Civil Censorship is one of the most dangerous new form of censorship, because there is no constitutional protection from it. The First Amendment of the Constitution states
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom or speech, or of the press ; or the right of the people to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.The key there is Congress cannot do it ( and by extension of section 1 of the 14th Amendment, state and local governments). Nowhere does it say your employer, ISP, parents, etc, cannot regulate what you say or hear. So a Christian ISP could prohibit you from saying anything they disagree with, including such things as gay rights, or the theory of evolution. Not only that, but as an ISP, they could prevent you from accessing material they find objectionable (which would be most of the Internet).
There are three recent examples of this kind of censorship. They all use different tactics. The first tactic is to threaten to, or file a lawsuit claiming some kind of damage from the speech (usually in the Intellectual property realm). The second is to arbitrary remove or restrict access to information. This option is popular with makers of blocking software and some ISP's, (like AOL).
Some Recent examples:
In September of 1996, the SPA sent an email to the administrators of Intergate.net, a Marrettia based ISP. The letter stated that a user's webpage (The Strange World of Tapu) contained copyright infringing material, and to remove the site or face legal consequences. The catch was that the Tapu page only contained links to other sites, and it was those sites that contained the infringing material. Jeffrey McGough of Intergate removed the pages, because he had no resources to fight the SPA's well funded lawyers. 22 other ISPs received similar letters from the SPA. Some of those letters didn't bother to site specific examples, they just said:
We have received information that unauthorized copies of our members' software are being reproduced and distributed on your server(s) in violation of Federal copyright law.
Now if you are a large ISP with 200k users, how can you remove the site? Furthermore the letter "forced" you to sign on the the SPA's piracy policy, which among other things requires you to monitor the content of your site. This provision could very easily destroy the Common Carriage principle that protects ISP's from legal liability for criminal use of their service.
Prompted by the success with the first 23 smaller ISP's the SPA then filed suit on three ISPs, Geocities, Tripod and Community Connexion.
"The terms of the 'Code of Conduct' are completely unacceptable, It basically gives the SPA the right to go on an ongoing fishing expedition through our customer's files, and requires us to do the same as their agent on a regular basis. The Code would classify us as 'publishers', and we would become responsible for everything our customers do. We've built this business on a solid foundation of respect for our customer's privacy. Monitoring their activities without grounds for suspicion is completely inconsistent with maintaining their privacy."
--Sameer Parekh Community ConneXion
The SPA has settled the suit with Tripod & Geocities. Community ConneXion refused to negotiate, and the SPA dropped the suit.
Interesting thing about the SPA's filing of the suit: The plaintiffs are Adobe Systems, Inc., Claris Corporation, and Traveling Software, Inc. When EFGA contacted Adobe about the suits, they were quick to deny that they filed any such lawsuit. They claimed it was not Adobe, but attorneys that filed the lawsuit, and we should talk to the attorneys and their representatives, not Adobe. However the lawsuit (which I do not have an online copy of) clearly states "Plaintiffs, ADOBE SYSTEMS, INCORPORATED, CLARIS CORPORATION, and TRAVELLING SOFTWARE, INC., by their attorneys, complain against Defendants......".
Solid Oak has added Peacefire to its list of blocked sites and has asked Peacefire's Internet provider, Media3, to remove Peacefire from its server. Milburn [Solid Oak's President] has also said he will block out all content Media3 hosts if it does not remove Haselton's site.The Internet community is fighting this, by mirroring the peacefire site, all over. While SolidOak has said they will block the page wherever it shows up, it is hoped that parents will be able to learn the truth about the product they have purchased.