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NorthStar 
A Guiding Light on Internet Issues 
 
Newsletter of the Internet Users Consortium 
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To heighten the NorthStar experience, subscribe to the HTML Version of
NorthStar.

NorthStar is a guiding light to help you focus on the primary issues 
which threaten our Internet Freedom. In this Newsletter we let Internet 
Users know what the necessary issues and actions are to defend the Internet. 
We sincerely invite your participation at all levels, from discussion to
action.  Rethink what Activism means - Isn't it just participation? 

NorthStar #11   Sunday 2/18/96
Director..........proteios@iuc.org 
Editor.............wtj@primenet.com 
Original Author..............barlow@eff.org

Update:   Internet Users Consortium 
With the US Congress leading the forefront of unconstitutional legislation
and attacks on personal freedom, it is now up to the people of the United
States and the (desire to be) Free World to unite and voice its presence
on the Internet. Restraining orders for the CDA portion of the Telco Bill
have been successful overall and will prove to the world and to the
anti-freedom organizations sponsored by the Christian Coalition that we
are a land of rights, freedoms and individuals united. With presumably
sweeping success in removing the CDA, Senator Leahy has already put forth
an amendment to repeal the CDA. Join a civil liberties organization and
help them support your rights.

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NEVER SAY NEVER . . . but . . . We at NorthStar 
believe so strongly in these principles that we make the 
following pledge to you, our reader and fellow Internet Activist: 
NorthStar will NEVER sell/rent/trade/share our mailing list 
NorthStar will NEVER use Government mandated encryption 
NorthStar will NEVER represent any commercial interest 
NorthStar will NEVER cooperate with any Government intrusion  
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A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

It is error alone which needs the support of government.  Truth can
stand by itself.
 --Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I
come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask
you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have
no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address
you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always
speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally
independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral
right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true
reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You
have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not
know us, nor do  you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your
borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public
construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows
itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you
create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our
ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order
than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this
claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't
exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will
identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social
Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our
world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself,
arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications.  Ours is a
world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice
accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her
beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence
or conformity.
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***A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace***

1) John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident, Co-Founder, Electronic Frontier
Foundation
http://www.eff.org/~barlow
2) EFFs Blue Ribbon Campaign
http://www.eff.org/blueribbon.html
3) CDT list of organizations in the Internet Coalition
http://www.cdt.org/speech.html#orgs
4) VTWs Blackened Page Protest list of supporters,  this is a long one....
http://www.vtw.org/new/999999_111111.html
5) ACLU
http://www.aclu.org/
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Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and
context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter
here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by
physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest,
and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be
distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our
constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope
we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis.  But we
cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications
Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams
of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These
dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world
where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust
your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly
to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of
humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole,
the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes
from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States,
you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at
the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small
time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in
bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate
themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own
speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be
another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world,
whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed
infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires
your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same
position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had
to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare
our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to
consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the
Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more
humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
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***A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace***

6) Cyber Rights Homepage
http://jasper.ora.com/andyo/cyber-rights/cyber-rights.html
7) Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)
http://www.epic.org/
8) Libertarian Party
http://w3.ag.uiuc.edu/liberty/libweb.html
9) VTW
http://www.vtw.org/
10) Center for Democracy and Technology
http://www.cdt.org/speech.html
*** proteios@indirect.com PLEASE send us any other relevant URLs you may
find ***
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NorthStar is an Internet Distribution List provided by the Internet Users
Consortium
a fiercely independent Grass Roots organization founded by Martin Thompson
and Kenneth Koldys, Jr, to inform and coordinate Internet Users concerning
political and government actions against the complete self-actualization 
of the Internet and our Constitutional Rights in Cyberspace. 
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Past issues of NorthStar are archived at the NorthStar Archive
http://www.iuc.org/www/proteios/northstar.html
on the Internet Users Consortium WWW site
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***Please feel free to distribute NorthStar to as many people and relevant 
forums as possible. That is one way to inform, educate and take action. 
All we ask is that you keep NorthStar intact. It is concise for that very
reason.
***If you wish to submit an article to NorthStar, please send your 
article to proteios@iuc.org 

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Internet Users Consortium 
7031 E. Camelback Ste 102-515 
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Email: proteios@iuc.org
IUC: http://www.iuc.org/www/molsen/
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Rethink what activism means - Isnt it just participation?
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