Here is an article from The New York Times regarding the destruction of our First Amendment rights in Cyberspace.
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February 8, 1996
Protests to Greet Communications Bill
By PETER H. LEWIS
President Clinton hailed it as a political triumph
and one of the most important pieces of legislation
in years. But to thousands of computer users and
advocates of free speech and civil rights, Thursday
will be a day of protest in cyberspace and in the
courts when the president signs the Telecommunications
Reform Bill.
Deep inside the complex legislation is a provision that
its supporters say will keep pornographers and
pedophiles from preying on children who use personal
computers. But opponents say the provision, known as
Computer Decency Act, goes too far by placing
unconstitutional restrictions on speech over the global
computer network known as the Internet, including an
apparent ban on discussions of abortion issues on
public computer networks.
Already, in what appears to be the largest organized
protest on the Internet, hundreds of computer screens
on the World Wide Web, the popular Internet service,
have protested the act by switching to black
have protested the act by switching to black
backgrounds -- "a thousand points of darkness,"
one protester called it -- and hundreds more
are expected to do so Thursday. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a
New York Democrat who was one of only 21 members of
Congress to vote against the measure, blackened his own
information site, or "home page" on the Web in support
of the protesters. Nadler called the act "the
cyberspace equivalent of book burning."
Supporters of the bill, including several religious and
conservative interest groups, dismissed the protest as
misguided.
"If the folks who are engaging in the protest are the
people who are addressed by the law, in other words
those sending pornography to children or making it
available to them, we would encourage them to stay
dark," said Cathleen A. Cleaver, the director of legal
studies for the Family Research Council in Washington.
Several groups said Wednesday that they would challenge
the new law in federal court in Philadelphia within
minutes of Thursday's expected signing of the bill,
which the White House has scheduled for 11 a.m. at the
Library of Congress. The opponents, led by the American
Civil Liberties Union, contend that the act places
unconstitutional restrictions on free speech on the
Internet. A protest rally is being organized in
Washington.
The act makes it a crime to transmit or allow indecent
material to be transmitted over public computer
networks to which minors have access. It authorizes the
government to restrict on-line speech and conduct,
imposing fines up to $250,000 and jail sentences of as
long as five years for anyone who makes indecent
material available to children in a public on-line
forum.
"For the first time, it puts the federal government in
the business of regulating the Internet and on-line
services," said Neal J. Friedman, a telecommunications
law specialist with the Washington law firm Pepper &
Corazzini.
The act also prohibits the use of interactive computer
services to make available an indecent communication to
minors. It defines indecency as "any comment, request,
suggestion, proposal, image or other communication
that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms
patently offensive as measured by contemporary
community standards, sexual or excretory activities or
organs."
*** In a move that appeared to surprise many House and
*** Senate members who voted for the legislation, Rep.
*** Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, a Republican and longtime
*** abortion foe, successfully added an amendment that
*** would extend into the electronic age a 123-year-old
*** legal prohibition, the Comstock Act of 1873, against
*** disseminating abortion information. In comments on the
*** House floor, Hyde denied that his intent was to halt
*** discussions of abortion on the Internet or on-line
*** services.
Rep. Patricia Schroeder, D-Colo., vowed to introduce
legislation to delete the passage. "A broader gag rule
is hard to imagine," she said. "This interpretation
threatens women's ability to use the Internet to find
out where and how to get a medical precedure that is
legal in this country." .
Steve Lieberman, a First Amendment specialist at the
Washington law firm Rothwell, Figg, Ernst & Kurz, said
the abortion passage was not likely to withstand a
court challenge. "It is very clear to me, and would be
clear to any judge who spent five minutes looking at
it, that this language is on its face
unconstitutional," Lieberman said.
Those challenging the Computer Decency Act contend that
the government has no mandate to dictate content on the
Internet, which the ACLU and other plaintiffs in the
suit liken more to newspapers and bookstores than to
broadcast media. They maintain that the "indecency" and
"patently offensive" definitions are overly broad and
vague, and that the act fails the Supreme Court's
requirement that efforts to restrict free speech be
kept to a minimum. Opponents of the act say that it
would reduce all discourse on the Internet to a level
acceptible to children in the most conservative parts
of the nation.
But Mike Russell, a spokesman for the Christian
Coalition, a conservative organization based in
Virginia Beach, Va., that lobbied for the indecency
law, said: "This is a predictable response from the
left. They're trying to overturn the same indecency
provisions and guidlines that radio and TV have been
following for years."
The language in the Computer Decency Act has been
upheld in other cases involving the broadcast media,
and the bill's supporters expect that it will withstand
any constitutional challenges. The Telecommunication
Reform Bill was passed overwhelmingly by Congress last
week.
Friedman, the telecommunications law specialist,
agreed. "The problem, from a legal standpoint, is
showing that the Internet is somehow less pervasive or
less intrusive than broadcasting, and that some higher
standard is required," he said. "I don't think they're
going to be able to do that."
Whatever the outcome of Thursday's protest, Internet
advocates say the dispute has galvanized computer users
nationally. "We will spread the voting records of
Congress on line," said Shabbir J. Safdar, a board
member of Voters Telecommunications Watch, a
grass-roots Internet advocacy group in New York City.
"We intend to insure that no one with an E-mail address
walks into a polling place in November uninformed."
Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company
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This page and all linked contents originating with me are Copyright (C) 1995-6 by Gordon E. Peterson II, all rights reserved worldwide. This page itself was last revised February 8, 1996 (but note that individual pages linked below this one probably have been revised more recently!).