To Internet users, Sotto is the ‘bad guy’

By Butch del Castillo / Omerta

LET’S face it, the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 is a seriously flawed piece of legislation that is like a freak offspring born with a number of shocking or monstrous congenital defects. In its present form, Republic Act (RA) 10175 needs to be rid of its monstrous defects. Otherwise, it must be terminated with extreme prejudice.

The outpouring of protests when the measure was signed into law on September 12 was so massive, nobody had seen anything like it before. The protests culminated in the filing of a total of 15 petitions from various groups and individuals—all questioning the validity or constitutionality of the newly passed law.

The High Court, after initially failing to muster a quorum, finally came out on Tuesday with a temporary restraining order (TRO) suspending the law’s implementation for 120 days. The petitioners included lawyers, bloggers, lawmakers, professors and, of course, various groups of journalists.

As I said, this freak of a law has defects that make it totally repugnant to netizens. But to its principal authors—notably Senators Edgardo Angara and Vicente Sotto III—it isn’t as bad as its critics are picturing it to be.

Still, to many people—especially the armies of Internet users in the news media—this law in its present form must undergo severe massive corrective surgery.

The common complaint against RA 10175 is that it violates people’s fundamental rights to express themselves, to due process, to privy privacy.

After a weeklong delay because of lack of quorum, the High Court came out with the TRO that was tumultuously welcomed by protesters demonstrating at the Supreme Court grounds on Padre Faura.

Sen. Teofisto “TG” Guingona III, the only senator who opposed the cybercrime bill, described the SC TRO as “the first victory in our battle to defend our freedom and right of expression.”

TG Guingona, incidentally, became the darling of Internet users overnight after he singlehandedly opposed his colleagues during the voting on the controversial measure.

He was quoted by Forbes magazine as having said that the Senate bill’s provisions were both vague and repressive that even Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, the inventor of Facebook himself, could be charged with libel.

(Guingona, in a move that would endear him more to Internet users, has just filed a bill allowing them to participate in the legislative process in Congress. Under Senate Bill 3300, which he calls “Crowdsourcing Act of 2012,” Internet users may comment on bills filed in the House or the Senate from the time of filing and even before the signing of the bill into law.… All comments shall form part of the official and public records of Congress and must be considered in the drafting of the committee reports for pending bills.”)

But if the “war” that erupted between Internet users and the Congress over the passage of the Cybercrime Prevention Act made a hero out of TG Guingona, it most certainly turned the law’s principal movants into “public enemies” whom many Internet users would campaign against in next year’s elections.

Marked down as the chief “casualty” in this war, judging from the exchanges among tweeters and Facebook is Senator Sotto, who was one of two senators who supposedly “inserted” the law’s most hated provision that doubled the existing penalty for libel.

If Sotto is not running himself in next year’s election, then whoever he would be supporting—friends or relatives—would be the target of a massive negative Internet campaign.

It’s ironic, one blogger pointed out, that the Senate majority floor leader happens to be the grandson of the late Vicente Sotto, who was hailed as a champion of press freedom during his time for having authored a piece of legislation called the “Sotto law.” Under that law, it became a time-honored legal principle that no journalist may be forced to reveal or identify his new sources—that protecting a source is a guaranteed right of every journalist.

And now, the grandson allegedly tarnished the name by inserting a repressive provision on libel.

Bloggers originally had the names of nine other senators who were listed as authors of the cybercrime bill. But now they seem to have forgiven Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago for having made up for it by predicting the Supreme Court would have to strike down RA 10175 as being “unconstitutional.”

Senate reporters told me recently that a few of the supposed authors of the Senate bill were “blindsided,” thinking that the bill was chiefly counteracting such Internet abuses as hacking, identity theft, spamming, cybersex and online child pornography. There was absolutely no mention of libel, “a provision that was a last-minute insertion.”

It is this libel provision that has to be struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.