Concern

[pecunium]

Been a busy couple of days (and the modem died Tues. night, so I'm behind on all sorts of things, more detailed review of Noise Ninja, second draft of the review of the D2H, uploading pictures to LJ, sidereading, the usual).

But I did, in my quick skim of things this morning find, Possible clampdown on blogging.

If this ends up doing what CNET says it might (define the use of computers to do grassroots work, and links to campaigns) as contributions, worth the value of money raised, not the cost of time/equipment/money spent, blogging as we know it, is mostly dead.

Comments

[ckd]

The periodical exemption makes me think of a possible dodge...get an ISSN.

Possible clamp down on good speech writers maybe?

[lilithharp17.livejournal.com]

When each candidate has their own set of speech writers, and they have the media to control in the White House Press Corp and the News to watch,it probably is very aggravating to have, a Blog go out and exemplify the opposing view point.

A blog maybe a very good example to state why this candidate or present politician in office is very wrong. A blog is free speech and the net is the fastest free speech we know. It helps words travel all over the globe and reaches the homes of millions. So, it makes sense that to clamp down on words in public forums, would be appealing to opponents of any program not agreeing with their politics, or any blog that can trail them on the campaign trail.

I would guess

[skip-hunter.livejournal.com]

that the "simple" solution is if the ad, link or whatever seemed intended to help raise funds for the campaign. Otherwise its no more effective than if i called you on the phone or told you so on the street.

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

And my first thought when reading the CNET piece, was how perfect this is for an adminstration that wants no desent. The one sentence in there about McClain and the other senator wanting email regulated-- that sends chills up my spine.

I see implications here far beyond political campaigns. How are they going to keep track of this? How will they monitor what goes back and forth in email? Are they going to have people surfing the net just looking for who is commenting on politics and monitor them?

One Judge's opinion or not, how can they even think it could possibily be consitutional to monitor people's blogs and emails? I find this very scary given the Bush record so far.

[sethg]

I can imagine a court deciding that if a blogger links to a candidate's fundraising page--especially through one of those affinity links that keeps track of how much contributed money is attributable to which blogger--then the blogger is engaging in the sort of fund-raising activity that is subject to regulation. Big whoop.

I have a much harder time imagining a court deciding that a blogger's redistribution of a candidate's press releases counts as a donation in kind to the campaign. Even if they did, all you need to get around that is to publish a link instead of the whole text.

I can't imagine a court deciding that if a blogger merely publishes political opinions, he or she is subject to regulation.

Consider the source. A Republican member of the FEC is speculating that at some point in the next few months, the FEC will just have to promulgate regulations that will get a lot of bloggers very angry, and one reason they'll have to do that is the intransigence of Democrats on the commission. Now, what's his interest in saying that?

[insomnia.livejournal.com]

I think it would be easily dodged, possibly by offering people subscriptions to a print version of a weblog. In any case, linking to a politician's site seems to be what would have to be avoided, which does nothing about linking to groups such as moveon.org, mediamatters, free republic, etc.

You can make laws, basically, but they're unenforceable and easily circumvented.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Of course it might be as Iron Mouth claims, a bit of low-grade astroturfing (of a very subtle nature)

Are we doing Brad Smith's bidding?

I try to not jump on bandwagons (which is why my link-lists tend to be older news. It's stuff I want to see stay above the fold), and this is why.

On the up side, I can't really see any court letting this stand, if the FEC does rule this way.

I also can't see the Right Blogoshpere (which claims it has, "revolutionized" the world of news) standing for it. So, while I intend to keep my eye on it, I shant be writing any furious letters.

TK

[jennae.livejournal.com]

Oh how our society fears change. Free speech no more, eh.