speech. The hero of this is surely FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith, whose interview with CNET set in motion the protests by bloggers from both the left and right. It was the seriousness of his warning -- his willingness to say, in effect, that as bizarre as it seems, there's a real possibility that things could go wrong here -- was the catalyst for yesterday's posts across the web. If you haven't read the interview, I urge you to do so before sorting through the reams of commentary on it. It's sobering. We all owe Smith our gratitude for bringing this looming problem to our attention now, while we can act to prevent any harm to our rights.

This morning, World Net Daily runs an article on the uproar, with your humble blogger quoted near the bottom. Michelle Malkin's fine post from yesterday, with additional updates, runs this morning at FrontPage Magazine. And Ed Morrissey offers a sample letter that you can send to your own Senators -- but you'll have to go to their web sites to do it. Emails sent from your own account bounce back, Ed reports.

On the topic of blogging, Eugene Volokh penned an opinion piece for yesterday's New Orleans Times-Picayune. He lists some of the strengths that blogging can bring to information dissemination:

Of course, bloggers often write outside their professional areas; and they make mistakes, like reporters do. But while bloggers don't have editors who can catch mistakes, other checks and balances help the truth come out.

First, blogs usually link to the sources they discuss. A blogger who says some newspaper article erred will generally link to the article, and to the data that supposedly proves the article wrong. Blog readers can then see the facts for themselves. Newspaper readers can't do that.

Second, most bloggers write because they want to be influential and respected. The best way to lose influence and respect is to consistently make mistakes and to refuse to correct them. Other bloggers will mock you, and readers will stop coming. So bloggers have an incentive to get things right, and what they get wrong, they can quickly fix.

Third, because bloggers are relative unknowns, their influence flows only from their writings' credibility and persuasiveness. No bloggers can get a journalist fired simply by making allegations; why would anyone listen to such charges? But if the blogger provides evidence, explains why readers should believe the evidence and persuades readers who are themselves journalists to write more about this, then the charges might stick.

I think that's what we're seeing now in reaction to the federal government's threats to the blogosphere.

Finally, LGF has a list of bloggers who've been arrested recently by dictatorial governments fearful of the spread of accurate information. To that list, see this article in this morning's New York Times, which details China's efforts to censor the Net lest the truth leak out to its restless and growing middle classes.

"If you say something the Web administrator doesn't like, they'll simply block your account," said Bill Xia, a United States-based expert in Chinese Internet censorship, "and if you keep at it, you'll gradually face more and more difficulties and may land in real trouble."

According to Amnesty International, arrests for the dissemination of information or beliefs via the Internet have been increasing rapidly in China, snaring students, political dissidents and practitioners of the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong, but also many writers, lawyers, teachers and ordinary workers.

Already the most sophisticated in the world, China's Internet controls are stout even in the absence of crucial political events. In the last year or so, experts say the country has gone from so-called dumb Internet controls, which involve techniques like the outright blocking of foreign sites containing delicate or critical information and the monitoring of specific e-mail addresses to far more sophisticated measures.

Newer technologies allow the authorities to search e-mail messages in real time, trawling through the body of a message for sensitive material and instantaneously blocking delivery or pinpointing the offender. Other technologies sometimes redirect Internet searches from companies like Google to copycat sites operated by the government, serving up sanitized search results.

Update: Deacon at Power Line has some thoughts on this matter.

— Winfield Myers

| Mar. 4, 2005 | 7:31 AM