Since President Clinton signed the Communications Decency Act (CDA) on February 8, the commotion in cyberspace over its censorship provisions has grown intense. Ostensibly, the law aims to control cyberporn and children's access to it, but its broad indecency provision waters down, if not curtails, the First Amendment right to freedom of speech on the Internet.
A consensus formed quickly among those versed in the technical issues that the people who voted for this law do not understand the technology. Wired editor Louis Rossetto compares it to a situation where "the illiterate could tell you what to read." Many organizations who operate publicly accessible servers object to the CDA because they could be held responsible for information uploaded by anonymous users, or find themselves in violation of local indecency ordinances thousands of miles away for making controversial literary works accessible. Before the ink had dried on the president's signature, the American Civil Liberties Union (http://www.aclu.org/action/chill.html) on behalf of, among others, the American Library Association, reacted by filing suit in Philadelphia federal district court. A three-judge panel immediately instructed the government not to enforce the CDA and granted a temporary restraining order against prosecutions based on some provisions of the law.
Yet perhaps more striking than the Congressional and courtroom action was a document John Perry Barlow ([email protected]) fired off around the globe, on the day of the law's signing, titled "A Declaration Of The Independence of Cyberspace." The document states that, "These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty."
Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation (http://www.eff.org/), is a Republican, hippie, ex-county chairman from Wyoming--a mystic who makes references to Ayn Rand and used to co-write songs with the Grateful Dead. Sound like Northern Exposure? Welcome to the new world. The Internet is a space where left-wing cybersubversives find themselves in league with archconservatives like Newt Gingrich, who has also spoken out against the CDA. Antiporn feminists who supported the double-edged bill have inadvertently helped make distributing abortion and rape information punishable by huge fines and long stretches in the federal pen. Things keep getting curiouser and curiouser on the new frontier.
If you look for it, you can certainly find plenty of porn on the Net, principally on Bulletin Board Services, (BBSs), web sites, Usenet newsgroups, and illegal pornography is often privately traded after meetings on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels. Yet the media deserve a large part of the responsibility for the amount of porn on the Net because we hyped it so intensely. User-end software to keep porn off of the monitors of minors already is already available, but companies like SurfWatch can't get enough publicity from the media to sell their product. Porn draws the big media attention, but no one seems interested in the solutions to the problems it creates.
Sensationalized hype comes from even august publications like Time, which recently displayed a picture on its cover of a child and a menacing green glove reaching from his monitor as if evil spirits possessed the computer. Legislators, like the media, play to their public, and even if the CDA is struck from the bill for constitutional reasons, politicians who supported it will gain currency among their voters. But maybe it is unavoidable that legislation surrounding an insubstantial phenomenon like cyberspace will be equally insubstantial.