Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
3.2.10 United States
Although it often trumpets itself as a paragon of democracy, and although internet
censorship in the U.S. is minimal, there too the state has intervened occasionally in
attempts to shape internet access. Whereas the first attempts to regulate cyberspace
were caught up in culture wars between liberals and conservatives, more recent
attempts have been more explicitly corporatist in nature.
The most egregious case of American internet censorship involved the Com-
munications Decency Act (CDA), passed by Congress in 1996 in an attempt to
limit children's access to pornography (however loosely defined) on the internet by
facilitating government censorship, particularly the distribution of ''patently
offensive'' materials to minors, essentially catering to the political agenda of the
Christian Right. Resistance to the CDA was ferocious, including lawsuits by a
coalition of ISPs, leading the Supreme Court to overturn the law in 1997.
More recent government internet censorship efforts in the U.S. involve private
sector proxy actors (Kreimer
2006
). Thus, Congress has mandated that public
schools and libraries install filtering software, and holds ISPs responsible for
providing access to child pornography. In this reading, censorship is a means of
controlling ''negative externalities'' such as internet crime and pornography that
the market, left to its own devices, would fail to control. Congress has also
initiated incentives for ISPs to block access to websites that infringe on intel-
lectual property rights. Under the Patriot Act, the Federal Bureau of Investigation
has a ''good corporate citizen'' program that encourages ISPs to censor websites
that are not consonant with the public interest and to turn over information about
users whose email reveals suspicious intent (Gellman
2005
). The administration
of George W. Bush enacted legislation encouraging telecommunications com-
panies to engage in data mining on anti-terrorist grounds; indeed, ''with respect
to online surveillance, the United States may be among the most aggressive
states in the world in terms of monitoring online conversations'' (Deibert et al.
2008
, p. 232). Whereas issues of copyright infringement or child pornography
constitute legitimate concerns in this regard, other applications, particularly
restrictions on political information, lie at the end of the slippery slope that such
measures entail.
The Wikileaks phenomenon—particularly Bradley Manning's appropriation of
a quarter million secret U.S. State Department diplomatic cables in 2010 and
passing them to the NGO that specializes in disseminating classified documents—
offers a useful opportunity to assess the politics of cyberspace. Wikileaks reveals
several important aspects of internet geopolitics: the internet as contested political
space; the advantages, limitations, and disadvantages of cyberactivism; the
geographies of empathy and caring that cyberactivism is capable of fostering; and
the limits of internet speech. Clearly, given resistance to censorship, the internet is
a contested domain of politics, an arena of conflict in which different discourses
jockey for influence (Kreimer
2001
). In this light, Wikileaks is part of a much
broader constellation of progressive uses of cyberspace (Warf
2011
), a vast array
