At 10:40 AM -0600 3/21/01, Harmon Seaver wrote:
Ray Dillinger wrote:
On Wed, 21 Mar 2001, Matthew Gaylor wrote:
Both the American Civil Liberties Union and The American Library Association filed suit 3-20-2001 in Federal court to stop the Children's Internet Protection Act (CHIPA). This is the act that forces libraries and schools to use filtering software (censorware).
Oddly enough, the san francisco public libraries are reading it as an act that prevents them from getting federal funds for internet access instead.
Well, what it does is stops any fed funding for k12/libraries if they don't comply. And since both are heavily, almost totally dependant on e-rates it's a serious threat.
No surprise to most members of this list that this government trend toward withholding money it has taken in other ways is a serious threat to freedom. The imposition of speed limits by Washington was an obvious example of this: highway taxes were collected, coercively of course, and then not given to states which failed to toe the Washington line. "We are not restricting speech, as that would violate the First. We are simply withholding highway funds to any state which does not follow our speech guidelines." "We are not banning guns. The American Medical Association has classified firearms as a disease agent, so we are not providing Medicare to any person who willingly exposes himself to this disease agent. Remove all guns from your house and your Medicare payments will be restarted." When the State has the power to take monies and then decide how and when to dole them back out, it is using its coercive powers to regulate behavior just as surely as if it had banned behaviors outright. The -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns