Last week, two women were arrested in New York for planning to build “weapons of mass destruction against persons or property in the United States.” Inspired by Islamic State, Noelle Velentzas and Asia Siddiqui purchased bomb-making materials and prepared for attack.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, released a statement in response. In it, she called for vigilance in the face of terrorism and reminded us that the “threat … inside the United States endures.”
But then the senator added, “I am particularly struck that the alleged bombers made use of online bombmaking guides like the Anarchist Cookbook and Inspire Magazine. These documents are not, in my view, protected by the First Amendment and should be removed from the Internet.” It is a puzzling, problematic aside in an otherwise anodyne statement, and it deserves some attention for what it reveals about Feinstein’s thinking, both about the Internet and about free speech.
Let’s first consider the several leaps of logic that she made in this statement:
— What precisely would removing the Anarchist’s Cookbook and Inspire Magazine from the Internet entail? It’s impossible to say, of course, for certain based on what little we have from the senator’s statement. There is operationally no way to scrub the Anarchist’s Cookbook from the Web. It was written in 1971 and has ricocheted on servers and hard drives since the earliest days of the Internet. It’s here to stay, whether the senator likes it or not.
— The U.S. government could presumably hack or take down the site or sites that host Inspire Magazine. But there’s nothing to prevent it from re-appearing. Even if it was left dormant, the magazine could still spread through emailed filed and thumb drives. With this too, one is forced to reach the same conclusion: removing Inspire Magazine from the Internet is an impossible task.
— It could be that Feinstein is arguing that Americans should be denied digital access to both the Anarchist Cookbook and Inspire Magazine — on the theory that Velentzas and Siddiqui were domestic terrorists. Even if these publications can’t disappear from the Internet, the least the U.S. government can do is block access. Set aside the technical difficulties of that kind of ban. The more obvious and troubling result is the profound infringement on civil liberties, not to mention the grave risk of abuse. It wasn’t too long ago that American schools banned books we now count as among the richest gems in our literary canon. The risk of the government deciding which websites we can and cannot see is simply too great.
— It could be argued that the threat — a potential bomb in New York — requires such desperate measures as Internet erasure or website bans. But read the reports of this failed effort. It’s hardly the stuff of nightmares. As near as we can tell, the FBI was onto this plot from the beginning. The two women had to order an intro to chemistry textbook to help with the bomb-making. They discussed the dangers of undercover informations with — wait for it — an undercover FBI informant. ABC News called the plan “more aspirational than operational.” One might forgive Feinstein’s boldness if it seemed at all commensurate with the threat. But her reaction is far from an equal and opposite reaction.
The worrying thing, of course, isn’t just that a United States senator and the top-ranking Democrat on the committee tasked with addressing the complex issues of security and privacy doesn’t seem to grasp some basic elements of how the Internet operates. Nor is it the fact that she has gone down this road before. In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombings, she proposed a bill that would make it illegal to distribute bomb-making literature for criminal purposes. The bill passed — but bomb-making instructions remain protected speech.
No, the truly worrying thing is this: the senator believes that eliminating bomb-making literature could eliminate actual bomb-making. That’s the logical basis on which her statement rests — and it has not an ounce of logic to it. Whether or not the senator wishes it to be so, the information on how to construct explosive devices is a few clicks and keystrokes away. That she was so willing to put barriers on free speech in an effort to rein that information in should trouble us all.
