VICTORY!

US Supreme Court protects online free speech
in unanimous ruling that the CDA is unconstitutional.
(full text of decision available.)

San Francisco: Free Speech Rally on day of Supreme Court's CDA ruling!

Adopt your legislator!

Last updated: 8:00pm PDT, June 24, 1997.

Check out the
Encryption Policy Resource Pages.
The next series of attacks on online free speech may not stem from moralizing, but may instead be launched in the name of "national security" and "combatting terrorists and organized crime". The US and other governments want to make sure we are all wiretappable and subject to surveillance at any time, so they seek to prevent you from having access to strong privacy-protecting encryption software. Familarize yourself with the issues, the proposals, and the stakes now, with this concise overview.

Blue Ribbon Intro	Blue Ribbon Graphics	ACTIVISM
Fed. US Update	State-level & Global Updates	Other Blue Ribbon Pages
Archive	Sites That Could be Banned	Skeptical?

Send questions about the Blue Ribbon Campaign to ask@eff.org

Blue Ribbon Campaign Introduction

A blue ribbon is chosen as the symbol for the preservation of basic civil rights in the electronic world. The blue ribbon is of course inspired by the yellow POW/MIA and red AIDS/HIV ribbons, and also by the various (U.S.) Second Amendment, child abuse, Israel awareness, and public land usage rights blue ribbons, the breast cancer pink ribbon, etc.*

EFF and other civil liberties groups ask that a blue ribbon be worn or displayed to show support for the essential human right of free speech. This fundamental building block of free society, affirmed by the U.S. Bill of Rights in 1791, and by the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, has been sacrificed in the 1996 Telecom Bill.

The Blue Ribbon will be a way to raise awareness of these issues, from locally to globally, and for the quiet voice of reason to be heard.

The voice of reason knows that free speech doesn't equate to sexual harassment, abuse of children, or the breeding of hatred or intolerance.

We insist that any material that's legal in bookstores, newspapers, or public libraries must be legal online.

See immediately below for info on how to get Blue Ribbon graphics for your WWW pages: Join the Blue Ribbon Internet Free Speech movement - the grassroots campaign for online intellectual freedom!

Legislative & Legal Info

Full text of the Communications Decency Amendment (CDA) of the 1996 Telecommunition Act and EFF's analysis of it.
The EFF Internet Censorship Legislation Archive - numerous bill texts, analyses, articles, and more.
The EFF CDA Legal Challenge Archive - court documents, case updates, testimony summaries, etc.

Blue Ribbon Graphics

All Web users are strongly encouraged to place a Blue Ribbon graphic on their servers, such as the ones below. (Click on each to download if your browser requires this.)

NOTE: You do NOT need to ask for permission to use these graphics. They are public domain, created either by EFF, or by people who have voluntarily donated new icons to the collection.

If you would like to point your Blue Ribbon icon at EFF's Blue Ribbon page (the page you are reading now), you can add this HTML Anchor to your homepage (or a similar one, pointing to another Blue Ribbon Site).

Many other versions are available, including borderless, transparent, grey and black backrounds, smaller versions, an outline version, and a textless version for incorporation into larger banners (as a standalone icon, please use the versions with text, so people have some idea that there IS a Blue Ribbon Campaign and what it is about when they first encounter it - not everyone has a color monitor, so the verbal name of the campaign is important to pass around.) Thank you for your support and activism, and remember - it's YOUR rights you are fighting for! Wear a real blue ribbon, so people ask you what it's all about.

If you are not sure why you need to participate in the Blue Ribbon Campaign and stand up for your free speech, or uncertain how your rights are threatened, please see our Internet Censorship Legislation Alerts Page

Other Blue Ribbon Pages

Here are some other sites providing Blue Ribbon pages. You might wish to refer people to one of these sites as well as or in place of ours. This will help reduce load on our system, and help spread the word into other online communities (e.g. via having someone within each community provide a Blue Ribbon page, rather than everyone having to figure out who we are and how we relate to their interests) This is *not* a list of people supporting the Blue Ribbon Campaign and putting Blue Ribbons on their WWW pages - there are already thousands!

USA
- EFF Local machine(s)
- Center for Democracy and Technology
- Voters' Telecom Watch
- Yahoo!
- Magellan (McKinley Group)
- Computer Currents Interactive
- HotWired
- Dave Winer
- Digital Shout
- Surfwatch
- Microsystems' "Internet Freedoms Page"
- Emperor & Jammer (a rebellious spin on the concept)
- Ryan Thornburg
- Raleigh Muns, UM-St. Louis Reference Librarian
- Teleport
- Karl Simanonok
- Spectral Media
- IgLou Internet Services
- Eugene Free-Net
- Buck
- The Pulse Online
- Digital Doomsday - a countdown clock of the threat to online civil liberties
- Rich Burroughs - HTML 3.0 | HTML 2.0 (Interesting feature: Rich has a list of all the people *just at a single Internet service provider* participating in the Blue Ribbon Campaign. As of June 14, 1996:
  113 individuals, 36 companies/organizations. Think on the ramifications of that...)
AUSTRALIA
- Electronic Frontiers Australia's STOP! Campaign to stop Australian Net censorship legislation
- Irene Graham's "Net Censorship Dilemma" site
GERMANY
- Thomas Voigtman, T.U.-Muechen (im Deutsche and in English)
GREECE
- Acropolis Net (sta Ellinika - in Greek)
SOUTH AFRICA
- Orbital Decisions

For a humor break, see the CensorU Movement (C.U.M.) www pages - a parody of the theocratic right, with its own red pro-censorship ribbon. And there's the Blue Ribbon Prank Page, which elaborately plays on the theocratic party line that "indecency = pornography". Also, the Free Peaches Online mock-campaign might cheer you up. New on the block is a page satirizing a hypothetical Communications Decency Administration (with some serious activism suggestions as well as parody material.)

And, to get back to being serious, a Christian book publisher proves, in case people have forgotten, that most religious people and institutions are not censorsious theocrats. Wanting to hone in on a paricular point, Zondervan Publishing House has created a derivative of the Blue Ribbon Campaign: the Green Ribbon Campaign for Responsibility in Free Speech. Their introductory page says, in part, "the right to free speech is one of the most important and fundamental rights of liberty....We support the right to free speech in all its forms. We also call for responsibility in exercising this right", without demanding censorship. Nice to see people advocating that *individuals* learn to act responsibily, instead of demanding that governments force everyone into someone else's moral suit. (One should note that the green ribbon also stands for marijuana legalization activism.)

EFF Welcome Page