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78 responses total.
Edited in backtalk for minor error in text The ^SCDAII^T has been signed into law it was sneaked into the spending bill signed yesterday by the President. What this bill does is make it illegal for people to provide information ^Sharmful to minors^T over the internet if you are a commercial provider. The ^Sharmful to minors^T language will hopefully be shown to unconstitutionally vague but until it is this law could affect Grex. The reason it could affect Grex is that we have explicit discussions of sexuality in the sexuality & the les/bi/gay conferences, we have no age verification process, and we are ^Scommercial^T by virtue of selling mugs, t-shirts etc. (this according to the EFF & ACLU web sites). If you want to fight this internet censorship go to http://www.aclu.org/ (works on lynx for all Grex users) and send a free fax to Janet Reno urging her not to enforce this draconian law.
Here is more info on this law from http://aclu.org/
ACLU v. Reno,
Round 2
Broad Coalition Files
Challenge To New Federal
Net Censorship Law
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, October 22, 1998
PHILADELPHIA -- Civil liberties groups today filed
a court
challenge to a federal Internet censorship bill
signed by President
Clinton despite serious constitutional concerns
raised by his own
Justice Department.
At a news conference in downtown Philadelphia, the
American
Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Privacy
Information Center
and the Electronic Frontier Foundation said the
Justice
Department was correct in warning that the law
unconstitutionally
censors valuable online speech.
In papers filed this morning in federal District
Court in
Philadelphia, the groups are seeking an injunction
against the new
law, which is scheduled to go into effect 30 days
from the date it
was signed.
Demonstrating the range of speech affected, the
list of plaintiffs
includes the Internet Content Coalition, a member
group including
Time Inc., Warner Bros., C/NET and The New York
Times
Online; OBGYN.Net, a women's health website;
Philadelphia Gay
News; Salon Magazine; and the ACLU on behalf of its
members
including poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and ACLU
President Nadine
Strossen. (The complete plaintiff list can be found
below).
In February 1996, during "round one" of this
litigation, the ACLU,
EFF and EPIC filed a challenge to the ill-fated
Communications
Decency Act. A three-judge panel in the same
federal district
court struck down the law in June, a ruling that
was upheld by a
unanimous Supreme Court one year later in Reno v.
ACLU.
This second round challenges the new so-called
"Child Online
Protection Act" makes it a federal crime to
"knowingly"
communicate "for commercial purposes" material
considered
"harmful to minors." Penalties include fines of up
to $50,000 for
each day of violation, and up to six months in
prison if convicted of
a crime. The government also has the option to
bring a civil suit
against individuals under a lower standard of
proof, with the same
financial penalty of up to $50,000 per violation.
Despite lawmakers' claims that the new bill is
"narrowly tailored"
to apply only to minors, ACLU Staff Attorney Ann
Beeson said
that the constitutional flaws in this law are
identical to the flaws that
led the Supreme Court to strike down the CDA.
"Whether you call it the 'Communications Decency
Act' or the
'Congress Doesn't Understand the Internet Act,' it
is still
unconstitutional and it still reduces the Internet
to what is fit for a
six-year-old," said Beeson, a member of the
original ACLU v.
Reno legal team.
Although proponents claim that the law applies only
to commercial
websites, nonetheless, the groups said in legal
papers, the law
"bans a wide range of protected expression that is
provided for
free on the Web by organizations and entities who
also happen to
be communicating on the Web 'for commercial
purposes.'"
The 17 plaintiffs represented in ACLU v. Reno II
are:
The American Civil Liberties Union (on behalf
of all its
members including Nadine Strossen, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti,
Patricia Nell Warren and David Bunnell)
A Different Light Bookstore
The American Booksellers Foundation for Free
Expression
ArtNet
The Blackstripe
Condomania
Electronic Frontier Foundation (on behalf of
all its members
including Bill Boushka, Jon Noring, Open
Enterprises
Cooperative and Rufus Griscom)
Electronic Privacy Information Center
Free Speech Media, LLC
Internet Content Coalition (whose members
include CBS
New Media, Time Inc., The New York Times
Electronic
Media Company, C/Net, Warner Bros. Online,
MSNBC,
Playboy Enterprises, Sony Online and ZDNet)
OBGYN.NET
Philadelphia Gay News
PlanetOut Corporation
Powell's Bookstore
RIOTGRRL
Salon Magazine
Weststock.com
In a seven-page analysis of the bill sent to
Congress on October 5,
the Justice Department said that the bill had
"serious constitutional
problems" and would likely draw resources away from
more
important law enforcement efforts such as tracking
down
hard-core child pornographers and child predators.
