Gun Activists Have A Stake Against Filtering Software[Censorware]

[Tim May]

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 at 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