Earlier this week we released a special “lame-duck” edition of our Internet Watch List, which identifies the legislative efforts that we believe to be the most dangerous to the Internet and civil liberties. We had hoped, following the election, that lawmakers wouldn’t be in the mood to do anything more than pass the necessary spending bills and head home for a long holiday rest.

Unfortunately, it appears there is at least some likelihood that lawmakers could try to move a range of troubling bills — probably by burying them in large must-pass legislative packages. The most troubling among these are bills aimed at legalizing the President’s warrantless domestic snooping program. Other measures would impose stifling filtering requirements on Web site operators, ban access to social networking sites in schools and libraries and force ISPs to retain massive amounts of customer data.

Even if the measures we identify in the Watch List weren’t fatally flawed, there is something deeply dangerous about making sweeping changes to how the Internet works, or worse, to our underlying civil liberties, in the hectic final days of a Congress.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006 at 3:20 pm and is filed under Digital Copyright, Free Expression, Security & Freedom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.