In what is certainly the tamest attack on what is seen by FOX News as an anti-American liberal bastion, affectionately called the ‘blogosphere’, CENTCOM recently announced that they will be providing the official side of the war on terror from their own blog! (I always laugh when I hear FOX talk about America since they’re owned by an Australian company). Apparently the blogosphere is rampant with liberal cretins who are evangelizing for the wrong side, and the Pentagon is going to fight them where they live - in cyberspace, fighting for readership. In reality, blogs have become a popular form of self-expression not just for liberals, but for people of all political stripes. Perhaps the administration has finally bought in to the adage that “the internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it” and has decided instead to compete fairly? Before you decide, you had better read on…

Before we even get into it, let me point out that the link to their blog doesn’t even work for me, since I use Firefox with the NoScript plugin, and their page apparently requires a script to run in order to show *anything*. So I just get a blank page, which is unfriendly, and very Microsoft (in fact I can tell they are running it on a Windows server). “Who needs to use open web standards? We spend more on the military than every other nation on earth combined, they’ll just have to do it our way!” Well, screw them - if they want to run a blog, they should learn how things work on the web first.

Recent (stalled) attempts by John McCain and others to pass legislation that could fine bloggers and admins of bulletin board systems as much as $300,000 for ‘child pornography’, posted by visitors on comment boards puts the onus legally on the owner of the blogging/message board system to report any such filth that they come across. This play to the right by McCain may be well-intentioned, but scary to many forum administrators who cannot moderate thousands of messages a day and might be frightened into closing down their systems because the actual *poster* of the vile content is not targeted, the website to which it was posted is. Since most bulletin boards are a free exchange of ideas from thousands of readers, the administrator of the board cannot reasonably be expected to moderate the entirety of the submitted content, but under this kind of legislation they would become responsible for it. The point being made to bloggers and bulletin board systems: maybe we can’t censor you, but we can sue your ass.

A bill submitted by the new Congress seems to be aimed squarely at those big online lobbying organizations like Moveon.org and the swiftboats crowd. Requiring that bloggers register their blogs if they have more than 500 readers or risk jailtime. The actual text of the bill suggests that it’s not just people running sites that accept monetary contributions that are being targeted, but that a person who

(ii) makes a contribution of more than a nominal amount of time to the entity;

would also have to comply with the registration process as a lobbyist!

Also, unconfirmed stories are now circulating that the current administration wants to start labeling bloggers who espouse policies counter to their own as terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. Laws passed during this president’s tenure make it possible that bloggers labeled in this manner could be jailed without trial, and possibly executed for having committed a treasonous act (blogging about how fascist their policies are).