Information Highway, The | Introduction
In June 1995, Los Angeles Times writer Kim Murphy described separate incidents involving a fifteen-year-old boy in Washington and a thirteen-year-old girl in Kentucky who ran away from their homes, apparently after corresponding with strangers via electronic mail (e-mail) on their personal computers. After spending several weeks in California, both teens were located and returned to their homes. According to Murphy, these stories reveal that there is a “very real possibility that children could be lured into illicit sex, prostitution or worse by contacts gleaned from their home computers.” Child welfare groups report that cases of adults having had unlawful sex with minors they have met through e-mail are becoming more common.
In a related development, in 1995, Robert and Carleen Thomas, who lived near San Francisco and operated a computer bulletin-board system (BBS) called Amateur Action, were convicted by a Memphis, Tennessee, jury of transmitting pornographic images to that state, thereby violating local obscenity standards. The couple, sentenced to three years in federal prison, had been charged after a state postal inspector signed on to the BBS and downloaded several sexually explicit images.
Like print, video, and other media that preceded them, computer networks such as the Internet—a patchwork network used by the runaway teens and more than thirty million other computer users worldwide—have become a medium for sexually explicit words and images. On portions of the Internet, users can view or produce risqué stories and computer-scanned nude photographs or join “chat” groups discussing sex.
According to Time and other newsmagazines, such electronic material is both popular and easily available. In the words of Time writer Philip Elmer-DeWitt, “There’s an awful lot of porn online” and “it is immensely popular.” After estimates of the precise amount became a controversy itself among computer users and journalists in 1995, Wyoming newspaper editor Charles Levendosky challenged Elmer-DeWitt’s perception: “A realistic estimate puts sex-related information at less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the sites on the Internet and other interactive computer services.”
In response to the availability of on-line porn and the risk of its exposure to minors, U.S. legislators have begun targeting computer networks. In 1995, Nebraska senator James Exon proposed the Communications Decency Act, legislation that would make transmission of sexually explicit material via computers a federal crime. Exon had become alarmed about some of the more explicit on-line images. “I knew it was bad,” Exon said. “But then when I got on [the computer], it made Playboy and Hustler look like Sunday-school stuff.”
The senator aimed to fill a void in the law regulating such material. Although an existing federal law bans any transmission of child pornography, no federal statute prohibits computer users from transmitting other forms of pornography or sexually explicit content. In Exon’s view, his amendment (specifying a maximum fine of $100,000 and a maximum jail sentence of two years for violators) places a justifiable restriction on free speech in order to protect children’s well-being. Exon argues that the increase in both the number of minors using computers and the amount of on-line sexual material creates the need for such a law and that government’s failure to act accordingly would be “an open invitation to some of the hardcore pornography getting into our homes.” As of October 1995, Congress was considering Exon’s amendment as part of its telecommunications reform bill.
But many civil liberties advocates, parents, and others argue that proposals such as Exon’s are ill-advised for several reasons. Most importantly, they contend, laws targeting computers would violate Americans’ First Amendment right of freedom of speech, not only producing a chilling effect on computer users’ speech but criminalizing some of it as well. In the words of Los Angeles Times columnist Lawrence J. Magid: “I worry that some overzealous prosecutor, anywhere in the country, might use this law to go after a discussion of reproductive rights, birth control, [or] gay rights.”
Free-speech advocates fear that government—with a license to regulate computer content and images—would become a censor of what has been a virtually uninhibited and democratic form of communication. Charles Levendosky asserts that with such a mandate, government would “inevitably stick [its] nose in business you thought was your family’s private affair.”
Some observers contend that Exon’s amendment threatens to undermine the Supreme Court’s 1973 Miller v. California decision, which stipulated that local standards should determine what constitutes obscenity. They argue that the legislation would, in effect, impose a national obscenity standard, thereby impinging on the right of local communities to establish and enforce standards consistent with their own values. For example, critics of the Thomases’ conviction argue that images produced in one community (San Francisco) should not be forced to meet the standards of a community that holds a markedly different ideology or philosophy (Memphis).
Despite their differences, Exon and many of his opponents do agree on the attractiveness of one approach: “lock-out” mechanisms that allow parents to block children from accessing computer network areas containing material they consider indecent. Several software companies and on-line service providers have introduced this option to parents, giving them greater control over what children can view.
As the information highway expands into more areas of society and people’s daily lives, debate about what types of images and words are suitable for viewing promises to continue. Whether broader restrictions are necessary to prohibit any computer transmission of sexually explicit material is one of the issues examined in The Information Highway: Current Controversies. Other viewpoints assess what constitutes the information highway, whether it benefits society, and how the information highway should be developed.
