Date: Tue, 02 Jan 96 09:06:55 EST
Errors-To: Comp-privacy Error Handler <owner-comp-privacy@uwm.edu>
From: Computer Privacy Digest Moderator <comp-privacy@uwm.edu>
To: Comp-privacy@uwm.edu
Subject: Computer Privacy Digest V8#001
Computer Privacy Digest Tue, 02 Jan 96 Volume 8 : Issue: 001
Today's Topics: Moderator: Leonard P. Levine
Volume 8
1995: The Year We Struggled with On-line Censorship (an essay)
Info on CPD [unchanged since 11/22/95]
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From: "Prof. L. P. Levine" <levine@blatz.cs.uwm.edu>
Date: 02 Jan 1996 08:13:41 -0600 (CST)
Subject: Volume 8
Organization: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Welcome to Volume 8 of the Computer Privacy Digest. I wish you all a
happy new year and look forward to a good year of work and turmoil.
In this special issue we will take a closer look at on-line
censorship.
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Leonard P. Levine | Moderator of: Computer Privacy Digest
Professor of Computer Science | and comp.society.privacy
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee | Post: comp-privacy@uwm.edu
Box 784, Milwaukee WI 53201 | Information: comp-privacy-request@uwm.edu
| Gopher: gopher.cs.uwm.edu
levine@cs.uwm.edu | Mosaic: gopher://gopher.cs.uwm.edu
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From: deselms@primenet.com (Gregg L. DesElms)
Date: 01 Jan 1996 23:52:01 -0700
Subject: 1995: The Year We Struggled with On-line Censorship (an essay)
Organization: Primenet
In reviewing various newsgroup activities in the past several days with
respect to the astonishing and troubling news about CompuServe and the
German government on Friday, I am surprised at the number of people
willing to accept some form of censorchip on the Internet. Upon
hearing and reading the story on Friday, I found myself moved to author
an essay (which I have now submitted for publication). I have posted a
pre-publication copy of it here for all who are interested to read:
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HEADLINE ---> 1995: The Year We Struggled with On-line Censorship
--------------------------------------------------------------------
by
Gregg L. DesElms
Copyright © 1995. All rights reserved. Use by permission only.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
This year, as with most years, during the weeks after Christmas we are
being inundated with television, radio, magazine and newspaper
"Year-in-Review" stories. Of course none of us will ever forget the
horrified faces of the families and friends of victims in the Oklahoma
City bombing. We watched with nervous anticipation as we witnessed the
uncommon heroism and admirable humility of a courageous, young Navy
pilot who lived for a week in the forest and then was rescued after
being shot down over Bosnia. And, as much as for any other reason,
1995 should be remembered as the year when peace in eastern Europe
finally became a real possibility.
But many Americans miss other important stories in the news. Perhaps
they're too busy, or too interested in watching old M*A*S*H reruns, to
really care. According to a study released just days before the end of
1995 and published by the Times-Mirror Center for the People and the
Press, fewer than 1-in-4 Americans pays very much attention to the news
at all.
So, many of them probably either missed or simply didn't appreciate the
irony of having one of the year's final stories on December 29th,
carried by most major news organizations, and describing how the German
government demanded that the on-line computer information service
giant, CompuServe, Inc., censor German users' access to more than 200
Internet Usenet newsgroups, ostensibly because of their pornographic
content. And, even more unsettlingly, it appears CompuServe has
decided to comply. This story, of course, comes on the heels of the
decidedly ridiculous brouhaha a month or so earlier in which America
On-line, Inc. banned (and then nearly immediately withdrew said ban on)
the use of the word "breast(s)" in user chat rooms, posting areas and
e-mail.
