The Great White North
Special Report
by Declan McCullagh Washington,
DC, 28 July Wired Magazine
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.