Frequent travellers and other people living abroad depend on their freedom to communicate with the rest of the world. But do we take it for granted and are we aware of what is going on behind closed doors? This affects the less mobile of the population too.
You would be wise to read this worthy plea for Freedom of Speech and basically the Right to Communicate in view of the growing importance of the Internet to that end.
The paper by William J. McIver, Jr., William F. Birdsall, and Merrilee Rasmussen is entitled "The Internet and the right to communicate" as published by First Monday.
The authors address "the political and definitional challenges of a right to communicate."
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, Article 19):
- "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression: this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." (United Nations, 1997)
Article 27 section 1 states:
- "Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits." (United Nations, 1997)
It is difficult to expound when in such erudite company, so I will just quote their conclusion entirely:
Conclusion
To summarize, we contend that the forces of worldwide expansion of human rights and the development of global communications systems present an opportunity to advance communication rights, specifically the right to communicate. We reviewed earlier efforts to formulate and promote a right to communicate and concluded to achieve a right to communicate there must be inclusive, grassroots national movements. We address a number of counter arguments to the right to communicate and argue a definition of a right to communicate must be at a level of generality to have universal application along with adaptability to national political cultures. Towards that end we argue for a legislative soft law strategy based on communicative law that draws upon the resources of the right-behind-the-right.
As many have claimed, the Internet represents a dramatic new development in global communication. However, dramatic it is, it is nonetheless part of the evolving universalization of communication technology accompanied by the universalization of human rights. It is our contention this conjoining of global human rights and communication technology has reached a stage demanding the dramatic change in the conceptualization of communication human rights called for by d'Arcy almost forty years ago. The emergence of the Internet challenges traditional conceptions of information freedoms. To insure their preservation, we advocate they must be re-conceptualized within the human rights framework of a right to communicate.
It's encouraging to discover that several bright people are thinking along similar channels.
Somewhere hidden in the comments of Dave Winer's multi-facetted discussion on Freedom of the Internet he notes, "They're discussing in Congress some very crazy ideas that if turned into legislation and signed by the President would change the kinds of computers we could use, with the goal of changing the way people use the Internet. That's what I'm talking about."
Wake up at the back of the class!
