Posted 8:01 PM by Floyd

Several bloggers (Colby Cosh, Joanne Jacobs, Damian Penny, Instapundit, the Volokhs) have linked to this National Post story on Canadian Customs' seizure of newsletters from the Ayn Rand Institute, on grounds that they constitute hate speech. (The newsletters advocated Israel's right to exist and said various mean things about Palestinian terrorists.) All were quick to condemn this censorship, and I concur.

Even more problematic is the attitude of Europe toward "hate speech". The European Union may decide that it needs to search your computer in order to stamp out racism:

Development on 12 Nov 2001

New Treaty is Proposed to Unify Web Laws

The Council of Europe has adopted a cybercrime convention, elements of which look to define and criminalise hate-speech on the Internet. The 43-nation body, which aims to protect human rights, on Thursday adopted the treaty on criminal offences committed over the Internet. The treaty seeks to criminalise activities like fraud and child pornography as well as hate-speech committed on-line. It also sets up global policing procedures for conducting computer searches, intercepting e-mails, and extraditing criminal suspects. The news from the Council of Europe came on the same day that Yahoo Inc. won a victory over the French court that had moved to block users from Nazi memorabilia auctions on Yahoo. A US district court agreed with Yahoo that its Web site is outside French jurisdiction.

(From Enterprise Ireland.)

(I googled and searched ZDNet, but could not find more recent news on a decision having been reached. A similar article was posted on ZDNet a month or two ago.)

Restrictions on free speech that supposedly punish immoral or corrupt behavior should always be opposed. In America, we have campaign regulations that never inconvenience the major parties, but have been used to bankrupt individual citizens who recalled a powerful California legislator. Europe's proposed cybercrime laws could be used to harrass any non-mainstream political group. I don't know what the situation is in Europe, but in America if the police search your computer, they seize it and you have to sue to get it back.