Also, the Justice Department noted, the new law is
ineffective
because minors would still be able to access news
groups or
Internet relay chat channels, as well as any
website generated from
outside of the United States.
"It is our fervent hope," said Barry Steinhardt,
President of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, "that Attorney
General Reno will
concede that the new law is unconstitutional so we
can avoid
prolonged litigation."
"The First Amendment still stands," he added. "A
law that the
Justice Department found unconstitutional last week
did not
suddenly become constitutional this week."
David Sobel, EPIC's Legal Counsel, said that making
children the
excuse for ill-conceived censorship schemes is poor
public policy.
"Congress has demonstrated that, when it comes to
the Internet,
it's prepared to score easy political points at the
expense of
constitutional rights."
"I'm confident that the courts will again
faithfully apply the
Constitution to this new medium," he added. "Let's
find ways to
protect both kids and the First Amendment."
The three groups continue to jointly sponsor the
Blue Ribbon
Campaign for Online Freedom of Expression -- first
launched in
1996 to mobilize the Internet community against the
CDA -- to
provide Netizens a platform for voicing their
concerns over
continuing governmental attempts to censor the
Internet. Visitors
to the Campaign site can fax Attorney General Janet
Reno a "don't
enforce the new law" message and join the campaign
by exhibiting
the Blue Ribbon logo on their own Web sites. More
information is
available at http://www.eff.org/br.
Attorneys in the case are Ann Beeson, Chris Hansen
and J.C.
Salyer of the ACLU, Shari Steele of EFF and David
Sobel of
EPIC. The law firm of Latham and Watkins is
assisting the ACLU
in the case.
The American Civil Liberties Union is a nationwide,
non-partisan organization headquartered in New York
City,
dedicated to defending and preserving the Bill of
Rights for all
individuals through litigation, legislation and
public
education.
Founded in 1990 as a nonprofit, public interest
organization,
Electronic Frontier Foundation is based in San
Francisco,
California and maintains an extensive archive of
information
on free speech, privacy, and encryption policy on
its website.
Electronic Privacy Information Center is a
non-profit
research group that works to defend free speech and
privacy
rights on the Internet.
(That last response could use some reformatting... Perhaps I'll try to do so later when I've some time.)
re # 3 Yes I noticed! :-) It was OK in my word processor but backtalk didn't past it in very well. This item is linked to the cyberpunk conference. The conference to discuss issues of internet based social change & controversy.
Hello, there are trying to censor *us*. Is anyone listening? Does anyone care?
er that should be "...they are try to censor..." none-the-less I'm somewhat suprised that only one other person on Grex seems to care about this issue.
Grex is an exceedingly small part of the internet; I doubt that any of the players in the CDAII world even have any notion grex exists. Yes, if CDAII survives its court challenges, and depending on how the justice department then decided to interpret CDAII, grex could be in trouble. But, based on the outcome of CDA, it appears at this point that CDAII will never be an issue for grex.
Well even if Grex was not actually taken to court we would most likely be in violation of CDAII. It seems like the right thing to do is to fight this law that makes us techinically criminals for providing free and open online community. After all it takes about 30 seconds to visit www.aclu.or/ and send a free fax to Janet Reno telling her not to enforce this unconstitutional law. There is nothing to be lost in taking action action against this law unless ofcourse you support censorship of the internet.
What good is it supposed to do to send a fax to the attorney general asking her not to enforce this law? Do you think that the executive branch should only enforce popular laws? I'd be pretty upset if such a tactic actually worked on a regular basis. The executive branch should fairly and impartially enforce the laws that the legislature passes unless/until the courts strike down those laws. If you want to fight against this CDA or any future versions the "right" way to influence the process is to fight against their passage in the first place by working on influencing the legislative branch. The current battle has been lost but that doesn't mean that people should give up on the war..
The sending the fax is the ACLU's idea not my idea. I believe the idea behind it is the law is unconstitutional and thus shouldn't be enforced. This does seem likely as this law contains similarly vague language to the original CDA. If you have a more productive way to influence the courts to overturn this law I'm all ears.
