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This is a timeline of the things that have happened up to early December. Some
more stuff has happened recently, but I haven't had the time to put it on the
page yet, but it is soon coming. This is
a very rough summary, and I hope to improve the writing as time goes by, but
for now this will have to do. I have links throughout this entire paper, so
that you can look up the information on your own, if you don't believe what
I am saying or just so you can access the information on your own. I
now have my English paper on the topic posted below. It's based on the
same information and it has my views on this entire issue. If you want
to read that, click here. If not, scroll down for
the timeline.
If by chance parts of this shows up as a line of X's, it is
because of the NetNanny filtering tool put onto the computers by my college.
It is annoying and very distracting, but I can't cut it off. This will only
show how ineffective some filtering software is!
On September 25, 1789 the first Congress of the United States proposed
twelve amendments to the Constitution that would define the people’s
individual immunities from the government to appease the people that were
against the Constitution. The first two amendments were not ratified, but
on December 15, 1791 the remaining ten were. These ten amendments became
known as the The Bill of Rights.
The First-- and in some opinions, the most controversial-- Amendment refers
to the freedom of speech.
Since the adoption of the Bill of Rights, many cases have come before courts
declaring that the government and the people could not censor or discriminate
the material that was in books, magazines, and other media such the television
citing the First Amendment as protection. Recently, another case was brought
before courts about a relatively new media, the Internet. One side of the
case claimed that a bill passed in the Congress and signed into law
infringed upon the free speech rights of the people on the Internet. The
opposing side claimed that the bill did not infringe on anyone’s free speech
rights and was needed to protect minors from the potential pedophiles and
obscene pornography on the Internet. But before the argument could be
resolved, a question had to be answered by the judicial system-- is
the Internet more like books or like television and does it deserve full
protection of the First Amendment?
On February 1, 1996 a bill passed Congress called the Communications Decency
Act of 1996(CDA) that was part of a larger act called the Telecommunications Act of 1996. When the bill reached President Clinton, many groups that
protect the citizens’ civil rights and on-line free speech said that if the
President signed the bill, they would file a lawsuit claiming the bill
infringed upon the First Amendment rights of the people. On February 8
President Clinton signed the bill and a suit was filed on the following day.
The contents of the CDA were to amend the previous Communications Act of
1934 by including the current technology such as cable television and the
Internet. The intent of part of the bill was to protect minors from child
pornography on the Internet. Some of the ways the CDA tried to amend the former
act was to stop the transmission of indecent or obscene materials--
pictures, descriptions, or other materials-- that were harmful to minors
from adults.
The American Civil Liberties Union(ACLU),
the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF),
the Electronic Privacy Information Center(EPIC), and
seventeen other groups and private citizens argued against the Attorney
General of the United States, Janet Reno, and other parties before Judge
Buckwalter of the Eastern District Court of Pennsylvania claiming the
current terms of the CDA infringed upon the free speech rights of the
various web sites on the Internet. Judge Buckwalter issued a temporary
restraining order on the enforcement of the CDA on the basis that the term
“indecent” was too vague to provide the basis of a criminal prosecution.
A second suit was filed by twenty-seven other groups and the two cases were combined so that a three judge District Court could rule on the CDA. The three judges wrote individual opinions but came to the same conclusion that the CDA was unconstitutional and did indeed infringe upon people’s right to free speech.
Chief Judge Sloviter did say that in the case of some of the material found
on the Internet, the CDA was compelling, but the CDA itself was too broad
and interfered with some of the other material on the Internet. Judge
Buckwalter again said that some of the terms were too vague within the CDA
and the term “indecency” was not clearly defined within the CDA unlike the
word “obscenity.” He felt that the description of indecent material did not
exclude “anything of serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific
value.” Judge Dalzell felt that the nature of Internet communication
denied Congress the right to try and regulate the content of protected
speech on the Internet.
The Government felt the justices erred in their judgment and brought a suit against the On-line Free Speech movement in the Supreme Court.
