Playboy Magazine is a publication that I find personally quite offensive. I don't read it, I won't spend my hard-earned money buying it, and I certainly don't believe that young children should be exposed to it. I happen to have this copy of the February 1996 issue of Playboy because it features an interview with a prominent member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), Andre Bacard, author of "The Computer Privacy Handbook." Andre was interviewed for The Playboy Forum about the state of privacy in the digital age. There were no photographs of Andre, lewd or otherwise, accompanying the interview, although there are plenty of other photographs in this issue of Playboy that I would consider to be pornographic.

But Playboy Magazine, which is far more accessible to far more children than any of the pornographic web sites on the Internet, is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. So is Seventeen Magazine, which, according to U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, is among the ten most frequently challenged school library materials in the country. I support the First Amendment, and I believe that it reflects the principles that this nation was founded on -- tolerance and respect for the beliefs and views of others.

I'd like to take a moment to remind everyone what the First Amendment says:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

CPSR, along with nineteen other public interest organizations, is a plaintiff in American Civil Liberties Union versus Janet Reno, one of two lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the CDA on the basis that it violates the First Amendment.

It is important to note that the very first clause of the First Amendment addresses the right to religious freedom. The Northern Europeans who brought Western Civilization to North America came here because they wanted to practice their religion without the interference of government. It is a more than a little ironic that many of the proponents of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) are active in the Christian Coalition. Perhaps some of these folks need to be reminded that tolerance works both ways.

By attempting to impose their values on all Americans, proponents of the CDA are moving us away from the principles of tolerance and freedom that were so important to our Founding Mothers and Fathers. This is unfortunate, because a tolerant society nurtures diversity, and a diverse society nurtures our growth and development as human beings, as well as our sense of community.

The Internet enables human beings to achieve a sense of community without regard to geography. Think about this for a moment. As the Executive Director of CPSR, I communicate daily with CPSR members throughout the United States. My professional life has been enriched by the support of people I've never even seen. My personal friendships with former neighbors and colleagues in distant locations have been strengthened through cyberspace.

As a tool of communication, the Internet is as useful to White Supremacist organizations in promoting community among its membership as it is to CPSR in promoting community among our membership. As offended as I am by the pornographic and demeaning way in which women are portrayed in Playboy, I'm even more deeply offended by the hateful and intolerant beliefs promoted by White Supremacist organizations. I consider the hate and intolerance that these organizations promote to be far more harmful to children than the pictures of naked women found in Playboy Magazine. But I won't deny these organizations their rights under the First Amendment, in cyberspace as well as on the streets of Skokie, Illinois.

Despite the rhetoric from its Christian Right supporters, the CDA is not about protecting our children from child molesters. CPSR supports the right of parents to control what their children are exposed to as strongly as we support the First Amendment. It is not an either-or choice, although proponents of the CDA have attempted to characterize it as such.

Consider, for example, the statement attributed to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) by Declan McCullagh in a recent update on the CDA court challenge that was published on the web.

"We provide free anonymous access to the net to sexual abuse survivors," the unidentified individual explained. "I . . . have been told by these folks themselves that some of them are under the age of 18 -- hell, I've had a few that tell me that they are 13 or 14 years old, and that they are still at home, still being raped by their perps. We provide an outlet for their frustrations, emotional support, a community for them, people to talk to, and support for them if they choose to report their abuse. None of this would be possible if Taylor and friends had their way."

The reference was to Bruce Taylor, an architect of the CDA, who is promoting the idea that every computer on the Internet should be reprogrammed to run software that tags users as adults or minors, so the ISP will know whether it can send out "indecent" material.

Complex technological schemes like this are not only unnecessary to protect our children, they raise significant privacy concerns for civil libertarians and other privacy advocates.

As Senator Leahy noted in his February 9, 1996, statement to the U.S. Senate on repealing the CDA, the bill is a misguided attempt to protect children that tramples on the free speech rights of all Americans.

"The people at risk of committing a felony under this new law are not child pornographers, purveyors of obscene materials or child sex molesters," he said. "These people can already be prosecuted and should be prosecuted under longstanding Federal criminal laws."

