Archive/File: miscellany/press vs.022295
Last-Modified: 1995/02/27
Source: The Vancouver Sun, Feb. 22, 1995 (B2)

"If six million died, that's six million less to deal with in the
future."

-posting on a computer bulletin board. 

WILLIAM BOEI 
Vancouver Sun

The worst kind of hate propaganda floats freely on the Internet.
Neo-Nazis and Jew-haters find the world-wide computer network a
perfect vehicle for denying that the Holocaust happened and for
threatening to finish the job, sometimes in the same cyber-breath.

Anyone with a computer, a modem and a telephone line can find their a
droppings on the Net.

It's a difficult - perhaps impossible - issue for government agencies
but the Canadian Human Rights Commission is making one of the first
attempts to come to grips with it.

The commission held its first meeting last week with directors of the
National Capital Freenet, an Internet access group in Ottawa, after
fielding a complaint about neo-Nazi propaganda on one of the group's
computer bulletin boards.

"We are in discussions with them not only about this specific
complaint, but about ways in which we can cooperate to deal with the
issue of hate propaganda," Donna Balkan, the commission's chief of
external relations, said Tuesday.  Ken McVay doesn't think the
commission has a hope of controlling cyber-hate.

"The government has no goddamned business fooling around with the
Internet," McVay said.  You can't censor the Internet.  It is not
possible.  The government will figure that out, sooner or later."

McVay and the computer in his Vancouver Island home are at the centre
of a world-wide network that seeks out Holocaust-deniers on the
Internet and counters their lies with hard facts.

On Monday, McVay told a shocked audience of B'nai B'rith members at
Vancouver's Jewish Community Centre that censoring Canadian cyberspace
will only force the haters to route their material through foreign
computers, which are just as easy to reach as the bulletin board down
the street.

If all else fails, there's an "anonymous server" in Finland - a
computer through which anyone can post information around the world
without leaving tracks.

McVay has spent four years finding hate material on the Internet,
posting responses to false claims and building up the most extensive
computer archives of Holocaust information in the world.  

Ignoring the hate is no answer, he said, arguing that the young, the
curious and the ignorant will inevitably find hate messages on the
Net.  The truth should be posted in the same locations, he said.

McVay was challenged by anti-racist researcher Alan Dutton, who said
it would be foolish to throw away hard-won victories such as hate-crime
convictions and human-rights precedents

"There has to be responsibility for what people say, regardless of
whether it's on the Internet, in newspapers, on radio or whatever," he
said.

"In Canada, we have made a decision that we are going to balance
individual rights versus group rights.  So Canada has legislation
which prevents people from spreading hate and slander and child
pornography and all those other things that we don't want to have in
our country."

Tony McAleer is wary of the human rights commission, but he doesn't
think Canadian laws can stop him.

McAleer has twice been convicted by the commission of spreading hate
on his telephone bulletin board, the Canadian Liberty Net.  The
convictions are under appeal.

He updates the Liberty Net recording only about once a month these
days, spending time on the Internet instead. He said Tuesday he has
been getting into a few arguments on local computer bulletin boards,
but his long-term aim is to set up his own web site - a computer
address where hundreds of millions of computer users will be able to
peruse and download whatever information he files there.

He said he's now thinking of using a U.S. location because he doesn't
want to tangle with the human rights commission a third time.

"There is no freedom of speech," he said, "and I don't particularly
wish to spend another 10 or 15 days in court again."

Brian Campbell, president of the Vancouver Regional Freenet
Association - an Internet-access provider - said he has more questions
than answers about freedom of speech versus censorship on the
Internet.

Campbell said there are plenty of ways to get around government
regulation in cyberspace, but that's not the only problem with
regulating hate.

"The other concern is, once you start introducing this kind of
restriction, where is it going to stop?" he asked, noting that public
libraries stock books such as Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' - if only
because students may want to research and write about fascism.

Campbell thought the place to draw the line might be somewhere between
debating right-wing ideas and using the Internet as an organizing
tool.

"In real life, I would not be in favor of allowing neo-Nazis and
fascist organizations to organize pogroms, for instance," he said.
"And I am not in favor of that on the Internet, either."

These ideas and others will be discussed tonight as part of a
two-month-long artistic forum called The Spectacular State: Fascism
and the Modern Imagination. The panel includes Campbell and McVay. It
begins at 5:30 p.m. in room 1700 of Simon Fraser University's downtown
Vancouver Harbour Centre Campus.

=30=

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