Democracy Online Project
National Task Force testimony
May 22, 2000

Declan McCullagh
Wired News
Washington, DC
declan@wired.com

Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this morning’s discussion. It’s an honor to be on a panel with such distinguished guests. I hope my perspective as the Washington correspondent for Wired News and a longtime Internet user proves helpful.

We were asked "How do we create a public space online?" I think the answer is we don’t need to create one. We already have one, and an unexpectedly wonderful one at that.

Think of the Internet as an unlimited expanse of public park, where soapboxes are available for free to anyone who wants one. You can set up your own web site on any of scores of free hosting services, including places like Geocities and Tripod, with little effort. These companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in making it easy for you to say whatever you want – you don’t have to a programmer to be heard.

Once your site is online, it’s discovered by search engines and people looking for information on your topic can find you. I launched one political web site in March, and it only took a few days before search engines like Google found it and began steering visitors toward it.

You can start your own mailing list for free as well, on sites like onelist.com. I run one called politech in my spare time that has thousands of subscribers.

If you don’t like the idea of free hosting services that usually place ads on top of your web pages, you can do it yourself. Pay web hosting services start at around $10 a month – less than the cost of cable TV or telephone service. And you can say whatever you want.

It is true that obscure sites may not get the same number of visitors as more mainstream ones. But that’s true offline as well as online: More people read Tom Clancy than Hemingway. More Americans will be watching Ally McBeal this evening than tuning in to this cybercast or CSPAN, for that matter. More people will go to Disney’s new dinosaur movie than listen to that street preacher on the corner of Connecticut and K streets. But there are no structural barriers to being watched or heard online.

In fact, exactly the opposite is the case. For the ultimate in public spaces, there’s Usenet. Usenet is a distributed collection of tens of thousands of discussion areas devoted to everything in the world you might want to talk about. It’s been around for a few decades, and was already well-established when I first got an Internet account in 1988. Nobody controls it, nobody owns it, and nobody can censor it.

According to the most recent statistics from yesterday, the average number of individual messages people post each day is 791,377. That amounts to 46,800 megabytes a day. To put this into more realistic terms, most of the folks in the audience have seen the size of books with the complete works of Shakespare. Usenet messages, if printed out, would fill about 5,200 of these books. A day.

This is one reason the U.S. Supreme Court in 1997 called the Internet a "new marketplace of ideas."

We were also asked "Is it possible to create an online public space for political discourse? What are the constitutional and legal issues?"

People feel comfortable engaging in public discourse online if they can do so without their privacy being violated. Anonymity is an important part of that, and I’d like to make you aware of some legal threats to anonymity on the Internet:

• The federal government must take steps to improve online traceability and promote international cooperation to identify Internet users, according to a report commissioned by President Clinton and released in March. The document, written by a high-level working group chaired by Attorney General Janet Reno, says that police should be able to determine the source of anonymous email in some situations.
• Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder told the House Judiciary committee at the same time that Internet malcontents are "often wearing the equivalent of Internet electronic gloves to hide their fingerprints and their identity."
• U.S. Customs has suggested that Internet providers keep records on what their users are doing, according to a CNN report.
• Some think tanks are suggesting that in response to the controversy over Napster, Congress should require Napster to collect addresses and credit card information of users before they can use it. The people most affected would be the young, the poor, and those in developing nations with limited access to credit cards.
• A Council of Europe draft treaty, crafted in part by the U.S., would require websites and Internet providers to collect information about their users, a rule that would potentially limit anonymous remailers. The treaty is expected to be finalized by December 2000 and voted on by participating nations next year.
• Yahoo inappropriately disclosed information about the true name belonging to a pseudonym of a user in response to a subpoena, according to a federal lawsuit filed earlier this month in California.

Anonymity has long been a shield from the tyranny of the majority. It protects individuals from retaliation for having unpopular views, and it prevents controversial ideas from being suppressed. Shakespeare, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Mark Twain, and Ann Rice used pseudonyms. In the McIntyre case, the Supreme Court struck down a law that requred pamphleteers to identify themselves, saying there was a right to anonymity in a democracy. Journalists rely on guarantees of anonymity to shield their sources from disclosure.

Anonymity protects whistleblowers from being fired when revealing corporate malfeasance or government wrongdoing. Without anonymity and pseudonymity, some communities could not exist. Alcoholics Anonymous, AIDS support groups, drug addiction support and other mutual help organizations rely on anonymity to protect the identity of their members. Anonymity reduces the risk of social ostracism, and promotes democracy online. Legal attempts to restrict it should be rejected.

Thank you.