Henry Chu reports:
She can’t vote yet, but 17-year-old Victoria Westburg has thrown herself headlong through cyberspace into the realm of real-world politics.
A teenager who spends “a lot of hours” a day on her computer, she’s ticked off by laws that allow the government to snoop into or limit what people do online, and she wants to translate her outrage into action.
“The Internet is a big part of my life, and I think that it always will be,” Westburg said. “These laws that have come right now are very hostile toward the Internet and everything I like about it, and I don’t think that’s OK.”
So with the click of a mouse, Westburg joined a movement that has made a surprisingly loud splash in the placid pool of Swedish politics. She joined the Pirate Party, a fledgling group whose sole aim is to promote the free and unregulated flow of information on the Internet for the people of this generally progressive Scandinavian nation.
Read more in the L.A. Times.