If it is unconstitutional then someone, presumably the ACLU, should challenge it in court. I'm with Mike; the Justice Dept. should enforce all laws. They are not the courts and should not decide these things.
Given their limited resources, enforcing all the laws is not an option that the Justice Dept. has. Enforcing most of the laws all of the time is not an option either. The can try to act enlightened, chase after whatever sort of crime came up tops in this week's opinion poll, or roll dice, but they'll have to pick & choose somehow. If they're reasonably professional about it, they probably won't waste much time screwing with CDAII - the question in my mind is whether they'll think it worth the political heat to do this. My understanding is that no law can be challenged in court until there is an actual case involving it. So the ACLU & friends may actually want Justice to give CDAII at least token enforcement....
They are challenging it in court the fax campaign is just one small part of the ACLU, EFF, and EPIC's efforts to stop CDAII. Does anyone have any productive contributions to make towards fighting the CDAII or shall we all squabble while the government perhaps gets ready to shut down say N.O.W.'s web site or a breast cancer research web site? Leaving *aside* the one perhaps short sighted strand of the ACLUs strategy is there anything concrete Grexers would be willing to do like perhaps putting an EFF blue ribbon http://www.eff.org/blueribbon.html on the Grex web site?
This response has been erased.
They aren't thinking. Thats the entire problem. If they were and applied their "concern" on a consistent basis, you'd block children from all but the kid's section in every library in the country. I still don't see how this affects Grex. It states that this applies to commercial entities, doesn't it? Grex isn't commercial, is it? Perhaps I'm being foolish here, but I don't see how this particular piece of idiocy affects Grex. What bothers me far more is the possibility of the net-censorship forces using this as a first law, and trying to pass successively more restrictive laws as the need "arises".
Yeah, from what I've read this one is vastly different than the last one, and its Congressional backers have been claiming that it takes care of the Constitutional problems the last one had. The Clinton Administration, on the other hand, publicly supported the last one but is saying that this one is likely unconstitutional. A large part of the problem here is that most of the congress people don't have much control over whether to vote for these things. Rather than letting it rise or fall on its merits, People pushing legislation like these generally push them into much larger bills that have to pass, which they can do in small committees rather than in the whole Congress. The original CDA was stuck into the Telecommunications Act, which has been really important legislation for lots of other reasons. In this legislation that basically reworked the rules for the entire US telecommunications industry, the CDA was a really tiny part. This latest legislation got slipped into the Federal Budget, if I remember correctly, tacked onto a provision that provided some money for Internet access for schools, or something like that. Congress was not likely to sink the entire Federal Budget to vote against this, nor was Clinton likely to veto the Budget over this, especially if they felt that it was going to get thrown out in court anyway.
A blue ribbon on the main web page is fine with me. We did that for
the first CDA.
To address raven's concern about apathy, I think the comparative
lack of online discussion of CDA II, compared to CDA I, is due to
a combination of factors:
(a) Burnout. ("Do we have to go through this *again*?") I'm not
defending this, but I think it's a factor.
(b) Lack of apparent applicability to Grex (as STeve notes).
(c) By their response to CDA I, the courts have shown that they
will uphold the First Amendment. Therefore, the danger seems
less than the first time around, when we didn't have a clear
idea what the courts would do.
I don't think that the lack of response means that we're a bunch of
indifferent slackers or worse.
The same groups that fought CDA I in the courts have initiated a
challenge to CDA II, by the way.
Scg's #16 slipped in. Yep, CDA II is a "rider". A pernicious practice, but it's done all the time.
re #14 & #18 Thanks for the support for the blue ribbon idea.
Re #15: Actually, they are "thinking", like politicians that is. Few if any have ever lost an election by coming down in favor of "protecting children." And few have the courage to oppose something on principal if an opponent could later point to the vote as being "against protecting children." Nowadays, I honestly believe a majority of the electorate would vote away the Constitution if the debate was phrased in terms of "protecting children."
And indeed, if our Constitution really were harming children, it would be worth changing. However, saying that something is "to protect children," and actually doing things to protect children, are different things entirely.
In the real world they're different. In the world of the 10-second sound bite who can tell?
steve, your hypothetical is a very subjective standard... the constitution *does* harm children, in the minds of those who want to change it because they believe it harms children. that doesn't mean *I* think that it harms children, or that i want it changed...
