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A profound reversal in attitudes has taken place in the last twenty years. While in the 1960′s the cries of “freedom” and “liberty” came from Progressives, today it is the right that sees liberty under attack. The campaign rhetoric of the four Republican candidates for President all put the defense of liberty at the top of their agenda. They see in Progressives attempts to regulate bad actors in the world’s of finance, health insurance, or environmental pollution a basic attack on the free market. As Rick Santorum said on Super Tuesday about Obamacare, ”Ladies and gentlemen, this is the beginning of the end of freedom in America. Once the government has control of your life, then they got you.”

I think we need to really consider whether liberty is the value that trumps all others in our society. Let’s take the case of the publisher of backpage.com. 

The biggest forum for sex trafficking of under-age girls in the United States appears to be a Web site called Backpage.com. This emporium for girls and women — some under age or forced into prostitution — is in turn owned by an opaque private company called Village Voice Media. Until now it has been unclear who the ultimate owners are.That mystery is solved. The owners turn out to include private equityfinanciers, including Goldman Sachs with a 16 percent stake…

There’s no doubt that many escort ads on Backpage are placed by consenting adults. But it’s equally clear that Backpage plays a major role in the trafficking of minors or women who are coerced. In one recent case in New York City, prosecutors say that a 15-year-old girl was drugged, tied up, raped and sold to johns through Backpage and other sites.Backpage has 70 percent of the market for prostitution ads, according to AIM Group, a trade organization.

Now the State of Washington has passed a law creating criminal penalties for sites like backpage.com for advertising girls under the age of 18. And what is the response from backpage.com–”Censorship”.

“There’s going to have to be a challenge to it,” said Liz McDougall, general counsel for Village Voice Media Holdings. “Otherwise it would effectively shut down an enormous portion of the Internet that currently permits third-party content.”

Now where have I heard that before? The defenders of Kim Dotcom and the other pirates who have lived luxuriously off the stolen work of musicians and filmmakers around the world, say that any attempt to block these sites is censorship. This is utter nonsense. As I have pointed out before, the issue is not Google or Baidu’s precious freedom, but their precious revenues.

How did we get to this point that the Libertarian rhetoric dominates our political debate? The Village Voice’s liberty to service pimps of underage girls, trumps society’s right to protect those girls from exploitation? The selfish individual’s liberty to not buy health insurance and make the rest of us pay for his emergency room care trumps society’s right to create a working health insurance system? Megaupload’s liberty to host stolen movies trumps the artist’s right to get paid for his work?

As I have said before, we must come off the barricades and stop using this foolish rhetoric of censorship and liberty where it really does not apply. You have no right to free food. Why do you think you have a right to free music? It is time for all the parties involved to sit at the table and figure out some solutions that afford the creators of imaginative work to get paid for their considerable labors.

Sabu

About a year ago I was at the house of my friend David Fanning on the Massachusetts coast when a call came in that messed up our weekend plans. David has been the Executive Producer of PBS’s flagship show Frontline for 25 years. He has fearlessly told truth to power, despite all the possible reverberations in Congress or elsewhere and the fragile funding of PBS. The call came from his webmaster who said that the whole Frontline website had been destroyed by a hacker collective called Lulzsec. Lulzsec and their leader, Sabu had been outraged by a frontline documentary on Julian Assange and had vowed revenge. I had seen the show and found it to be very evenhanded, but Sabu and his friends objected to a passage in which Julian Assange’s tactics were questioned. When Assange first gave the raw intelligence cables from the State Department, all of the names of the local informants in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere were in the docs. The editors of the Guardian and the New York Times insisted on redacting the names of the local informants so they wouldn’t be killed for helping the Americans. Assange insisted the names stay in and started dumping the raw files out on Wikileaks. That anyone should even question Assange was too much for Lulzsec and so they waged cyberwar on Frontline. They didn’t just bring down the website, they destroyed it and all the archives. It took David Fanning weeks and a lot of money to restore the site. Read more…

I don’t have a publicist and so I rely on the kindness of friends to spread the word about my new book, Outlaw Blues; Adventures in the Counter-Culture Wars. Its been pretty well reviewed and has been in the number one spot on the I Bookstore Arts and Entertainment chart for a while. The book is a history of the role of artists from Mark Twain to Bob Dylan in shaping our culture and our politics. It has over 100 embedded videos that help guide you through the culture. The Wall Street Journal thought it was a technological breakthrough in the E book world.

So I figured Wired Magazine might be interested in this new form. But when a friend inquired of an editor there, the word came back that “they were aware of the book, but it was not a good fit.” I should have known. The last chapter of the book takes on the question of the future of America as a knowledge society in a world where knowledge is being devalued. How can you build a society that’s great at making music, movies and video games if the rest of the world thinks these objects of desire should be free? And of course the main proponent of this view is none other than Wired’s Editor in Chief, Chris Anderson, whose most recent book is titled, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. I was pretty hard on Anderson in the book, going so far as to quote Malcolm Gladwell’s famous query from the New Yorker.

“It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.” Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? Anderson’s reference to people who ‘prefer to buy their music online’ carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference.”

So I guess Wired is run like the old Soviet Politburo. If you are not willing to spout the party line of Free Culture and Techno-utopianism, you don’t exist.

“Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”

Sumner Redstone, the controlling shareholder of CBS, always shows up at the big Hollywood liberal parties and brags about how he is a great fighter for the First Amendment. But yesterday, CBS Outdoor, the billboard company that controls much of the Minneapolis market, cancelled the contracts for the Soldier Billboard Project, that would have placed a telling reminder of the War in Iraq in the face of celebrating Republican’s at the RNC. The Billboards had already been up in Denver for the DNC. Evidently the Republicans “can’t handle the truth”. The cancellation was of course too late for the artists to get another site.

In 2006, in his Keynote Address to the First Amendment think tank the Media Institute, Redstone pounded the lectern while stating that,

imposing any kind of burden or penalty on those who publish protected speech — circumvents this process(the First Amendment). This is particularly pernicious not only because it is prohibited by the Constitution but also because it can be abused by the government.

What a hypocrite.

As I’ve said before, its hard for countries still trying to practice Internet censorship to know where the next challenge will come from. China is entranced by a new scandal known as “Sexy Photo Gate”and the desire of average citizens to see whats going on are driving the censors crazy. It all started when Chinese Hip Hop Star Edison Chen dropped his pink Mac Book off for repairs. Next thing Eddie knew, hundreds of pictures of him in compromising positions with many young Chinese Starlets were floating around the Internet.

In this part of the world, Sexy Photo Gate is much more than your average Paris Hilton affair. In mainland China, which tightly monitors Internet content through a series of blocks often called the “Great Firewall,” the rapid spread of the images challenges the effectiveness of government controls. In Hong Kong, aggressive moves by police, which have arrested nine people involved in distributing the photos, has made the scandal an unusual rallying point for protecting civil liberties.

In Tom Stoppard’s wonderful play Rock and Roll, the Velvet Revolution in Prague in 1984 is stalled as the state clamps down on political speech. And then a band called The Plastic People start performing music with political content. And of course the censors try to ban them. And then the kids get mad and politicized and accomplish what Havel and the intellectuals had been unable to get them to do. Whatever it takes to get the kids into the streets asking for Internet freedom is fine with me.