The attacks of the stupid on the intelligent have been moving forward. On Wednesday, December 6th, the House Conference Committee on Telecommunications Reform voted to insert even worse language into their version of the bill. This sneak attack was coordinated by lobbyists for the so-called "Christian Coalition". The telecom bills, S.652 and H.R.1555, have already been voted on by the full House and Senate. The next step in the legislative process is when the two different versions of the bill get sent to conference committees. These conference committees aren't supposed to make substantial changes in the bills--they're only supposed to iron out differences in language between the House and Senate versions so that one bill is sent to the White House for the President's signature. It was here in the House conference committee that the sneak attack was launched, led by Republican Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois.
The controversial language that was inserted into the bill is the word "indecent". The bill now provides for penalties of up to two years and $100,000 for using "indecent" language on the Net--that means, among other things, the same "seven dirty words" that George Carlin was hauled into court for saying in 1978.
Rep. Rick White had been offering proposed language that would only make such language illegal if it could be read by someone under 18. (White is a Republican from Washington; Microsoft headquarters is in his district.) The ACLU had sent a letter to all the members of the House conference committee pointing out that both proposals violated the First Amendment to the Constitution, among many other flaws.
Nevertheless, the House conferees voted in favor of the Hyde language--the worst possible--by a 17-16 vote. To add insult to injury, two Democratic representatives, John Conyers of Michigan and Pat Schroeder of Colorado, voted in favor of the so-called "Christian Coalition"'s proposal. Free speech advocates who had been counting on their votes were shocked at this sudden lapse of judgement. Another shock was the sudden invisibility of Newt Gingrich, who had spoken out against Internet censorship just this summer. When push came to shove, Gingrich was nowhere to be seen.
As this article goes to press (December 15th), the bill has to find its way through a comparable Senate conference committee. No vote has been scheduled for the Senate conferees yet. The members of the Senate conference committee don't inspire confidence; they include Sen. James Exon, Democrat of Nebraska, who started this whole Internet censorship drive last year after seeing a poorly-written, superficial television news report on the issue. (He had never been on the Internet before, and he still does not have an e-mail address.)
Internet political organizations, including the Voters Telecommunications Watch, Center for Democracy and Technology, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, organized a National Internet Day of Protest for Tuesday, December 12th. The day was a smashing success, as Congress was swamped with as many as 50,000 phone calls in one day, fax machines jammed or ran out of paper, and e-mail servers overflowed with messages. Since the exact time of the Senate vote was still unknown, VTW and the other organizations urged anyone who likes freedom of speech to keep up the pressure on the Senate conferees indefinitely.
Once the bill leaves the Senate conference committee, the only way to stop it from becoming law would be a Presidential veto. President Clinton would not be able to veto only the Internet censorship part of the bill; he would have to veto the entire package of telecommunications reform that much of the Congress has been working on all year.
If the bill is signed into law, the only way to dump it would be to fight a court case all the way to the Supreme Court and have it struck down. That process would be expensive, and might take two or three years to fight to the end. Nevertheless, all sorts of people are lining up already to offer themselves as sacrificial test cases, notably Joe Shea of the Internet newspaper the American Reporter.
Has Congress finally gone senile? Has it really come to the point where someone like Dr. Ruth will have to be arrested for giving safe-sex advice in e-mail, in order for the First Amendment to be reaffirmed as the supreme law of the land? Did the Republican landslide of '94 mean that the Constitution would henceforth be used primarily as toilet paper by the "Christian Coalition"? Citizens and politicians who actually know what the Internet is (and what the Constitution says) have stood aghast. On Thursday, December 14th, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, one of the few Senators left with detectable brain activity, addressed the Senate:
"The Congress is venturing where it need not and should not go. We should not be seeking to control communications among adults, whether old fogeys like ourselves or the vibrant young people who make up the vast bulk of the communities in cyberspace. We should not be acting to reduce all discourse over the Internet to third-grade readers...
"After a majority of my Senate colleagues rejected my position in June and incorporated a so-called Communications Decency Act in the telecommunications bill without hearings, without examination and without much thought, I still held out hope that they would proceed to learn something about the Internet, how it works, and its potential benefits for those who will be using it in the coming century. I was encouraged when the Speaker of the House agreed with me and remarked that the Senate's action was `clearly a violation of free speech' and `very badly thought out.' I, again, urge him to rejoin in the debate before it is too late.
"We have already seen the chilling effect that even the prospect of this legislation has had on online service providers. Last week, America Online deleted the profile of a Vermonter who communicated with fellow breast cancer survivors online. Why?