Right. I don't think the Constitution is harming children, at least to the extent that changes to it wouldn't in general do more harm, so I support leaving it alone. If there were a provision in the Constitution that I felt were harming children, I would think the Constitution needed to be changed. But, the US is the World's second largest democracy (India being the largest). The US Constitution is ammendable, but intentionally it was made rather difficult to ammend. If I felt the Constitution were harming children, I couldn't just go out and ammend it; I would have to convince a really large number of other people that it was worth ammending. Likewise, those who now feel that free speech harms children would have to convince a lot of other people that it was worth changing the constitution to get rid of freedom of speech, to protect the children. It's one thing to push a rider on the budget bill through Congress, but I don't see the CDA making it as a Constitutional ammendment any time soon. That sort of thing tends to get much closer examination.
well, i care about this issue a lot. i have had something about this on my website for about 6 months now. i suppose it is time to update it, now that this got passed (that, and I could remove the marquee asking for pledges for the June 8th Ecology Center Bik-a-thon, though I suppose that, much like Christmas lights, i could just leave it up for NEXT year ;-). I imagine that a fair number of people care about it far more than they have expressed in this conference. It is probably good to assume that for every 1 person who said something about this, 10 have heard about it. Of course, these numbers are still low, so I urge everyone to go send an e-mail / fax right now. F'real. Take the initiative NOW please. As far as having an electorate that doesn't care about the constitution, they are only representing American interests. Americans, as a general rule, don't care about the constitution either, as they are too lazy to find out what is going on in their government, and presumably think that what they hear on the evening news is "correct" and "complete." If people would take the initiative to find out what is happening in their government, we wouldn't be facing this problem right now. The fact of the matter is, most of the time the only people who are aware of the governments workings are the Christian right and other politically-organized and politically polarized action groups, who don't typically represent the views of the average American. When the average american hears on the news that the government is cracking down on kiddie porn with a new bill, however, they are pretty likely to think it is a really bitchin' thing, without realizing that what is actually being cracked down on is personal freedom and privacy. The long and short is, in order for this current state of affairs to stop, more Americans need to TAKE THE INITIATIVE to find out what their government is REALLY doing. This is the only way to prevent more CDA's and prayer in schools bills from being produced in the future.
The CDA keeps getting passed because a lot of people want it. Just as with motorcycle helmets, seatbelt laws, TV/movie/music rating systems, and laws about smoking, drinking and drugs, they want someone to make choices for their neighbors. No one, of course, needs regulation himself, but everyone else around does. It isn't driven by just a few people. It's driven by most people. The CDA was a popular law. The president held his nose when he signed it, (and so did a lot of senators and congressmen as they passed it) but he signed it -- he had to. People wanted it. The CDA II will be even more popular, because it more directly targets the 'protection of children'.
#26 If that's true, then why have both bills (the original CDA and "CDA II") had to be tacked on to large measures that were passed based on the support for the large measures and in spite of opposition to the CDAs? (the first CDA was tacked onto a huge telecommunications bill that was basically guaranteed to pass and the second one was added to this year's last-minute budget compromise. In a way, the full Congress has never voted on either CDA, only on the proposition "you can have this other thing that you really want only if you'll also accept this CDA.") As far as the popularity of the bills go, that's in large part a function of how they're described. If you ask people if they're in favor of laws to protect children from pornography you're going to get a lot of positive responses. Ask them, though, if they're in favor of censorship and the response is going to change considerably. Unfortunately a lot of the press coverage that these bills get uncritically uses the descriptions provided by the pro-CDA folks without also raising the censorship issue. If you ask me, that's a pretty significant omission for our nation's supposedly vigilant free press to be making.
Well put, Mike - I agree with that whole response.
Actually, congress did vote on the original CDA. It lost. There is a significant and powerful *minority* that supports CDA and its ilk. They are the conservative right, the same people who want to outlaw abortion, legalize school prayer, and all that. I've never seen anything to suggest these people command an absolute majority of popular opinion. (Otherwise, I imagine we'd be voting in Pat Robertson's 3rd presidential term in the next election). Besides the conservative right, CDA and its ilk also enjoy a certain amount of support on the left, from "femninists" who are against "exploitation" of the female body in any form. It should be noted that while there are a *lot* of commercial oriented pornography sites out there, there are also a significant number of sites oriented around "erotic art" (some of which are commercial, and some of which are not), as well a significant number of sites that contain what I guess you could describe as "sexually explicit" amateur material (mostly stories). I don't think many people will shed tears if the commercial oriented pornography sites were to disappear (especially as they seem to generate a significant amount of spam). On the other hand, I suspect CDA II would also apply to most, if not all, of these other sites, and it is likely to have a dampening effect on many other sites as well. It could well effect grex. If we have a "singles" conference here, would we be able to buy a commercial internet ISP connection and allow people on the internet to read that conference? Or would most commercial ISP's enact stricter regulations on customers to avoid any possibility of risk?
