http://www.netizen.com/netizen/96/31/index0a.html

HotWired
The Netizen

29 July 1996

The Great White North
by Declan McCullagh
Washington, DC

   
   
   A Holocaust revisionist Web site in Canada has sparked a raging
   political firestorm that recently spread to the British Columbia
   attorney general ministry, which has decreed that the Net should be
   regulated.
   
   The heat began rising for Marc Lemire, a 20-year-old Toronto resident,
   when Pathway Communications, an Internet service provider,
   unceremoniously booted his "Freedom Site" on 28 June. "It's evolving
   into a big censorship debate in British Columbia. Censorship is coming
   to a head in Canada," Lemire said.
   
   After losing his Pathway account, Lemire shifted operations 2,500
   miles west to FTCnet, a small ISP in rural British Columbia. FTCnet
   quickly came under siege from irate community activists, the publisher
   of the local Oliver Chronicle newspaper, and the Los Angeles-based
   Simon Wiesenthal Center, which fired off an angry note to the owner
   of the company, Bernard Klatt.
   
   The Wiesenthal letter said: "Your Internet service has become the site
   for a number of groups that specialize in racial and religious hate
   material.... You are not obligated to carry subscribers who involved
   the provider in matters such as race hatred...."
   
   Klatt refused to bow to pressure and said he would not censor his
   users. "Freedoms are always attacked at the fringes since they're
   hardest to defend. If we're going to keep constricting the circle of
   free speech you're going to have to be middle of the road or be
   unacceptable," Klatt said.
   
   Next, the provincial authorities stepped in with a plan to seize
   control of British Columbia cyberspace, further boosting the
   temperature of this flamefest. Attorney General Ujjal Dosanjh promised
   to "look into it to see if there was some way to regulate [the Net] or
   whether it was feasible," ministry spokesman Brent Thompson says.
   
   "[Dosanjh] has asked and our various officials are responding to his
   request. At this stage I don't know anything.... Another route would
   be through the federal criminal code. The police could investigate
   under criminal provisions of the federal criminal code," Thompson
   said.
   
   When asked if Canadians enjoy the right to free speech, Thompson
   refused to answer: "That's beyond my expertise as a humble civil
   servant. I couldn't speculate on that."
   
   This isn't the first time Canadian authorities have moved to regulate
   the Net. As early as December 1994, a Canadian Human Rights Commission
   staffer posted to Usenet asking "what measures could be considered to
   control the use of the Net."
   
   It's predictable, said David Jones, president of Electronic Frontier
   Canada. "Underlying all these efforts is a significant level of
   ignorance. There's no discussion of specifics. Nobody has identified a
   Web page that's illegal. There's just guilt by association. That's
   just enough to inflame people."
   
   Is Lemire's Web site illegal? "No. Absolutely, positively not. There
   are pictures of Nazis. So what? There are lists of white supremacist
   or Holocaust-denial groups. So what? Lists of PO box numbers aren't
   illegal in this country," Jones said.
   
   Jones has a point. For all this Net-scaremongering and political
   cyberposturing, the "Freedom Site" would be legal if printed out and
   distributed on a Toronto street corner. So why the fuss?
   
   According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which regularly slams the
   Net as a vehicle for hate speech, it's not "an issue of free speech,"
   but "a regulation of hate propaganda."
   
   Yet that ignores the underlying problem - which is not the speech
   itself, but the divisive and hurtful beliefs of the speakers. By
   muzzling the Holocaust revisionists and driving them and their
   neo-Nazi allies underground, the Wiesenthalers would make it harder to
   track and expose them.
   
   Far better to keep the white supremacists and their publications
   publicly available for criticism and critique - shining a bright light
   on them as the Nizkor Project does - than to permit the hate to fester
   in darkness.
   
   Perhaps the Holocaust may suffer momentarily from having its legacy
   debased online, but by exposing the activities of white supremacists
   and of human-rights abusers around the globe, the Net can help make
   sure that it never, ever happens again.
   
###