"They found in checking that this Vermonter had used the word `breast.' Nobody bothered to ask why. She is a survivor of breast cancer. She was using the Internet to have correspondence with other survivors of breast cancer...But the censors looked in and so, because the word `breast' had been used, she was being stopped.
"In my years here I have seen rare instances where Senators and House Members in both parties have rushed pell-mell into having the Government step in to take over for parents. At a time when we hear that we have a new thrust in the Congress where we want to get Government off your backs, we want to get Government out of your life, we want to turn things back to people, we have a massive effort underway in the telecommunications conference to say we are going to tell you what to think; we are going to tell you what to do, when you go online.
"Do you know why? I am willing to bet that three-quarters of the Congress do not have the foggiest idea how to get on Internet; do not have the foggiest idea how to use the Internet; have never corresponded back and forth on the Internet. They can say: `We do not use it. It does not involve us. So let us screw it up for everybody else who might use it.' But, `everybody else' are millions and millions of Americans.
"...for those who want to abuse it, those who want to be involved in child pornography, we have laws on the books. We can go after those people. We can prosecute them. But let us not close down 99.9 percent of the Internet because of a few child pornographers. Go after them, but protect the Internet for the rest of the people.
"Maybe those who are on the Internet ought to ask their Members of the House or the Senate, Do they use it? Do they understand it? Do they understand the computer? I do not want to ask them if they know how to do really technical things, like programming a VCR. Ask them if they can turn on the Internet? Can they actually talk with each other? And if they cannot, maybe Internet users ought to tell their Members, `Then leave us alone. Leave us alone.' "
Bear in mind that by the Senate's standards of polite discourse, that roughly translates to "You stupid fuckwads--have you lost your minds??"
There are several ways the situation could play out if the bill is passed. One less alarming possibility is that this legislation could become the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit of the Internet: a stupid law that no-one obeys. Nothing much would change, except that every once in a while an Internet user would be the victim of selective enforcement, and the U.S. government would get even less respect than it does today.
We will face a more chilling future if anyone actually tries to enforce such a law. Bigger Internet service providers would dumb their sites down to elementary-school level, while smaller providers who would defy the "Christian Coalition"'s law would go to jail.
The Web would lose much of its connectedness, as United States site administrators would be afraid to link to anyone they don't know--who knows what that person might put on their page?
Usenet would be decimated. Dozens of groups would disappear, not just binaries groups that carry images, but groups like sci.med.aids as well. Dissident Internet users would create bogus groups to avoid censorship, much the way Canadian users created alt.fan.karla.homolka to break a judicial ban on news about a controversial murder case.
Usenet's easy search capabilities would push most such discussion underground, though. Uuencoding would put dissident text out of reach of search engines, and public-key cryptography would put it out of reach of anyone the sender doesn't want to read it. A repressive "Christian Coalition"-friendly government in Washington might respond by outlawing citizen use of cryptography at all, possibly even outlawing uuencoding, as Singapore has tried to do.
To police other Internet services would take even more totalitarian measures. To catch Internet users who use dirty words in e-mail, the government might simply end up reading your mail. Packet-sniffing might be used to catch offensive mail in transit. IRC channels would have to have government monitors to make sure that nobody says a bad word--possibly censor-bots that would do Big Brother's work for him. Whole IRC servers, or even networks, might be shut down for the spicy words of one or two people.
None of this would stop anything from being said on sites outside the United States. U.S. Internet users might try to open accounts in Canada, the Netherlands, or even in an enterprising Caribbean nation trying to cash in on American Internet refugees. Would connections between the US and offshore sites be blocked? Would the US go from being the heart of the Internet to being a pothole to be detoured around? Would the rest of the world thrive while the US bit of the Internet stagnates under the threat of frivolous prosecution? Faced with a dead net at home and unacceptable legal liabilities for swear words, would whole companies move themselves overseas? Ford going to Mexico takes some planning; a Microsoft move to Vancouver could be done in a week. Dr. Chaum's decision to put his Digicash venture in the Netherlands looks pretty brilliant with hindsight. What started as an anti-pornography crusade could end up as a mass-migration of high-tech jobs out of the United States.
As of this writing, the bill hasn't made that last step out of the Capitol. There is still time to contact the Senate conferees. The First Amendment defines us as Americans more than any other document--it would be a dark day in history if we joined the ranks of nations like China and Iran that try to control what their citizens say and think.
To keep you updated, I've put up a summary page that has local copies of documents related this Internet censorship crisis, as well as links to the main protest groups. You can find my page at:
http://www.skypoint.com/~gimonca/report/ccindex.html
Or you can link directly to these sites:
Voters Telecommunications Watch
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Electronic Privacy Information Center
Center for Democracy and Technology
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
The American Reporter newspaper is at:
http://www.newshare.com/Reporter/