New Internet Censorship Law Introduced in U.S. Senate

Senator Patrick Leahy has introduced S.3804 or the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). Although this bill is in the first step in the legislative process, if signed into law, it would allow the attorney general and the Department of Justice to require domain registrars and registries, ISPs, DNS providers, and others to block Internet users from reaching certain websites.

In addition, it would also create a set of Internet blacklists. One would be a list of all of the government-selected Web sites served with a “censorship court order” from the attorney general’s office. The second would be a list of domain names that the Department of Justice determines singularly and subjectively without judicial review that are described as or determined to be "dedicated to infringing activities" — whatever the heck that is. The bill will block domains on both lists, with the latter requesting that service providers do so with legal immunity when they block the sites listed.

This is a censorship bill that could have an extremely dangerous impact on freedom of speech and the Internet. Moreover, it is in contradiction to the tenets of democracy espoused in the Bill of Rights. Last I read, no law shall be made that restricts limits or suppresses speech, meaning that blocking an entire domain over a portion of a single Web site is just dumb.

The Senate needs to seriously reconsider this bill. I would like to believe that the public will make the effort to oppose such idiocy, but the reality is that many do not know and would not know because reading is a lost art and most spend too much time on the Internet following gossip and celebrity than the laws of our great nation and the practices of our politicians.

Are you at all bothered by the government's quiet attempts to infringe upon or do away with our rights? Could you live without Facebook, Twitter or some of the other sites that occupy your time if they happened to make the list?

Obama to Sign Fair Sentencing Act That Is Still Unfair

Congress just passed a bill to address disparities in sentencing based on crack and powder cocaine possession. The House passed the legislation under suspension rules after it was passed by the Senate in March. The bill, the Fair Sentencing Act (S. 1789), will now go to the president, who is to expected to sign it into law.

The new law modifies the 25-year-old statue that has been employed to send thousands of African Americans to prison for crack cocaine convictions while giving lesser sentences to whites arrested with the same amount of cocaine in powder form.

Provisions of the modified law include reducing "the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine from 100:1 to 18:1, with a five-year mandatory minimum for 28 grams of crack cocaine and a five-year mandatory minimum for 500 grams of powder cocaine." In addition, it "eliminates the mandatory minimum sentence for simple possession of crack cocaine." In the original law penned in 1986, crack was the only drug that had a mandatory minimum sentence for simple possession.

The new bill, which is authored by Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin and co-sponsored by Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and ranking member Jeff Sessions, still is unfair, and represents a compromise made with Republican Senate Judiciary Committee members who objected to equitable sentences for the drugs.

Originally, it was introduced to completely eliminate the discriminatory 100:1 disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentencing under federal law. The fact remains that it does not obviate the proven disproportionate impact such sentencing has on African Americans when compared to whites, nor does it remedy the many who are currently serving sentences under the old law.

Unfortunately, this law on paper may be seen as a move in the right direction but it still will result in disparities in incarceration rates for Africa Americans when compared to whites. Based on 2009 data, although African Americans comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population and 14 percent of monthly drug users, they are 37 percent of the people arrested for drug offenses. Moreover, according to Human Rights Watch, across the nation, African Americans are arrested for drug offenses at rates 2 to 11 times higher than the rate for whites.