2. Censorship in Cyberspace

During the early years of the internet, it was virtually unregulated and largely unknown outside of its aficionados. Not so anymore. With the recent surge in popularity has come headlines about pornography on the internet and calls for the government regulation in the name of protecting minors.

Some of the issues of internet censorship are far from clear-cut. One example is University of Michigan student Jake Baker, who posted sexual fantasies on alt.sex.stories describing how he would abduct a female student from one of classes (whom he named), take her to a secluded area off Route 23 in Ann Arbor, use tools from his toolbox to rape and mutilate her, and then kill her. Baker wrote, "I plan it well. It will be my first kidnapping; my first real rape of a pretty young girl. My first experimentation with all the devices of pain I had thought up before. I am obsessed about my target more than any other girl on campus." Baker also e-mailed a friend: "Sometimes, I'll see a pretty one alone in the quad and think "Go on Jake, it'd be easy.' But the fear of getting caught always stays my hand."

Baker was immediately expelled from campus under a bylaw that allows the president to take necessary actions to maintain order. James Smiley of Michigan's Department of Public Safety said, "We think it's a very serious matter. When he named a student, that put a different light on it -- he's just not fantasizing any more."

To call Jake Baker a victim of censorship is difficult considering that it was never his fiction writing, but his use of a specific woman's name, that caused the controversy. However, there was some over-reaction. Denying him bail, one federal judge called him "too dangerous for society" and another said he was "a ticking bomb waiting to go off." The case was eventually dismissed for lack of evidence, but the government promises to appeal the decision. Yet it is disturbing that the FBI investigated the charges not as possible threat, but as "distribution of obscene material."

It is quite clear that the university is within its powers to forbid specific threats against an individual, even if they are posted on the internet rather than sent directly at that individual. If Baker's words are protected speech, then the same principle could allow anyone to publish death threats in the newspaper or on the internet and claim that it was only "fiction." (Ann Arbor News, 2/4/95; Michigan Daily, 2/13/95; Time, 2/20/95)

The true danger of censorship comes not from the Michigan officials who wanted to discipline Baker for his explicit threat against a woman, but from members of Congress and administrators who want to ban sexual fantasies (including anything that is "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent") altogether.

A House-Senate conference committee voted in December 1995 to impose harsh restrictions on the internet. The proposed measure would outlaw making any indecent "comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image or other communication" available on any system where minors can gain access to it. Violators would be subject to fines up to $100,000 and as much as five years in prison. The revised Exon bill is so extreme that even commercial internet services, notorious for their censorship, opposed the language, offering instead a compromise restricting only material deemed "harmful to minors." (New York Times, 12/7/95) In essence, the federal government will compel academic institutions to impose the censorship controls now used by several commercial internet providers. (The extent of this censorship was revealed recently when America Online put "breast" on its list of forbidden words, only to back down when breast cancer survivors protested.)

Self-censorship by internet providers is strongly encouraged by the bill, which protects "good Samaritan" efforts to censor messages "whether or not such material is constitutionally protected." But organizations that have no reason to "protect" minors -- such as universities -- will have no legal defense unless they impose severe censorship standards.

Since every college admits some "minors" (e.g. any 17-year-olds) to its first-year class, ever college can be found in violation of the law for providing internet access without sharp limits on what all students can look at or say. Every newsgroup, and every web page, could be subject to the same censorship that radio and television face.

"Indecency" is a word that covers a broad sweep, from four-letter words to nudity and any sexual material considered "patently offensive" according to community standards. Because of the international nature of the internet, a lawsuit could be filed anywhere, particularly places where community standards are notably harsh toward "offensive" sexual material.

The drive for the internet censorship bill is being led by Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL), who ironically is the sponsor of a bill compelling private colleges and universities to adhere to the First Amendment, a proposed law aimed at striking down speech codes. While Hyde pretends to defend freedom of speech with one bill, he shows no qualms at restraining it with another (as he is done before with the abortion gag rule against doctors.)

The internet censorship bill is a boon to smut-hunting search engines, which will become the monitors of the thoughts of the entire world (since there is no way to isolate and censor only American messages). Because it is technically possible for programs to examine every word of every message on the internet, the much-ridiculed broadcasting rules banning the seven dirty words could be the law of every publicly-expressed message. And since much more than these seven words have been found indecent (depending upon the context), there will be a long supplementary list of words (and virtually every picture) that will trigger surveillance. If actually enforced, the internet censorship bill would impose thought control on an enormous scale. Quite literally, millions of people will be forced to watch what they say -- and have it watched for them.

Even if some new limits were needed for the internet, this bill goes far beyond protection of children. The internet is analogous to a vast, international library. Naturally, some people don't like to have their children wandering around it reading potentially offensive material. But the answer is not to pull the books off the shelves and prosecute the librarians.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that the new law will benefit most of all the commercial bulletin boards which specialize in providing pornography -- the same bulletin board misleadingly used by Martin Rimm in his study (publicized by Time) to promote the notion that pornography dominates the internet. If they can keep out minors, these provides will be virtually immune from the law, and will become vastly more popular because they can offer the only uncensored areas of the internet.

The internet anti-smut movement is driven by a desire to protect children from indecent material. But due to the interconnected nature of the internet, every regulation of computer networks is a threat to academic freedom. The Exon bill in Congress will not only "protect children from these materials, but adults as well. Since there is no absolute way to prevent children from gaining access to news groups and web sites, a law requiring the protection of children will inevitably compel censorship of everything on the internet. A ban on having "indecent" material made available to children is synonymous with a ban on all such material. It is as if a magazine like Playboy (and its printer, distributors, and sellers) could be found guilty of violating the law because of the possibility that a minor might read a copy of it. Such a law would amount to nothing less than an absolute ban because the threat of legal action is so great. The irony is that Playboy's web site may now be prohibited on the internet, even though a similar law banning Playboy in print would be plainly unconstitutional.

The threat of internet censorship also comes from universities themselves. In 1994, Carnegie Mellon University eliminated three computer bulletin boards devoted to sexually explicit pictures, fearing that they violate state obscenity laws. Many institutions, especially religious colleges, already ban sexually-related bulletin boards by refusing to carry them. Some are concerned about the space that sexually-explicit images take up on their computers, while others worry about obscenity laws or sexual harassment regulations. Carnegie Mellon had originally planned to eliminated three additional bulletin boards including alt.sex and its subgroups, but relented after criticism from students and the ACLU, which warned that their policy "sweeps far too broadly." (Chronicle of Higher Education, 11/16/94)

One need not believe in absolute freedom of expression to see the dangers of such regulations. Because universities in charge of computing distribution systems could be held liable for anything publicly posted, many of them might impose particularly harsh regulations on free speech. All sexually oriented material could be banned, and the imposed censorship will go far beyond the existing standards. Not only universities, but everyone connected to the internet, will suffer the consequences of this drive to regulate offensive ideas.