Government Censorship 3438

Thesis:Government Censorship would damage the atmosphere of the freedom to expressideas on the Internet; therefore, government should not encourage censorship.Introduction I. In the Internet community, there is a large volume of technicalterms. For this reason, it is first necessary to examine the terminologyspecific to Internet. 1.The internet is a world wide computer network.

1.Electronic mail (email), which is one component of the Internet, approximatesperson to person letters, memoranda, notes and even phone calls. 2.Another termthat is often used is electronic news (enews/Usenet), enews is a broadcast, freeto the Internet medium. 3.The term FTP is also frequently used.

File transferprotocol (FTP) started as an Internet archival and retrieval medium, somewhatanalogous to traditional libraries. 4.The world-wide web (WWW), which is anothercomponent of the Net, can be used to "publish" material that wouldtraditionally appear in journals, magazines, posters, books, television and evenon film. 2.

It is also essential to give a brief history on the internet. 3.TheU.S.

government is now trying to pass bills to prevent misuse of the Net. II. Inorder to understand the need for the ever-growing body of legislation, it isimportant to explore the controversy, and the current problems involved with theNet as it exists must be introduced. 1.The problem that concerns most people isoffensive materials such as pornography. 2.

Another crucial internet crime is thestealing of credit card numbers. III. One reaction to this inapplicability hasbeen the "Censor the Net" approach (the censorship bill), we are nowto compare its advantages and disadvantages. 1.First, the meaning of"Censoring the Net" must be explained.

2.However, many experts havepointed out that government censorship is not possible. 1.First, it is not fairto exclude the freedom and damage the atmosphere of freely expressing ideas justfor the safety of children. 2.Most internet users are enjoying their freedom ofspeech on the Net, which is supposed to be protected by our First Amendment.

3.Additionally, only a very small portion of the Net contains offensivematerial, most people do not use the Net for pornography. 4.It must beunderstood that censoring the Net is technically impossible.

5.While people areconcerned about Internet pornography, it should be recognized that pornographyis sometimes legal; for example, pornography is legal in video and magazines.IV. There are many alternative measures to government censorship which wouldprevent misuse of the Net and would have the same effects as censorship. 1.It isvery important for parents to provide moral guidance for their children, andparents should have this responsibility.

2.However, at the same time as we carryout moral guidance, we have to come out with some short term approaches to solvethe problem in a more efficient way as well. 3.An alternative to governmentcensorship is the technological fix, which would prevent misuse of the Net andwould have the same effects as government censorship. 1.One example oftechnological fix is the "SurfWatch" software.

2.Also, commercialInternet service providers, such as "America Online", allow parents tocontrol what Internet relay chat (IRC) sessions are available to their children.3.Another technological fix is for parents and guardians to have a separate"proxy server" for their children's web browser. 4.There are nocomputer programs to automatically and reliably classify material; only peoplecan do it.

As a result, while practicing technological fixes, the classificationof the contents of the material when posting is very important. 5.Nowadays, mostinternet users classify their postings with standard categories, and leavesignatures at the end of postings. 6.The combination of the installation ofcensoring software and the classification of materials is a much better solutionthan government censorship. Conclusion Bibliography The Internet is a wonderfulplace of entertainment and education but like all places used by millions ofpeople, it has some murky corners people would prefer children not to explore.

In the physical world society as a whole conspires to protect children, butthere are no social or physical constraints to Internet surfing. The InternetCensorship Bill of 1995, also known as the Exon/Coats Communications DecencyAct, has been introduced in the U.S. Congress. It would make it a criminaloffense to make available to children anything that is indecent, or to sendanything indecent with "intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass"("Stop the Communications .

.." n.p.).

The goal of this bill as written(though not as stated by its proponents) is to try to make all public discourseon the Internet suitable for young children. The issue of whether is itnecessary to have censorship on the Internet is being argued all over the world.There are numerous homepages on the World Wide Web discussing this issue, orasking people to sign the petition to stop government censorship. The Internetwas originally a place for people to freely express their ideas worldwide. It isalso one of America's most valuable types of technology; scientists use emailfor quick and easy communication.

They post their current scientific discoverieson the Usenet newsgroups so other scientists in the same field of study all overthe world can know in minutes. Ordinary people use the Net for communication,expressing their opinions in the newsgroups, obtaining up-to-date informationfrom the WWW, acquiring files by using FTP, etc. Censorship would damage theatmosphere of the freedom to express ideas on the Internet; therefore,government should not encourage censorship. In the Internet community, there isa large volume of technical terms. For this reason, it is first necessary toexamine the terminology specific to Internet.

The Internet is a world widecomputer network. The "Net" is frequently used in place of Internet.In the words of Allison and Baxter, two experts on Internet Censorship at theMonash University, "the Internet is comprised of various digital mediasubsuming many of the distinct roles of traditional media" (Allison andBaxter 3). Electronic mail (email), which is one component of the Internet,approximates person to person letters, memoranda, notes and even phone calls.Sound and pictures are sometimes sent along with text. Email is mainly forprivate communication.

