FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, March 12, 1998

WASHINGTON -- The Senate Commerce Committee today approved two bills
that reconstruct the unconstitutional provisions of the 1996
Communications Decency Act and remove power from parents and local
communities to decide how to help children use the Internet safely.

The American Civil Liberties Union dubbed the bills "spawn of CDA,"
saying in a letter to the committee that the proposals fly in the face
of the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in ACLU v. Reno and will restrict
protected speech on the Internet.

Ignoring these warnings, the Commerce Committee passed Senate Bill 1619,
the Internet School Filtering Act, by a unanimous voice vote. The bill,
sponsored by Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, requires all public libraries and
schools that receive federal funds for Internet access to use blocking
sponsored by Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, requires all public libraries and
schools that receive federal funds for Internet access to use blocking
software.

The second bill, S. 1482, was sponsored by Senator Dan Coats, R-IN.
Dubbed "Son of CDA," its thrust is identical to the ill-fated
Communications Decency Act, which was unanimously overturned last year
by the United States Supreme Court in Reno v ACLU. The lone dissenter in
that voice vote was Sen. Ron Wyden, D-OR, who criticized the
"one-size-fits-all Washington approach" to regulating the Internet.

"We are beyond Son of CDA and well into spawn of CDA," said Gregory T.
Nojeim, Legislative Counsel on cyberspace issues for the ACLU's
Washington National Office.

"Lawmakers continue to ignore the technological realities and
constitutional problems with these bills," Nojeim added. "Congress is
obviously enjoying the free political ride these bills provide, with
little thought for the taxpayers who will ultimately pay the price when
obviously enjoying the free political ride these bills provide, with
little thought for the taxpayers who will ultimately pay the price when
the courts strike them down."

In a letter sent yesterday to the Senate Committee, the ACLU and the
Electronic Frontier Foundation outlined their objections to the bills.
Addressing the Internet Filtering Act, the groups said, "Blocking
software restricts access to valuable, protected online speech about
topics including safe sex, AIDS and even web sites posted by religious
groups such as the Society of Friends and the Glide United Methodist
Church."

The letter also emphasized that "parents and teachers, not the
government, should provide minors with guidance about accessing the
Internet."

The Coats bill, which attempts to narrow the CDA's restrictions to
speech that is "harmful to minors," is also unconstitutional, the groups
said, because such speech is "unquestionably protected by the
speech that is "harmful to minors," is also unconstitutional, the groups
said, because such speech is "unquestionably protected by the
Constitution when communicated among adults."

The bill also "fails to make any distinction between material that may
be harmful to a six-year-old but valuable for a 16-year-old, such as
safer-sex information," the ACLU and EFF said.

The Commerce Committee was clearly unmoved by these criticisms.

Commenting on the "First Amendment problems" with the Coats bill, a
Congressional aide remarked that "we can address those at a later time."
Similarly, Sen. Ernest Hollings, Democrat of South Carolina and a
co-sponsor of the bill, urged the committee to "just vote on it because
we've had it on our hands a long time."

Senator McCain was equally unswayed by local control arguments raised by
Senator Conrad Burns, R-MT. He refused to allow any amendments that
would permit communities to decide whether schools or libraries could
Senator Conrad Burns, R-MT. He refused to allow any amendments that
would permit communities to decide whether schools or libraries could
use alternative to blocking software even though many localities may not
wish to use such clumsy and ineffective programs.

During committee debate, Burns noted that many schools and libraries
already have developed policies that address Internet abuse problems
without using filtering devices.

Federal lawmakers are not the only politicians jumping on the censorship
bandwagon, the ACLU said. In the last three years, at least 25 states
have considered or passed Internet censorship laws. But however popular
the laws may seem, they do not hold up well to constitutional scrutiny.
Federal district courts in New York, Georgia and Virginia have found
Internet censorship laws unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds in
challenges brought by the ACLU.

And in its June 1997 landmark ruling in Reno v. ACLU, the U.S. Supreme
Court struck down the federal CDA, saying that it placed an
 
And in its June 1997 landmark ruling in Reno v. ACLU, the U.S. Supreme
Court struck down the federal CDA, saying that it placed an
"unacceptably heavy burden on protected speech" that "threatens to torch
a large segment of the Internet community."