It was in 1995 that the debate over pornographic or otherwise
unsuitable prurient materials on the Internet and on-line services
really heated-up. In July the Senate approved the broadly restrictive
Communications Decency Act, and in August the House approved its
Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment amendment, all while the White
House was proposing compromises. Meanwhile, in early December, in an
impressive organized protest against censorship on the Internet,
thousands of on-line computer users telephoned, FAXed and e-mailed
their concerns to senators, congresspersons, and other government
officials while House and Senate conferees attempted to reconcile the
two bills for final approval and presentation to the President.
Computer users' fears that a wave of censorship is about to descend
upon the Internet, on-line services and other forms of electronic media
are valid. It is my belief that censorship, in any form, howsoever
well-intentioned (albeit fundamentally misguided), is among the most
dangerous affronts to freedom and liberty as we know it. It is as
sinister and imminently devastating to a free society as violent crime,
drugs, epidemics -- even war.
Of all our fundamental rights as Americans, perhaps none is so
simultaneously fundamental to our rights as human beings than the free
exchange of information and ideas, no matter what the form. In the
name of protecting the innocent against the harm to them that may be
done by their exposure to certain, admittedly objectionable and morally
repugnant materials, there are those among us who would unhesitatingly
denude our ability to exchange information of kinds and for reasons
personal and, therefore, not within their purview to judge or
regulate.
In order to secure some form of misguided, temporary and illusory
safety, these people would, without losing a moment's sleep or having
given any thought to the devastating secondary effects such reckless
actions could ultimately have, cash-in our fundamental rights as
citizens and as humans to freely express ourselves and to freely
consume the expressions of others so that, having responsibly informed
ourselves, we may act to materially affect the society in which we must
live. Without momentarily leaving my keyboard to consult a quotation
reference, I will risk being in error when I attribute to Benjamin
Franklin the following (most probably paraphrased) quote: "Those who
would sacrifice essential, fundamental liberties to purchase a little
temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
As citizens in a free and diverse society, each of us must take
responsibility for our respective small parts in helping to ensure that
everyone, friend and foe alike, has the ability to live according to
whatever personal, lawful standards they choose, and to freely exchange
information in any way they desire or deem necessary as long as doing
so does not infringe on the rights of others. I do not deny that
placing pornographic materials into a public forum where children may
access them with the same ease as they may access Dr. Seuss stories or
articles from the Encyclopaedia Britannica is, at the very least,
problematic and disturbing.
By all means, we must find a way -- a legal, constitutional way -- to
protect our children from premature exposure to prurient materials
which could not possibly be of any rational educational value to them
during those critical, formative years when we should be endeavoring to
shape their minds and their moral characters in preparation for lives
as productive and contributing citizens of our society and of this
global village. But we already have laws which, when properly applied,
could adequately punish those who, by placing pornographic materials
into what is fast becoming another form of the public domain (Internet
newsgroups, for example), are virtually guaranteeing that those
materials may be easily obtained and viewed by children. We simply
need to be able to identify the culprits.
It is the anonymous nature of the Internet which allows this, not the
existence of the Internet itself, nor any of its component parts.
Instead of shutting off access to any part of the Internet, I believe
we should, instead, simply work to ensure that no access is anonymous.
Slander and libel laws help to ensure that no one may, with impunity,
make statements about us in public or in the public media, whether
spoken or written, which are not provably true. These laws work, in
part, because the responsible mediators of the media routinely require
that the speaker or writer simply identify him or herself, thereby
inflicting the stark burden of personal accountability.
History has shown that personal accountability within a community is a
much more powerful natural deterrent to bad or unacceptable behavior
than a club, a stone wall or a padlock. Personal accountability to a
community is the ingredient that makes the old African adage, "It takes
an entire village to raise a child" a functional, workable concept.
Enforcing individual, personal accountability, not wholesale
censorship, is the first step in ensuring that the Internet will be a
place where children and adults may explore and research confidently
and freely, and where diverse viewpoints may be shared without fear of
governmental oppression or reprisal.
