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Porn ban linked to Telcom Bill

Berkeley (March 25) - The Computer Decency Act, sponsored by Sen. Jim Exon (D-Neb.), is a threat to free speech, said Mike Godwin, a lawyer representing the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), at a meeting of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR). The meeting was held at the offices of BMUG, a Berkeley-based Macintosh computer user group.

According to Godwin, Congress is misguided in its attempts to criminalize the transmission of indecent information across the Internet. Citing the Government's attempts to apply regulations used in the broadcasting industry to the Internet, Godwin said that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was attempting to control the Internet like it controls television.

"The thing we have to fight is that only traditional media will be protected by the 1st Amendment. We must pay attention to how the Government is encroaching on our free speech rights on the Internet," said Godwin. The well-spoken and authoritative Godwin talked at length on the legal intricacies of how Congress and the Justice Department have created and administered the laws of cyberspace. The meeting in the BMUG offices was held in anticipation of the 5th Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference to be held in San Francisco this week.

Sen. Exon said that he introduced it to protect minors from pornographic material that is found on many on-line services. "I want to keep the information superhighway from resembling a red-light district," he has said. Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), a co-sponsor, said "it extends to computer users the same protections that currently exist for telephone users' against obscene phone calls.

The federal government has long enforced rules against obscene material being broadcast by radio or TV stations. The bill would extend similar standards to the fast-growing and largely unregulated field of on-line communications, where tens of millions of people worldwide sit at computers and trade information electronically.

The backers of the Computer Decency Act have skirted a single-issue vote in the United States Senate by incorporating an amendment into a massive telecommunications deregulation legislation package. Exon has withdrawn the Senate Bill 314 and has transformed the bill into an intricately worded amendment that protects on-line services.

The Computer Decency Act is now part of the massive telecommunications deregulation legislation that has been forwarded to the Senate for debate and voting. If passed in its current form the bill would instruct the Federal Communications Commission to devise ways to bar such material. Enforcement provisions of the proposed law includes as many as two years in prison and fines of as much as $100,000.

Prosecutions would likely be handled by the Department of Justice. A broad coalition of civil liberties organizations and businesses came together to fight the bill. Members of that group, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Library Association, Apple Computer Inc., Time Warner Inc. and the Newspaper Association of America publicly opposed the earlier version of the Exon bill. An on-line petition opposing the bill has over 108,000 electronic "signatures."

vern@cybertoday.com