The opening arguments started on March 19, 1997 and the decision was handed
down on June 26, 1997. The Supreme Court agreed with the previous court
decision. Although the Court did believe that that sexually explicit material
could be accessed on the Internet quite easily, it was the opinion of the
Court that several deliberate steps had to be taken to access that material
unlike radio and television, where the only steps that needed to be taken
was to buy the technology and change the channels. Also the child accessing
this material, had to be well versed in the use of the computer and the
Internet, as well as be able to use the Internet with no adults watching.
The Court also found that the CDA was too broad in its coverage. It felt
that the material considered indecent or patently offensive included a great
deal of material that was nonpornographic and had great educational value.
They also felt that the community standard that the material on the Internet
would fall under would be the standards of the community most likely to be
offended by the message being sent. The Court felt that the CDA as it stood
placed a heavy burden on the Internet and if put into affect, would eliminate
a large part of the Internet community. In the end, the Internet was granted
full coverage of the First Amendment, much like the protection granted to
books and magazines.
After the Court decision, there was some celebration by the On-line Free
Speech movement and the members of the Internet community. However, this
celebration was to be short lived, for the Internet was about to be attacked
in a different way by some of the members of the Free Speech Movement group.
On July 15, 1997, a summit meeting on Internet censorship was announced by
the White House. The groups invited to the meeting were representatives from
Microsoft, America On-line, and Prodigy (who were all fighting against the CDA),
executives from filtering software companies, and the head of an Internet
censorship group Enough is Enough. The
American Library Association was also invited, but groups such as EPIC--
which is based in Washington, DC, the ACLU, EFF, and other civil liberty
groups were not invited. The ACLU sent out a press statement saying that
in denying the civil liberties groups the right to going to the meeting, the
Clinton Administration was denying the voice of the individual on-line users.
Later in the day, the White House called the ACLU to join them in the meeting.
After the meeting had taken place, the ACLU issued a press release stating
they were wary of the effort by Netscape, Microsoft, and other industry
companies to embed a rating software code in the World Wide Web browser.
This software would then use a ratings software to rate the sites on the
Internet and screen out the sites deemed harmful to children. The ACLU
warned the groups not to put out a universal ratings system, but several
third-party rating systems that would allow diverse groups to create their
own filtering systems. That would allow parents to choose from many different
systems instead of having no choice at all. A couple weeks later, the ACLU
issued a white paper describing the various rating plans proposed and their
threats on free speech on-line. They also discussed their stand and views
on the issue of Internet filtering software.
On November 8, 1997, a new bill, S.1482,
was proposed to correct the section of the CDA that the Supreme Court said
swept too broadly. This bill tried to ban on-line material that was thought
to be harmful to minors. The ACLU said this bill would again restrict adults
from accessing protected speech. Any commercial on-line distributors of
material that was considered harmful to minors could face up to six months
in jail and a $50,000 fine. One problem with that was "distributors" could
mean anyone from a virtual bookstore, a promotional site for a movie, or
possibly America On-line or Microsoft. A second problem with the bill was
it did not differentiate between things that might considered harmful to a six
year old but helpful to a sixteen year old.
A second summit meeting was scheduled about the filtering software on December 1-3,
1997. In response to the second meeting the ACLU and other groups joined up
to create the Internet Free Expression Alliance (IFEA). At the meeting,
Barry Steinhardt, the Associate Director of the ACLU, made a statement. In
the statement he told the press that the ACLU and the other members of the
IFEA were not oppose to the idea of filtering software. The only thing they
wanted was to make software developed user controlled, however the different
software available did not provide the user with full control over the program.
Steinhardt also outlined a possible scenerio that might develop with the use
of the software developed. The end result was that unrated speech is blocked
by the software, search engines could ignore the existence of unrated or sites
with a high rating, and the government makes rating sites mandatory and
misrating a site a crime.
One search engine, Net Shepherd Family Search, adopted the model of ignoring
the existence of unrated sites or sites that have too high a rating. Net
Shepherd and AltaVista released Family Search on October 6, 1997. A person
would enter a request at Family Search. The request would then be forwarded
to the AltaVista search engine and the results would then be sent back to
Net Shepherd. Net Shepherd would then filter the results through its rating
system, and the filtered results were then presented to the user.