These are the seeds, the seeds of personal accountability and not the
seeds of censorship, which we must plant for our children today. The
example we set for them should not be that we would silence those who
write that which we do not wish to read on the Internet, but rather
that we make them accountable by asking them not to write it
anonymously. And when an individual breaches community trust by using
the Internet to expose children to materials which they should not see,
it should not be the media by which he disseminated those materials
that should be held accountable, but rather the individual himself, who
freely chose to do so with full knowledge of the community
consequences.
Those of us who use the Internet wisely and responsibly, and who
routinely regulate what our children see, hear and do there, deserve to
have it kept free, open, diverse, thought provoking, intellectually
stimulating, morally challenging and subject to the same First
Amendment protections as any other form of media.
If MIT's Nicholas Negroponte, in his fascinating book, Being Digital,
is even remotely accurate in his thoughtful, futuristic view of our
world and his concomitant assertion that today's Internet is merely the
forerunner of a complex, ubiquitous, massive personal
telecommunications infrastructure that will ultimately supplant most
forms of media as we know them today, then surely keeping the Internet
free, open and uncensored now is as important to maintaining the basic
tenets of our society as has been any battle or war fought at any time
in this nation's history.
Government sponsored, involuntary prior restraint and censorship, no
matter what seemingly harmless form it might take -- no matter what
common good it might, at first, seem to accomplish -- simply has no
place in a free society. Be it the Internet, television, radio,
newspapers, books, magazines, pamphlets or a preaching heretic standing
atop a broken-down wooden crate on the sidewalk at the corner of 5th
and Main, we must -- all of us -- jealously guard, with every ounce of
our beings, our precious civil liberties as guaranteed to us by our
Constitution and our glorious Bill of Rights. We must remain ever
vigilant to ensure that those who would sacrifice our liberties in
order to purchase for themselves a little temporary safety, as Benjamin
Franklin so wisely and profoundly warned us two centuries ago that
someone among us might attempt to do, are wholly unsuccessful.
In a speech to the New York Press Club in 1912, Woodrow Wilson said,
"Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come
from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of
resistance." And in the history of our great nation, far too many men
and women have willingly laid down their lives in battle to help ensure
that our Constitution and Bill of Rights would continue to guarantee
our liberty and our way of life. For the moment, the Internet is a bit
of a digital, electronic mystery to many Americans. But do not allow
the fact that it is not a body-strewn, battle-scarred clearing in a
bloody foreign war to mask its importance to all Americans as today's
battleground for our freedoms tomorrow.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Gregg L. DesElms is a 39-year-old computer consultant and free-lance
writer living and working in the Midwest. His Internet e-mail address
is deselms@primenet.com where you may write to him directly.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
KEYWORDS: Censorship, Internet censorship, prior restraint, CompuServe,
German Government, Year-in-Review, news, media, Internet, Usenet, newsgroups,
on-line, pornography, America On-line, AOL, Communications Decency Act,
Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment amendment, Exon, Cox-Wyden, liberty,
liberties, freedom, rights, children, ideas, pruient, safety, Benjamin
Franklin, public forum, Dr. Seuss, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Constitution,
Bill of Rights, First Amendment, anonymity, anonymous, accountability,
responsibility, slander, libel, deterrent, citizens, society, Global Village,
Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, telecommunications
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
*END*
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From: "Prof. L. P. Levine" <levine@blatz.cs.uwm.edu>
Date: 22 Nov 1995 14:25:54 -0600 (CST)
Subject: Info on CPD [unchanged since 11/22/95]
Organization: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
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---------------------------------+-----------------------------------------
Leonard P. Levine | Moderator of: Computer Privacy Digest
Professor of Computer Science | and comp.society.privacy
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee | Post: comp-privacy@uwm.edu
Box 784, Milwaukee WI 53201 | Information: comp-privacy-request@uwm.edu
| Gopher: gopher.cs.uwm.edu
levine@cs.uwm.edu | Web: gopher://gopher.cs.uwm.edu
---------------------------------+-----------------------------------------
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End of Computer Privacy Digest V8 #001
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