The Right to Bear Ar--, Or Is It Access the Internet?

The Right to Bear Ar – , Or Is It Access the Internet?:

All of these events [in Burma a.k.a. Myanmar] make we won­der whether the Bill of Rights would explic­itly state that there is a right to free access and dis­tri­b­u­tion of infor­ma­tion over the Internet had the American Revolution occurred today. Now before every­one gets into a dither about the nature of the free press and what the First Amendment encom­passes, I am sug­gest­ing that the sit­u­a­tion described above shows the pre­car­i­ous nature of shar­ing infor­ma­tion given the choke-​​points in place today. In other words, it seems that the ben­e­fits of tech­nol­ogy also offer a much eas­ier way to clamp down on soci­ety. Many have made this obser­va­tion in the pri­vacy con­text. Neil Richards’s post about the First Amendment gets to this point as well. We must con­sider what is at stake in today’s con­text. Put dif­fer­ently, could it be that the individual’s abil­ity to access and use the Internet is now one of the key ways indi­vid­u­als serve to bal­ance the power of the state?