EPIC sent out a report, in December of 1997, summarizing their survey using
Net Shepherd and an unfiltered search engine, AltaVista. In one test, EPIC
sent out a search looking for the Arbor Heights Elementary School. That
particular site had been visited by over 70,000 people in the last two years
and published a magazine for kids between the ages of seven and twelve. When
they used AltaVista to look up “Arbor Heights Elementary”, they received 824
hits. But when they used Net Shepherd, they only received 3 hits. Looking
up other schools, produced similar results. Other searches they conducted
used other phrases like the following: American Red Cross, UNICEF, United
Way, Disneyland, National Zoo, Boy Scouts of America, National Aquarium in
Baltimore, Thomas Edison, Betsy Ross, United States Supreme Court, Dr. Seuss,
and others. EPIC found that the software blocked access to 95-99 percent
of the material that might be of interest to minors. They also found that
the more popular the topic, the more the search engine was inclined to block.
A third thing they found was that the the search engine did not make it more
difficult to get to certain senstivie topics anymore than it would block
access to sites of general interest.
I ran a search that EPIC ran with Net Shephard and discovered that either, Net
Shephard had changed the format of the search or EPIC used some other method
to count the hits.
To go to the links listed below, click here.
“...‘Shut the door, they’re coming through the window, shut the window, they’re coming through the door,’ are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had ,bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place....” --Ray Bradbury “Coda” Fahrenheit 451, 1979
In his novel, Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury approaches the problem of censorship. The main character in the novel, Guy Montag, is a firemen paid to set books and the houses they are in on fire. In the middle of the book, he is questioning his profession and why he does the things he does. In the end, Montag ends up running away from his life and living with a group of people that are against the burning of books and were only biding their time until they could recite the books they had memorized and get them printed again. At one time the American Civil Liberties Union asked if cyberspace was burning, using this as an allusion to Fahrenheit 451. They answered the question with, “It’s covered with a dense smoke, but where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
Recently, a case was brought before courts about the censoring of the Internet. One side of the case claimed that a bill passed in the Congress and signed into law infringed upon the free speech rights of the people on the Internet. The opposing side claimed that the bill did not infringe on anyone’s free speech rights and was needed to protect minors from the potential pedophiles and obscene pornography on the Internet. But before the argument could be resolved, a question had to be answered by the judicial system: Is the Internet more like books, or is it more like television and does it deserve full protection of the First Amendment?
On February 1, 1996 a bill passed Congress called the Communications Decency Act of 1996(CDA) that was part of a larger act called the Telecommunications Act of 1996. When the bill reached President Clinton, many groups that protect the citizens’ civil rights and on-line free speech said that if the President signed the bill, they would file a lawsuit claiming the bill infringed upon the First Amendment rights of the people. On February 8, President Clinton signed the bill, and a suit was filed on the following day.
The contents of the CDA were to amend the previous Communications Act of 1934 by including the current technology such as cable television and the Internet. The intent of part of the bill was to protect minors from pornography on the Internet. Some of the ways that the CDA tried to amend the former act was to stop the transmission of obscene or indecent materials-- pictures, descriptions, or other materials-- that were harmful to minors from adults.
The American Civil Liberties Union(ACLU), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Electronic Privacy Information Center(EPIC), and other On-line Free Speech groups and private citizens argued against the Attorney General of the United States, Janet Reno, and other parties about the constitutionality of the CDA. They agreed that pornography was a problem on the Internet, but they did not feel that the CDA was the solution. The EFF went so far as to say the CDA actually hindered finding a solution. The way the bill was written did not discriminate between works of art, literature, on-line medical texts, and other things. The free speech movement also felt that the very nature of the Internet change if the CDA was passed-- no longer would the Internet be a place for free exchange of thoughts and ideas. They wanted the Internet to receive full protection of the First Amendment just like books and magazines have.
