Feds Plan Crackdown on Bloggers

"The commission has generally been hands-off on the Internet," says Federal Election commissioner Bradley Smith, in an interview with CNET News. In the interview – which bears the ominous headline, "The Coming Crackdown on Blogging" – Smith reveals that FEC policy has changed. From now on, the commission will monitor political speech on the Net as strictly as it oversees such communications on television.

For this, we can thank Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold, as well as Congressmen Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and Martin Meehan (D-Mass.). We can thank them, first, for winning passage of the so-called Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (popularly known as BCRA or the McCain-Feingold Act) and second, for pushing relentlessly to expand the power of McCain-Feingold over the Internet.

Shays and Meehan sued the FEC and won a September 18, 2004 decision in federal court which effectively compels the FEC to regulate political speech on the Net. In obedience to the decision by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, FEC officials are now drawing up guidelines to determine who should be allowed to say what in cyberspace. Says Smith:

"Line drawing is going to be an inherently very difficult task. … Why can this person do it, but not that person? …We're talking about any decision by an individual to put a link (to a political candidate) on their home page, set up a blog, send out mass e-mails, any kind of activity that can be done on the Internet."

Smith, who opposes Internet regulation, warns, "It's going to be a battle, and if nobody in Congress is willing to stand up and say, `Keep your hands off of this… then I think grassroots Internet activity is in danger."

Let us not forget to thank George Soros for the critical role he played in engineering this assault on our essential liberties. The McCain-Feingold Act won passage on March 27, 2002 only after a seven-year lobbying effort which Soros largely financed.

BCRA was later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court on December 10, 2003, in a decision which relied strongly on arguments derived from data now deemed to have been fraudulent – said data having been cooked up by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. The Brennan Center, which promotes radical judicial activism in order to circumvent the Constitution, has recieved more than $3.3 million in funding from George Soros's Open Society Institute since 1999.