Charles Levendosky, editorial page editor of Casper, Wyoming's Star-Tribune and a past winner of a Playboy Foundation First Amendment Award, pays tribute to the first and best amendment. His site focuses on protecting religious liberty and free speech and includes weekly updates on the activities of the politicians, zealots and other clueless individuals who threaten those freedoms.
If you're concerned about civil liberties online (particularly your right to write and view what you please), add EFF to your hot list. Its home page includes news about recent legislation and lawsuits (including the Communications Decency Act and efforts by the Church of Scientology to squash critics), a huge archive of files covering censorship issues and a collection of the "brightest and stupidest things ever said" about liberty and cyberspace. You can subscribe to EFF's free e-mail newsletter by sending the message "Subscribe effector-online" to listserv@eff.org.
Besides its well-organized guide to privacy issues, this site includes updates on the clipper chip, the digital telephony law and other bad ideas that make it easier for federal agents to snoop online. The Center for Democracy and Technology offers similar resources.
Created by the Library of Congress and named for Thomas Jefferson, this site includes the text of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, The Congressional Record and pending House and Senate bills, all searchable by keyword. Another useful archive, located at Cornell Law School, contains U.S. Supreme Court decisions from 1990 to the present, arranged by topic.
One-stop shopping for anyone who gets a kick out of the antics of the right. It includes extensive links to sites that blast Rush Limbaugh, Holocaust revisionists, the Christian Coalition, Pat Robertson, the Promise Keepers, Focus on the Family, the National Rifle Association, militias, white supremacists and right-wing politicians such as Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, Jesse Helms, Lyndon LaRouche and Ronald Reagan. Its major fault: too many recruiting pitches for the Democratic Party. You don't have to be a member of any party to dislike blowhards.
This site, an offshoot of the Online Books Page, includes links to the online text of books that have been censored at some time or another, including James Joyce's Ulysses, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and works by Shakespeare. While reading these texts on a computer screen isn't very satisfying, it's reassuring to know that in digital form they can be reproduced and distributed throughout the world with a click of the mouse. Electrons also aren't flammable.
Launched by a group of Chicago artists, the File Room documents incidents of censorship from around the world, dating from before Christ and involving a wide variety of media. Browse by date, location, grounds for censorship (sexual, religious, racial, political) or medium (print, fashion, film, performance, online). Like Banned Books Online, the site allows you to see what bureaucrats or moralists would rather suppress by including photos of many of the works.
This Institute for First Amendment Studies site lists the e-mail addresses of hundreds of government officials and media outlets, complete with decorative red, white and blue dots. If you write Capitol Hill, be forewarned that e-mail from voters and special interest groups has overwhelmed its computers in the past, so you may not receive your form letter response any more quickly than if you had licked a stamp. Of course, it's the thought that counts.
