been in thespotlight. A banned book on the health history of former French presidentFrancois Mitterrand was republished electronically on the World Wide Web(WWW). Apparently, the electronic reproduction of Le Grand Secret by athird party wasn't banned by a court that ruled that the printed versionof the book unlawfully violated Mitterrand's privacy. To enforcecensorship of the Internet, free societies find that they become morerepressive and closed societies find new ways to crush politicalexpression and opposition.13 Vice - President Al Gore, while at aninternational conference in Brussels aboutthe Internet, in a keynote address said that "[Cyberspace] is aboutprotecting and enlarging freedom of expression for all our citizens ...Ideas should not be checked at the border".14 Another person attendingthat conference was Ann Breeson of the Ame rican Civil Liberties Union, anorganization dedicated to preserving many things including free speech.She is quoted as saying, "Our big victory at Brussels was that wepressured them enough so that Al Gore in his keynote address made a bigpoint of stre ssing the importance of free speech on the Internet."15 Manyother organizations have fought against laws and have succeeded. A primeexample of this is the fight that various groups put on against the recentCommunication Decency Act (CDA) of the U.S. Se nate. The Citizens InternetEmpowerment Coalition on 26 February 1996 filed a historic lawsuit inPhiladelphia against the U.S. Department of Justice and Attorney GeneralJanet Reno to make certain that the First Amendment of the U.S.A. wouldnot be compr omised by the CDA. The sheer range of plaintiffs alone,including the American Booksellers Association, the Freedom to ReadFoundation, Apple, Microsoft, America Online, the Society of ProfessionalJournalists, the Commercial Internet eXchange Association , Wired, andHotWired, as well as thousands of netizens (citizens of the Internet)shows the dedication th...
