You're under arrest: Congratulations, Philippine government, you've sufficiently screwed us over.

 Dearest Philippine government,

You must be pretty flippin’ pleased with yourself.

It’s all over the news, and all over the Internet that you’re trying so hard to regulate. We’ve heard about how quickly the Cybercrime Law’s approach to modern technology has thrust us into the dark ages. You’ve managed to give yourself the power to seize devices, restrict access to data, and prosecute literally anyone on mere suspicion of so-called subversive behavior. You’ve also managed to set parameters so vague that anything can be actionable, from blowing off steam on a blog after a bad day to a simple “like” on a Facebook page. You’ve even managed to make it retroactive, so that past offenses can be prosecuted, and set penalties so high that we’d all understand you mean business.

As it stands, violating the Cybercrime Law wins the offender six to 12 years of imprisonment, or a fine of 200,000 to P1 million. I wondered if it was just me, but that seemed a little steep, so I turned to the Revised Penal Code for reference. I was surprised to find that conspiracy to commit treason warrants a penalty of five to P10,000, and a sentence of as little as six months to a maximum of 12 years. Meaning someone with real, premeditated plans to bring down our government has more of a chance at a minimal sentence than someone who wrote an offensive comment on a social networking site. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the former would pay a mere .01 percent of what he would’ve been fined had he chosen to break the Cybercrime Law instead.

To add insult to serious injury, your people keep playing dumb. Really? The provisions weren’t in there when they signed off on the bill? Did no one bring up the contentious parts of the bill the entire time it was being discussed? Was there some evil veiled ninja (Sotto, perhaps) who decided, “We’re going to digitize martial law, suckers” and slipped in those provisions while they weren’t looking? Did someone hotbox the entire Congress, both upper and lower chambers, so that people couldn’t even tell what they were signing? These provisions were said to be on record as early as January 2012, whereas the Senate passed the bill on June 5. So it’s either everyone who signed off on this bill is physically incapable of hearing/speaking/reading/critical thinking, or they simply weren’t doing their jobs.

Threat of punishment

A law — especially a penal law — is written to be followed to the letter, under threat of punishment. It takes literally hundreds of people to go from drafting a bill to enacting a law because these laws navigate the democracy of a nation. This is a task that demands perfection, because although revisions and regulations can be made and certainly loopholes can be found, they will never be enough. Revisions are simply cement over potholes. They can minimize damage, but cannot perfect essential flaws within a structure. So as far as we know, the damage has been done and can never be completely undone. Congratulations, you’ve sufficiently screwed us over.

Self-created fear

You (or at least Senator Angara) can tell us that all this fear is self-created, but the intent is pretty clear. There are so many questionable provisions in this act that it’s hard to see it as something other than deliberate. This law comes under the guise of addressing issues that do deserve solutions, such as child pornography and Internet-based crime, but allows you to position yourself so that nothing is private. It seems to me that this law isn’t about justice; it’s about control. It’s about showing us that you can shut us down any time you see fit, especially if we don’t keep ourselves in line. You can now take anything you want, have the catch-all for any course of action you decide to take, and you expect us to be grateful as you have yet to abuse this newly-acquired power.

The real problem here isn’t your excuses or your sheer desire to avoid all accountability. The problem is that you’ve lost sight of who we are as the electorate. Let me remind you that our rights don’t come from you. We were born human, and so come with rights no State can bestow or detach. We are born with the right to freedom of thought, opinion, and expression — which, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says, “includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” Regardless of what you or your people might think, our freedom is not yours to regulate. Our worth is not yours to determine or weigh, it’s for you to simply recognize and so protect. Your job is to safeguard our freedom by the laws you create, and not to be the entity that takes the first strike against that freedom.

Promises

You beg for our trust and flatter us with promises for the prestige of a title, even if the job it comes with is one you are clearly unable to fulfill. You have dealt in so many back rooms and traded dignity for power so many times over that you’ve forgotten who put you there in the first place. We are not pawns in your little chess match. We are the Filipino people; to serve us is your privilege. And on the 3rd of October, you, as a governing body, officially failed us.

Vaclav Havel, in The Power of the Powerless, says that armies quaked in the presence of a poem. The power these armies had was fragile, because it dreaded the masses coming to the realization that a totalitarian rule could only exist so long as the people accepted it. One individual, one voice, one truth could incite the overhaul of a steeled machine of lies. This is a lesson you would do well to remember. You can feign ignorance and brush this all off like it isn’t the affront to human decency that it is, but if you think we’re simply going to stand for it, then you’ve got another thing coming.

 (Not so) respectfully yours,

Gabbie Tatad

Quezon City

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Come and get me, or tweet me @gabbietatad.