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Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

Keep in mind we're talking about communications services here, and one focusing on political speech at that.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

In general I think the free lunch of centrally hosted services and persistent doxxable identities is nearing a close. It was inevitable that governments would meddle more, and more, and more - implicitly treating communications are something other than speech due to how encompassing the digital world has become - and now here we are.

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There is the absolutely perfect Supreme Court case that ruled against your theory.

Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/561/1

There is a law (18 U.S.C. § 2339B) that says you cant knowingly provide material support for designated foreign terrorist organizations. A law firm wanted to provide financial support and legal services to some, including the PKK (the same group A/I was accused of helping). They argued the federal law violated their first amendment rights.

The court concludes that the first amendment doesn't protect your ability to provide material support including services and communication equipment and the law still stands today.

Im curious. How would you argue the first amendment protects knowingly providing material support to designated foreign terrorist organizations?

As I said to your first comment: positive arguments rooted in what is aren't terribly compelling when the government has gone off the rails (unfortunately).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49480377

Can you elaborate? The positive argument being that the law and judiciary disagree with you? The court decisions was 15 years ago when Obama was president btw.

I fully elaborated in the other comment, which you didn't respond to. There is a sibling reply that is on point as well. And sorry no, "Obama is responsible too" has no purchase with me.

not the person you replied to, but the distinction between communication equipment vs press seems pretty small, no?

Unless you're just saying the court disagrees, which is fair, but yuck

Their infrastructure and services were used in domestic terrorist attacks on pregnancy centers in the United States, by the CHAZ operation in which two black teenagers were lynched, attempts to crash police helicopters, attempts to burn police officers alive.

Providing material support to perpetrators of these actions would go above "speech".

Basing an argument around the unavoidable physical embodiment of speech is sophistry. There is no "above". The "material support" you speak of is all just republishing speech.

By the argument laid out by the government here, merely reading writings by terrorists would be illegal. You'd be providing "material support" by helping them spread their message to yourself - regardless of whether you're processing their writings with your network and computing device, or trafficking in their printed books.

The current United States government is very keen on pushing the idea that there is a vast and shadowy international left-wing conspiracy waging war on it.

This is, to be clear, lying nonsense.

And despite it being transparent garbage, millions of Americans are eagerly lapping up Red Scare 2.0

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