"When the Court struck down the CDA, we anticipated that members of
Congress would renew their attempts at Internet censorship," Nojeim
said. "But no matter how many bills are spawned from this ill-fated and
unconstitutional legislation, the ACLU stands ready to stamp them out."

        The ACLU and EFF letter can be found at:
        http://www.aclu.org/congress/lg031198a.html

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35 responses total.

This item linked to the cyberpunk conf, your conference of net culture
and controversy.

        I can understand blocking childrens access at libraries, but i don't
agree with the rest of what was outlined in the paper.

i was rather nonplussed to discover that http://www.deal-mac.com, if
entered without the hyphen, led to not a site publicizing bargains on mac
compatible hardware, but a porn site.  it is easy enough to find this stuff
without having to shadow sites which exist for other, completely different
purposes. i think it was in very poor taste.  i also think it would be stupid
to try to make it illegal.

Tried www.whitehouse.com lately?    ;)

I'm a little disapointed in the lack of creativity.  Somebody could have used
whitehouse.com to sell nights in the Lincoln Bedroom, or something like that,
instead of having a porn site.

Will libraries also be required to keep Lady Chatterley's Lover under lock
and key, accessible only with proof of age?  Who will decide which books to
ban to which ages?  There seem to be lots of books on AIDS and sex on the
shelves, not to mention murder mysteries and other things potentially harmful
to kids.  Would you want your kids reading Agatha Christie, or Hamlet, or the
Greek tragedies?  Or the Bible?  (Murder, polygamy.....).
Raven, thank you for notifying us of this.  Very thought provoking.

        There's a big difference between a child reading Lady Chatterly and
viewing hard porn on the screen.

What is so awful about a picture of a naked man on top of, or
under, or beside a naked woman, with his penis in her mouth or
vagina, that children need to be protected from seeing the
image?  It is not dirty.  It is not evil.  It is part of a 
healthy life.

We (our culture) needs to grow up and get over it.

Whether or not preventing kids from looking at porn in libraries is a good
idea, I'm confused about why it should be a federal issue.  Is this really
something that Congress can't trust local officials with?

unfortunately, it is not a matter of the feds "trusting" the locals, but
instead the federal legislators are picking up on every conceivable issue they
think will improve their images in the minds of the voting public and doing
the stupidest things imaginable to satisfy their perceptions of their
constituencies' desires.

besides, if they make laws against porn being available to kiddies, so few
people are going to have the courage to publicly oppose them that it nicely
distracts the populace away from the issues which require real government and
leadership in order to resolve.

Can *you* trust "local officials" scg? (I generally do, but not blindly,
and rarely on matters of social conscience and morality, which is not what
they are elected to meddle in).

i'm really tired of politicians making legislation the option of first resort
for any item the polls say the public is concerned about...  See item 127.
I'm almost tempted to run for office, but i doubt i'd ever be elected..

  I trust them to be more responsive to individual constituents than 
  federal-level officials, that's for sure..

  The whole thing is just depressingly moronic.  Time and time again
  congress manages to come up with proposed "solutions" which indicate
  that they haven't spent any time really thinking about or even
  understanding the problem.  

  I have to say, though, that things have come to a new low when people
  start censoring the Quakers.  Is there really censorware out there that
  blocks sites operated by the Society of Friends?

  re #13: (first paragraph in response to Rane's #11 about trusting local
           officials, other's response slipped in..)

  re #12:  what have you got to lose?  if you're really interested you
           could at least give it a shot.

it's far too easy to talk myself out of it.  besides, there are a lot of
things i'd like to do, and many of them would not necessarily coincide with
running for office.

        Mary, if the children are taught from a young age that sex is natural
and normal it's one thing, but most of sociaty hides it and teaches the kids
that it's wrong or nasty or sick or whatever their particular hangup is. If
they understand it fine but don't allow it if not.

re #13 (Quaker censorware): Yes.  For more info: 
http://www.spectacle.org/cs/xstop.html

Mary, for some people, it is harmful.  Some people are actually different from
others, and they look at things in different ways.  

I think I'd better end this now, before my response turns really nasty.

Assuming for a moment that keeping kids from using school or library computers
to find porn is a good thing...

