Live Blog: Tangled Web Internet Filtering Forum – Brisbane, March 24

People seem to have such a hard time getting it. When the government is permitted to be the censor of anything at the behest and encouragement of group A, it will only be a matter of time until someone of a different political/cultural persuasion takes office and uses those same censorship powers to repress group A.

This is why it is absolutely vital for those of both the left and the right to come together at least on this issue, in the realisation that when any foundational right or freedom is diminished for one group of citizens, it diminishes that right or freedom for all of us and we will all mourn that loss sooner or later. If I’m allowed by the present governmental powers to pick your pocket to take your property, then some day another set of rulers will allow you to pick my pocket and take my property. Even more important is the right of free speech, which is perhaps the most critical freedom in any society bearing the label free, because it is so absolutely important to the free-flowing communication of ideas, information, petitions, and complaints that keep the society free. If government puts constraints on free speech for any reason, ultimately those constraints and their reasons will change as times, governments, and crises change. And the reasons used to block free speech will multiply and distort themselves over time until nobody has free speech about anything… whereupon government will dominate us unchecked which is despotism.

The appropriate methods of protecting oneself and one’s family from disturbing exercises of free speech are to block it out at the thresholds of our spheres of legitimate personal control our households, our families, and so on. It can not, should not, must not be made the responsibility of government to emplace limitations on the free exercise of speech. Those limits will ultimately be used against the citizenry in ways none of us on the right or left can imagine or accept… but then it may be too late. The testimony of history is unrelenting about this danger.

The political leaders in any free land where this kind of control is proposed for any reason should be powerfully cautioned at once by their citizens to not proceed, should be contested in court if they do proceed, and (if they do proceed) should be voted out of office at the very earliest opportunity with no exceptions to be replaced by leaders who do understand freedom and who will reverse the errors of their predecessors. Leaders of the left or right must be unmistakably made to understand that such tampering with basic rights for any reason will simply not be tolerated by the citizenry. If we will not do that to protect our freedom, we do not deserve that freedom and we will lose it.