The 19 Senators Who Voted To Censor The Internet
TechDirt | November 18, 2010
This 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 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:
a.. Patrick J. Leahy -
b.. Herb Kohl -
c.. Jeff Sessions -
d.. Dianne Feinstein -
e.. Orrin G. Hatch -
f.. Russ Feingold -
g.. Chuck Grassley -
h.. Arlen Specter -
i.. Jon Kyl -
j.. Chuck Schumer -
k.. Lindsey Graham -
l.. Dick Durbin -
m.. John Cornyn -
n.. Benjamin L. Cardin -
o.. Tom Coburn -
p.. Sheldon Whitehouse -
q.. Amy Klobuchar -
r.. Al Franken -
s.. Chris Coons -
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
vote in favor of censoring speech in
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