There are several ways to deal with the issue.  A Federal mandate has to
specify something that will sort of work in all situations, for it to do
anything.  On the other hand, leaving it up to local libraries to figure out
how or whether to implement such restrictions would enable the libraries to
come up with a solution that fits with the views of the local community, and
works better than a blanket bandaid handed down from Washington.

Filters can sort of work, sometimes.  On the other hand, the school or library
could make a rule that kids couldn't use the computers to look at porn, and
put the computers out in an area where there wasn't much privacy (basically
any school computer room I've ever been in).  At that point they can have a
teacher or librarian walking around, occasionally glancing at peoples'
screens, and dealing with it if they find somebody violating the rules.  It
would work better than any filter ever would.

You mean there is a VIEW of a local community? (Emphasis added). Who
chooses that VIEW? Is it decided there is no VIEW if there is one dissent?
If not, is that a majority suppressing dissenting OPINIONS? 

I do agree that teachers should keep students' studies relevant during
school hours, including if they are studying the sociology of porn.

Ther is a new movement on the web, Cyberrealist. They claim we need more
government. 

Who will control copywright?
Who will enforce anti-stalking laws?
Who will enact a "death penalty for a nasty user?"
How do you control spam unless somone is in charge?

Get your mind around it, we have cyberlawyers. So much for the wild west show
that was the net.

The issue I look forward to is dealing with news. The net has been called an
echo chamber where every thought comes back in a hundred voices. Just look
at what happened with TWA Flight 800 and Monica Lewinski. This has issue of
how truth is lost in a torrent of opinions needs to be addressed. Perhaps
news needs to be banned from the web to protect the innocent or unindited.

Look forward to more lawsuits like the one against the Drudge Report.

Finally, the net is a bunch of students and housewives and a few corporations.
Who has the money and time to create the universe that they want. If I were
you, I would not bet on the students and housewives.

  "students and housewives"?  there are those, to be sure, but not only those.
  the ones who will fight most effectively for an unrestricted net are the
  many grass-roots organizations that have seized on the web as a powerful
  tool to get their message out.

Heh.  That was a heck of a generalization :) 

I got the impression that the net was mostly science research, it depends what
parts of it you look at (and whether you have a graphics browser).
In my day, sex education was not taught in schools.  Our freshman year of
college we were all surprise to find a paperback on the subject in our
mailboxes.  The traditional way of learning about it was probably things llike
Playboy magazine (which my brother used to hide in his room).  At what age
is it taught in schools now, if at all?  Perhaps enough correct information
would counter any wrong ideas kids would find on the net, in fact the teachers
could, as suggested above, teach a course on net pornography.  Who wants to
sneak looks at something you have to study for exams?

        Did you hear about the girl who wouldn't take sex education because
she heard the final was oral?

I had sex ed in fifth grade, sixth grade (at a different school, where the
other kids hadn't had it in fifth grade), eighth grade, and tenth grade.  The
topics covered were a bit different at the different ages.

A few years ago, when the Internet was funded by the National Science
Foundatino, scientific research was its stated purpose.  At this point,
scientific research is probably still a significant use, but the Internet is
also being used in big ways for business communications and entertainment.
I really doubt scientific research is what the Net "mostly" is in 1998.

What age children are supposedly using the net to look at porn?  Figure out
the age and start sex ed at that age, instead of letting them get their info
from the net.  (I think we were assumed to be neuter until age 18).

Sex Education occurs en masse on the internet, though not in the form taught
in schools....

Re #26: Its interesting that the Internet2 project also claims to be
interested in solving speed/bandwidth problems to permit scientists to
remotely work on projects together and also to provide 3-D capabilities.
Gee, those things wouldn't be of important to the business and
entertainment interests too, would they?

re #28, are there any sex ed sites on the web?  You could put in a 
few with really catchy names and even a few color pictures.  (I mean the
official type of sex ed sites, that even the censors would approve of.)

check out http://www.activism.net/sex/
I'm sure there are others, as well.  try a search on yahoo for 'sex
+information'.  It'll probably give you thousands of sites. Maybe add a
'-XXX' to that to weed out the trash...

In what way does pornography harm children (or adults, for that
matter)? 

It creates intense headaches in conservative parents who want to protect
children forever...

Not forever, just until they are old enough to be responsible for their own
actions.

it causes children to ask questions their parernts don't know how how or want
to answer, in some cases...

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