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Public service is also an important part of hams’ self-understanding. Hams have long provided emergency communications for local community events and in response to natural disasters. Hams have also contributed significantly to advancing radio technology, such as pioneering early high-frequency communications and popularizing packet radio. Some hams currently communicate via Morse Code and single-sideband voice communications, methods of communications that have been in use for over half a century. Other hams explore digital signal processing, software-defined radios, moon-bounce communications, and communications using specially designed earth-orbiting satellites. The three-million hams worldwide form a community with a strong sense of tradition and identity. Amateur radio has created for hams opportunities for social interaction, for serving the public, and for exercising engineering creativity. Hams’ appreciation for the freedom they have found in amateur radio, and their dedication to preserving it, cannot be doubted.

To a remarkable degree, hams understand their activities to be dependent on government license. This view goes all the way back to the beginning of radio. The development of radio implicitly raised the question of whether persons have some natural rights to communicate by radio. Most governments, and amateurs, seemed to assume that persons do not. Nonetheless, absent effective means of suppression, amateur radio developed naturally, through personal curiosity and creativity. About 1912, there were roughly 8000 amateur radio users and 230 amateur radio clubs in the U.S.[21] The U.S. Radio Act of 1912 was hailed as a great victory for amateurs. An amateur activist/magazine publisher declared, “The amateur had at last come into his own…. Uncle Sam has set his seal of approval upon the amateur’s wireless…”, and of course, “the entire credit for obtaining the amateur’s rights belongs to [the author]…”[22] Here is what the Act said regarding amateurs’ rights:

Ten years later a historian asked, without even a whiff of self-consciousness, “What has the amateur done in the past ten years, to justify the privileges granted him by his government?”[24]

An informally recognized hacker-leader performed another dramatic challenge to authority:

Those who interpreted the spiel as a word-for-word parody of the Watergate hearings only got half the message. For Stallman, the other half of the message was something only his fellow hackers seemed to be hearing. One hundred years after Lord Acton warned about absolute power corrupting absolutely, Americans seemed to have forgotten the first part of Acton’s truism: power, itself, corrupts. Rather than point out the numerous examples of petty corruption, Stallman felt content voicing his outrage toward an entire system that trusted power in the first place.[42]

Elsewhere, this hacker-leader presents himself as a general, writing:

Another hacker-leader wrote and made freely available on the Internet a fourteen-page article, “How to Become a Hacker.” The substance of the article begins this way:

The article then offers a modern Zen poem for inspiration, and advises: “So, if you want to be a hacker, repeat the following things until you believe them….” Although exactly what should be repeated is not entirely clear, this appears to be the litany:

The article then goes on to advise on how to acquire hacking skills and on socially valued uses of these skills.

Hackers and others actively engaged with the Internet would consider government licensing of Internet users to be an outrage. This is so even though hackers seem to be historically linked to amateur radio users, and a leading hacker is also a leader in amateur radio.[45] This is so even though the challenge of initiating new users and the problems of abusive use, interference, and breakdowns in operating standards and cooperation are similar in amateur radio and on the Internet. Nonetheless, government licensing of Internet users would be abhorred as a violation of God-given inalienable rights. Or abhorred as a violation of natural human rights. Or abhorred as a violation of what most persons, deliberating under appropriately specified circumstances, would come to agree to regard as rights persons should have irrespective of decisions made by duly constituted governing authorities. Freedom to use the Internet is not understood as a privilege granted by national governments and international treaties. In the Internet field, freedom means capabilities that persons should personally recognize, cultivate, and defend.

Internet users have recognized, cultivated and defended capabilities that some governments would prefer to suppress. Supporters of democracy in China and adherents of the Falun Gong movement have vigorously sought to communicate with persons in China. When the founder of China’s first human-rights website was arrested, supporters copied his website to a server in the U.S. and the contents of the website remained accessible to persons in China.[46] In contrast to amateur radio communications, international law does not require the U.S. or any other country to shut down Internet communications that the Chinese government does not want to occur.

[tags]freedom, ham radio, spectrum management, spectrum policy, fcc[/tags]