Janet Reno, Attorney General of the United States, other branches of the government, and Internet censorship group Enough is Enough, felt otherwise. One part of their argument was that by having pornography on the Internet, it was just an easier way for pedophiles and other people to gain access to minors on-line. They also interpreted the CDA as already discriminating between works of art, literature, and the like. They felt the nature of the Internet would remain the same and that the only areas that would change would be the areas where pornography was found and other sites deemed obscene in nature, and the CDA must be considered constitutional, because it was written to protect the children from those sites.
The first case was argued before Judge Buckwalter of the Eastern District Court of Pennsylvania. He issued a temporary restraining order on the enforcement of the CDA on the basis that the term “indecent” was too vague to provide the basis of a criminal prosecution. A second suit was filed and the two cases were combined so that a three judge District Court could rule. The three justices wrote individual opinions but came to the same conclusion that the CDA was unconstitutional and did indeed infringe upon people’s right to free speech on the basis that some of the terms in the bill were too vague and covered too much ground.
The Government felt the justices erred in their judgment and brought a suit against the On-line Free Speech movement in the Supreme Court. The opening arguments started on March 19, 1997 and the decision was handed down on June 26, 1997. The Supreme Court agreed with the previous court decision. Although the Court did believe that that sexually explicit material can be accessed on the Internet quite easily, it was the opinion of the Court that several deliberate steps to gain access to the internet itself unlike with radio and television where the only steps that needed to be taken was to buy the technology and change the channels. Also the child accessing this material, had to be well versed in the use of the computer and the Internet, as well as be able to use the Internet with no adults watching.
The Court also found that the CDA was too broad in its coverage. It felt that the material considered “indecent” or “patently offensive” included a great deal of material that was nonpornographic and had great educational value. They also felt that the “community standard” that the material on the Internet would fall under would be the standards of the community most likely to be offended by the message being sent. The Court saw the CDA, as it stood, place a heavy burden on the Internet and if put into affect, eliminate a large part of the Internet community. In the end, the Internet was granted full coverage of the First Amendment.
I feel that both groups are right. Minors should not be able to access pornographic material on the Internet, but the Internet should not be changed just so minors are protected. Parents should be the ones that censor the material that their child is allowed to see on their own personal computer. I also feel that parents that fought to have the CDA passed, were just looking for somebody else to over another part of their parenting job. They don't want to spend the time necessary to keep an eye on what their kids are doing, so they want some outside force come in and do the job for them. If they bought their kid a computer and installed it in their kid’s room and gave them access to the Internet, those parents get what they deserve. Kids who are not in high school don't need private access to the Internet and the Internet is not the modern day baby-sitter, just like TV, game systems, and other things aren’t.
Unfortunately, this fight is not over. A new bill, S. 1482, was proposed in Congress on November 8, 1997, that again tries to block out material on the Internet. That bill is going to be fought by the On-line Free Speech movement when Congress comes back into session. Also a couple of White House summit meetings have taken place to develop software to block out harmful material. The Free Speech Movement, which has now developed into the Internet Free Expression Alliance(IFEA) is fighting the software, claiming they will not stop until the software is completely user controlled. In my opinion, the only way for this fight to be resolved is to make the user controlled software, and stop passing bills to change the Internet. Because unless they do, the only way this problem will be resolved, is if the plug is pulled on the Internet and all the pages “burnt.”
Censorship on the Internet Links
Against Censorship
American Civil Liberties Union
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition
Electronic Privacy Information Center
Internet Free Expression Alliance
For Censorship
Enough Is Enough
The White House
To find the press releases about the internet, go to the Virtual
Library, and look for materials between February 8, 1996 and the current date. Some of the stuff has nothing
to do with censorship, but it can't be avoided.
Links to the Various Things Referred To
Reno, Attorney General of the United States et al. v. American Civil Liberties Union et al.
Telecommunications Act of 1996
The Bill of Rights
S.1482
This is another attempt at correcting the Communications Act
of 1934 like the CDA
My Links
Back to Whence You Came
Links for a Rainy Day
Quotes for Those Times When You Need Them Most
I Have the Audacity to Want to Be a Writer- Judge for Yourself
Songs- Food for Thought
Sign My Guestbook
