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Thursday, March 03, 2005Here's a bit from the CNET interview with FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith on efforts to apply McCain-Feingold to net commentary, including e-mail lists.Worries Smith: It's going to be a battle, and if nobody in Congress is willing to stand up and say, "Keep your hands off of this, and we'll change the statute to make it clear," then I think grassroots Internet activity is in danger. The impact would affect e-mail lists, especially if there's any sense that they're done in coordination with the campaign. If I forward something from the campaign to my personal list of several hundred people, which is a great grassroots activity, that's what we're talking about having to look at.Hmm. I'm less worried for bloggers than I am for the pols. Iraqis, Iranis and Chinese risk their lives in posting their opinions on weblogs. American bloggers are in much better shape. We're in a freer society, one were the ridiculousness of this is pretty apparent. The only way these threats will work is if we, the bloggers, stop commenting. If the courts ever actually make stick the idea that blogs aren't opinion journals, we should all immediately put links to the major parties on our weblogs, run google searches for sites with the links and forward the searches - all of us - to the FEC as potential complaints. Swamp 'em. If they're going after ten or fifteen sites, they can play hardball, perhaps, but if the thousands of political and quasi-political weblogs all show up in violation, what are they going to do? And do you want to be the politician who's defending McCain-Feingold while a thousand online journals a night post comments wondering when the FEC's gonna get them? The answer to the speech question is always more speech. If the FEC doesn't shut this down, we should give them more speech than they can handle. Btw: if the day comes, be sure to also forward your complaints to McCain and Kollar-Kotelly and encourage your readers to play along. We don't just want the FEC and co. getting letters from a couple thousand bloggers. We want John McCain's internet guy greeting him in the morning with a worried look and news that he has 70,000 e-mails waiting. Update: I see commenter Maximos at Redstate.org is way ahead of me on this: Yes, and if they are actually so foolish as to ignore us, then we ought to "crash the system" during the next election cycle: generate so many links to campaign sites and literature that it will be impossible to enforce the law in any but a token number of cases. 
posted by gbarto at 7:27 PM |
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