The U.S. Department of Justice, which has the unenviable task of defending the CDA against challenges to its constitutionality brought by the ACLU and the American Library Association, introduced testimony in the court hearing recently by Dan R. Olsen, Jr., incoming director of the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and currently the head of the computer science department at Brigham Young University. Olsen's proposal is to require every individual who uses the Internet to label every USENET post, email message, FTP site file, web page, chat room and IRC channel if the content is "inappropriate" for minors.

For this system to work, servers with indecent material will have to register users as adults or minors, and every ISP will have to tag every email account as adult or minor. It would also mean a massive investment by everyone in software that supports this kind of labeling. It may even have some effect on efficiency, which would add an unjustifiable burden on networks that already experience bottlenecks.

The result will be a lengthy pre-registration process before anyone can access a web site, and the server will have to keep a database with the identities of all of the adult users, complete with credit card numbers. An adult who wanted to access hundreds of web sites with indecent material would be forced to establish hundreds of passwords.

If you're thinking that this might not be a bad idea since only perverts want to access "indecent" material anyway, think again. CPSR's web site qualifies as indecent under the CDA -- and this is an organization devoted to social responsibility, not sexual pornography.

What's indecent about CPSR's web site? Nothing, in fact. As is the case with the nineteen other plaintiffs in the ACLU lawsuit, there is nothing "obscene," titillating or even suggestive on the CPSR web site. Nevertheless, under the provisions of the CDA, CPSR would be subject to a $250,000 fine and two years in prison if a minor visits our web site. Why, because some of the discussions and position statements archieved on CPSR's server contain words that might be considered "indecent."

Part of the problem is that Congress never defined the term "indecent." According to Mike Godwin, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the term "indecency" is a far broader concept than "obscenity.

But that's only part of what's wrong with the CDA. As WIRED editor Todd Lappin explained in a thoughtful background article on the issue, another problem with the CDA is that it applies an indecency standard that was originally created for broadcast radio and television to the Internet.

According to Lappin, the "indecency" standard can be traced back to the Radio Act of 1927. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the "indecency" restrictions in a narrowly worded decision in 1978 in the case of FCC v. Pacifica. That decision made it clear that the standard was only meant to be applied to broadcast radio and television, and identified the specific characteristics of the broadcast media which make it subject to a different -- and lesser -- standard of First Amendment protection than other media.

Basically, the Court found that the uniquely pervasive nature of broadcast media made it impossible to avoid all objectionable material. Also, broadcast media is uniquely accessible to children.

In approving the CDA, Congress and President Clinton ignored the logic of the Pacifica ruling. "The assumption seems to have been that if the medium conveys messages through a cathode ray tube, then it must be like TV, and should be regulated as such," Lappin noted.

If this was, indeed, the assumption behind the CDA, it reveals -- more than anything -- how ignorant our lawmakers are about the Internet. When you turn on a television or radio, information is broadcast at you until you turn it off. When you turn on a computer, you have to actively go in search of information. And as anyone who is just beginning to surf the Internet knows, locating what you are seeking in cyberspace is a lot more complex than punching the channel changer on your TV's remote control.

Exactly what impact the CDA will have on the evolution of cyberspace is still an open question. CPSR, along with numerous other public interest organizations, is hopeful that the courts will ultimately rule that the CDA is unconstitutional. As Christopher Hansen, lead counsel for the ACLU, noted after the first two days of hearings in Philadelphia:

"The censorship law is technically and economically infeasible to enforce, it blocks speech that has value to a great many people, and it ignores effective alternatives available both to protect children and to protect free speech."

If we're truly fortunate, the effort, energy and commitment that is currently being focused on fighting this assault on our First Amendment rights will do much more than simply get a bad law overturned. I'd like to think that it can result in increased understanding, respect and tolerance for the views and beliefs of others. And as I noted earlier, a tolerant society nurtures diversity, which in turn nurtures our growth and development as human beings and as members of our communities.

Audrie Krause     * Executive Director *    CPSR
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
P.O. Box 717   *   Palo Alto   *   CA   *  94302
Phone: (415) 322-3778    *   Fax: (415) 322-4748
Send E-mail to:                 akrause@cpsr.org

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