ISPs are not responsible for content that they do not originate, according to this law, so ISPs can't be held accountable for content created by their customers, or users of their customers' systems.
Except that over-zealous prosecutors in (I believe) New York state recently seized equipment and shut down temporarily a couple of ISPs (Dreamscape and Buffnet) for carrying the Usenet newsgroup alt.binaries.pictures.pre-teen. Even if the CDA protects them or they are found to be common carriers and not responsible for the material they carry they will still have suffered considerable hassle and the actions of the New York Attorney General's office can be expected to have a chilling effect.
Re #26: You say: "The CDA keeps getting passed because a lot of people want it." This demonstrates the error in your logic. People want results (protecting children from inappropriate sites). They do not necessarily want the methods that politicians have chosen to achieve those results. Part of the problem is that the technical aspects of this issue escape both the general public and the average politician. Its interesting that there has been almost no discussion of creating new "filterable" appellations such as ".sex", even though this idea periodically gets raised. If Grex truly wants to accomplish something, it would be to educate the public and politicians about the technological alternatives available to achieve results the public may desire, as well as a clear-headed discussion of the technological and social implications of the various alternatives.
Yeah. If people want to stop their kids from being exploited, they should do something towards looking after them. This doesn't mean depending on a piece of legislation, because all the legislation will do is make the people breaking the laws that already exist (and last I checked, there was a certain legal age that you have to be to be involved in the production of pornography) a bit more careful. This is redundant, unneccesary legislation that is being marketed as being pro children. Of course, every state in the country has an age of consent, every state has laws against minors making pornography. So, this law won't really accomplish a whole lot except to annoy ME, an ardent believer in free speech. I am not the kind of person who normally subscribes to mass beliefts, however I used to think that I was a patriot because I felt almost religiously about the constitution. I feel that newCDA is a violation of the constition, and if it gets passed, I won't even be able to believe in our country anymore.
By the way, while were at it, would someone care to define what porn is?
"Porn is sexually explicit material I don't like; Erotica is sexually explicit material I do like."
Re resp:32 - "The technological alternatives available to achieve results the public may desire" -- Now that's a thorny area. I don't think there are any such alternatives, and am pessimistic that there ever will be. Designing a filtering protocol that's flexible and actually works -- i.e. gives the user some reasonable degrees of freedom about what to filter, then correctly filters all such things without false positives -- is extremely difficult. I'm not at all surprised at the news stories I read about failures of existing filtering products -- letting through stuff they weren't supposed to, rejecting things they shouldn't have rejected. The PICS project (PICS = Platform for Internet Content Selection)is one very ambitious attempt to provide standards for doing filtering. (See http://www.w3.org/PICS/ for lots of info.) It provides a flexible protocol for content labeling, which can then be used as a basis for intelligent filtering. PICS shows promise of being useful in various areas, for instance as a basis for intelligent search engines. However, it requires cooperation among users, rating agencies, and content providers. If you're using it to screen "content unsuitable for minors", what do you do about providers who don't cooperate with the standard? I'm a firm advocate of free speech and support putting a blue ribbon on Grex's web page (an issue being discussed in another item). But I'm pessimistic about the prospects of coming up with a technical solution for something that -- if it's a problem at all -- is a social problem.
Since parents can control (up to a point) what books and magazines are in their homes (but not in the library), one "fix" would be software that (even imperfectly) scans for (levels of) "objectionable material" (using the "contemporary community standards", for example), and then sends a message to the parents to look at it and decide if they wish to filter it. [I'm not yet sure that I think this is a *good* idea, but it is an idea that meets current parental responsibility and rights.]
CDA type legislations all deals with drawing lines between decency and indecency, lines that become extremely complicated, jagged, and undefinable. The lines shoudn't be drawn in the first place.
Does it matter if lines are drawn so long as acting on the lines is optional? If we can choose to accept or reject any lines, then they just become an opinion (and others can offer them too). It is the enforcement of opinions that is objectionagble.
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- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss