U.S. religious fanatics declare war on free speech on the Internet
Communications Decency Act Passed
commentary by Bob Bickford
Score another victory for bigotry and intolerance. The radical “Christian Right” has used manufactured paranoia about pornography on the Internet (which is at most a small problem that has been well addressed by existing laws and software solutions) to get some of the most sweeping censorship legislation ever passed in the United States signed into law.
Make no mistake about it, they have their boot planted firmly on the face of your First Amendment rights, and they’re about to start grinding it down. Under this new law, anything you say or do in cyberspace that could be found “indecent” – even in the most primitive and backward jurisdiction to be found in the U.S. – could land you in jail for 2 years and net you a $250,000 fine.
How did this happen??
On February 1st, 1995, Senators Exon (D-NE) and Gorton (R-WA) introduced “S.314”, which they called “The Communications Decency Act”. At the same time, an obscure engineering student at Carnegie Mellon University, Marty Rimm, was putting the finishing touches on an alleged “study” of “pornography in cyberspace”. (It has since been revealed that both of these apparently unrelated events were orchestrated by the radical right-wing people at the “Christian Coalition”, notably Ralph Reed). In reaction to the legislation, which proposed to censor all content of cyber-space down to the level of what would be acceptable for small children, a coalition of civil-liberties groups was rapidly formed; which included the US National Libertarian Party (a member of that coalition since March 20th, 1995).
Rimm’s “study” eventually became the basis for a lurid TIME magazine front-page article. However, once copies of the actual document were made available for analysis, it rapidly fell apart. TIME immediately ran a retraction, and Rimm was disinvited from a Congressional hearing on the subject of pornography on the Internet. Even TIME’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt, the author of the article, has recently admitted publically that “I agree that there were elements of fraud to the Rimm study.” Meanwhile, the legislative juggernaut rolled onward, in spite of heroic efforts by Senator Leahy (D-VT). Leahy spoke out against the censorship and introduced alternative legislation (S.714) to have the Justice Department examine the problem and determine if any additional laws were even needed. (People have been for years, and continue to be, prosecuted for crimes related to pornography on computer networks, including providing same to children, so there does not appear to be a need for new legislation if the issue was really a concern for children).
The “Stop 314 Coalition” organized an extremely effective on-line petition drive against the bill, collecting an unprecedented one hundred and ten thousand signatures, which were printed out and delivered to Congress. Later in the year, a letter-writing campaign was rapidly organized and over 20,000 persons participated in just a couple of days (each sending at least one letter in opposition to the bill). These efforts fell on deaf ears in Congress.
From the start, this act was a fully bi-partisan effort in both houses of Congress. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA) at one point voiced his vehement opposition to the censorship legislation, and the House overwhelmingly passed the “Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment Act” (HR 1978) introduced by Reps. Cox (R-CA) and Wyden (D-OR), a much better bill. Unfortunately, Gingrich's verbal support evaporated when the time came for the conference committee to resolve the differences between the House and Senate bills. The committee made the result much worse in several ways, most notably by substituting the vague (and legally undefined) word “indecent” for the phrase “harmful to minors” in an important section of the bill. It turns out that the Christian Coalition people were behind this change, once again proving that their agenda was never about children, but instead was about control. Language was also inserted to modify an old law so as to make it illegal to discuss abortion on computer networks – again prompted by the right-wing zealots at the Christian Coalition.
When the conference committee was through, both houses of Congress (with their eyes firmly on the corporate welfare represented by the overall Telecom Bill) passed the final bill overwhelmingly. Clinton signed the result into law on February 8th, 1996.
On the Internet’s World-Wide Web, tens of thousands of pages were turned black for 48 hours to protest the censorship legislation; many pages were reduced to nothing more than the words “this is what censorship looks like.” Steve Russell, a trial judge for 16 years in Texas and now retired, wrote a blistering article filled with foul language for a national newsletter as a deliberate violation of the law (for a test case), as the only definitively-known example of “indecency” in federal court cases are George Carlin’s infamous “Seven Dirty Words”.
The ACLU, EPIC, EFF, VTW, and several other plaintiffs joined forces to file suit against the new law within hours of its being signed. Justice Buckwalter, in the US District Court of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, granted a Temporary Restraining Order against one piece of the CDA on Feb 15th. Another suit was filed by NARAL and others against the provisions which censor discussion of abortion, although the DOJ has claimed in a letter that it believes that portion of the law to be unconstitutional on its face.
Heroes and Villains
There have been many heroes and villains over the past year. Some of the people that deserve the most praise are: Mike Godwin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation for his tireless efforts to tear away the layers of lies and deceptions surrounding the Rimm study and the CDA; Donna Hoffman of Vanderbilt University for her amazing work on the Rimm study; and Shabbir Safdar of VTW for endlessly coordinating the huge coalition against censorship (and for writing most of the alerts).
The villains include Senator Exon, Marty Rimm, and especially Ralph Reed and Cathleen Cleaver of the “Christian Coalition”. The latter three have proved themselves to be both very dangerous, not to mention being pathological liars of the worst sort. Despite the ready availability of the text of the law as passed, Cleaver in particular continues to make claims which are totally and completely false regarding what the bill does. They, and many others, claim to be concerned about children, but refuse to acknowledge that existing commercial software packages such as SurfWatch and NetNanny are completely effective against any accidental exposure to potentially offensive materials on the Internet.
Another set of villains has, unfortunately, been the national media, which almost totally ignored the issue until the black-web-pages protest, at which point the law had already been signed. When they did report on the subject, they most commonly regurgitated the propoganda of the Christian Coalition uncritically, and further confused the public about just what is available on-line. (In actual fact, there is some “indecent” material out there – just as there is in any bookstore or library. But just as in a library, the books don’t jump down off the shelves at you: you have to go actively looking for such material in order to find them).
What You Can Do
Most important is to stay informed! Look at the text of the law (available from all of the web sites listed below), read the many excellent legal analyses available, stay informed and form your own opinions rather than accepting what the news media tell you. Use the Internet yourself, and learn about the incredible wealth of excellent information which exists out there (one count indicates that there are over five million web pages alone!).
Some important web sites include:
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) http://www.eff.org/
Voter's Telecom Watch (VTW) http://www.vtw.org/
Center for Democracy and Technology http://www.cdt.org/
Each of these has many links to other resources, including EPIC, ACLU, etc.
The next most important thing to do is to counter the nonsense and hysteria whenever you hear it. If someone at the supermarket worries aloud about the “porn on the Net”, tell them that you use the Net every day (if you do) and tell them about something valuable or interesting that you found there (that obscure recipe, perhaps, or a source for those old automotive parts you wanted). If you’re like me, you can tell them that you’ve met dozens of friends, two lovers, and a wife on the Net (married for 7 years).
It is often said that the remedy for bad speech is not censorship, but good speech. Nowhere is this more true than on the Net, where absolutely everyone is equally powerful and equally able to say his or her piece, and where nobody ever has to listen to anyone who distresses or offends them. Unlike the television, it is neither a one-way medium, nor is it broadcast into your home whether you want it or not: the net is totally under your individual control for you. Take control!
Bob Bickford is the National Libertarian Party's Coordinator for the Anti-CDA Coalition
Robert Bickford rab@well.com
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