The 19 Senators Who Voted To Censor The Internet

[Guest guest]

The 19 Senators Who Voted To Censor The Internet

from the free-speech-isn't-free

deptThis is hardly a surprise but, this morning (as

previously

announced), the lame duck Senate Judiciary Committee

unanimously voted to move forward with censoring the internet via the

COICA bill -- despite a bunch of law professors explaining to them how

this law is a clear

violation of the First Amendment. What's really amazing is that many

of the same Senators have been speaking out against internet

censorship in other countries, yet they happily vote to approve it here

because it's seen as a way to make many of their largest campaign

contributors happy. There's very little chance that the bill will

actually get passed by the end of the term but, in the meantime, we

figured it might be useful to highlight the 19 Senators who voted to

censor the internet this morning:

J. Leahy -- Vermont Herb Kohl -- Wisconsin Jeff Sessions -- Alabama Dianne Feinstein -- California Orrin G. Hatch -- Utah Russ Feingold -- Wisconsin Chuck Grassley -- Iowa Arlen Specter -- Pennsylvania Jon Kyl -- Arizona Chuck Schumer -- New York Lindsey Graham -- South Carolina Dick Durbin -- Illinois Cornyn -- Texas L. Cardin -- land Tom Coburn -- Oklahoma Sheldon Whitehouse -- Rhode Island Amy Klobuchar -- Minnesota Al en -- Minnesota Coons -- Delaware This should be a list of shame. You would think that our own elected

officials would understand the First Amendment but, apparently, they have

no problem turning the US into one of the small list of authoritarian

countries that censors internet content it does not like (in this case,

content some of its largest campaign contributors do not like). We

already have laws in place to deal with infringing content, so don't buy

the excuse that this law is about stopping infringement. This law takes

down entire websites based on the government's say-so. First Amendment

protections make clear that if you are going to stop any specific speech,

it has to be extremely specific speech. This law has no such

restrictions. It's really quite unfortunate that these 19 US Senators are

the first American politicians to publicly vote in favor of censoring

speech in America.

Update: Some people in the comments are claiming this is not about

censorship, so I've put up a new post explaining in detail why this bill

is all about censorship.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/10291211924/the-19-senators-who-voted-to-censor-the-internet.shtml#comments

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