Electronic mailing lists are rather like club newslettersand readers have to contract-in or subscribe to a list. Another term that isoften used is electronic news (enews/Usenet), enews is a broadcast, free to theInternet medium. It has some properties of radio or television, particularlytalk-back radio or television, in that the destination is indiscriminate. Theterm FTP is also frequently used.

File transfer protocol (FTP) started as anInternet archival and retrieval medium, somewhat analogous to traditionallibraries. Files can be retrieved from distant computers using a traditionaltext-based interface. The world-wide web (WWW), which is another component ofthe Net, can be used to "publish" material that would traditionallyappear in journals, magazines, posters, books, television and even on film. Theterm UNIX, "a widely heard computer term, is a multi-user, multitaskingoperating system originally developed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, atAT&T Bell Laboratories, in 1969 for use on minicomputers"("UNIX" n.p.

). To understand the background of the controversy, it isalso necessary to give a brief history on the Internet. The Internet was createdabout twenty years ago in an attempt to connect a U.S. Defense Departmentnetwork called the ARPAnet and various other radio and satellite networks. TheARPAnet was an experimental network designed to support military research; inparticular, research about how to build networks that could withstand partialoutages (such as bomb attacks) and still function.

At about the same time theInternet was coming into being, Ethernet local area networks ("LANs")were developed. Most of these workstations came with Berkeley UNIX, whichincluded IP (Internet Protocol) networking software. This created a new demand:rather than connecting to a single large timesharing computer per site,organizations wanted to connect the ARPAnet to their entire local network. Thedemand keeps growing today.

Now that most four-year colleges are connected tothe Net, people are trying to get secondary and primary schools connected.People who have graduated from college where they have used the resources of theNet in classes, know what the Internet is good for, and talk their employersinto connecting different corporations. All this activity points to continuedgrowth, networking problems to solve, evolving technologies, and job securityfor networkers (Willmott 107). The Internet can also be compared to a church. Inmany ways the Internet is like a church: it has its council of elders, everymember has an opinion about how things should work, and they can either takepart or not.

It's the choice of the user. The Internet has no president, chiefoperating officer, or Pope. The constituent networks may have presidents andCEO's, but that's a different issue; there is no single authority figure for theInternet as a whole. As stated by Frances Hentoff, the staff writer for TheVillage Voice and the author of First Freedoms, "on an info superhighwaydriven by individuals, there are no cops preventing users from downloading"(Hentoff 1). Internet users can broadcast or express anything they want.

Thefact that the Net has no single authority figure sets forth a problem about whatkind of materials could be available on the Net. The U.S. government is nowtrying to pass bills to prevent misuse of the Net. The Internet Censorship Billof 1995, which has already been discuss earlier, was introduced to the U.S.

Congress. Under the Censorship Bill, a person breaks the law if he/she puts apurity test on a web page without making sure children cannot access the page.Also, if a person verbally assaults someone on IRC, he/she breaks the law. If auniversity, where some students may be under 18 years old, carries the alt.sex.*newsgroups, which contains adult material, it breaks the law.

According toGeorge Melloan from the Wall Street Journal, a censorship bill was passed by theSenate 84-16 in July, and an anticensorship bill was passed by the House 420-4in August. There are now four different sets of censorship and anticensorshiplanguage in the House and Senate versions of the Telecomm reform bill, whichcontradict each other and will have to be reconciled (Melloan, n.p.). In orderto understand the need for the ever-growing body of legislation, it is importantto explore the controversy, and the current problems involved with the Net as itexists must be introduced. The problem that concerns most people is offensivematerial such as pornography.

As pointed out by Allison and Baxter,"Possible (offensive) topics are behavior (drugs, ... ), nudity,political/economic/social opinion, violence, racial/ethnic, religious, coarselanguage, sexual/gender orientation, [and] sexuality" (Allison and Baxter3).

Since the Internet is open to everyone, children are very easily exposed tosuch material. According to Allison and Baxter, "the information providedon the Internet, particularly through the WWW, ranges across train time-tables,university lecture notes, books, art exhibits, film promotions, the wisdom andravings of individuals and, yes, pornographic pictures" (Allison and Baxter3). Moreover, many high schools in the United States provide Internet access tostudents, which is very useful for looking up information, but if a studentintends to look for inappropriate material, he/she is very likely to find suchmaterial simply by doing an Internet search. Another crucial Internet crime isthe theft of credit card numbers. Companies do business on the Net, and creditcard numbers are stored on their servers; everyone with the necessary computerknowledge could hack in and obtain such databases for illegal purposes. To citean instance, the most infamous computer terrorist, Kevin Mitnick, "waivedextradition and is now in jail in California, charged with computer fraud andillegal use of a telephone access device.

The list of allegations against himinclude theft of many files and documents, including twenty-thousand credit cardnumbers from Netcom On-Line Services, which provides thousands with access tothe Internet" (Warren 52). Americans have to come up with a solution inorder to keep children away from inappropriate material and to prevent misusesof the Net. One reaction to this inapplicability has been the "Censor theNet" approach (the censorship bill), which is being debated worldwide.First, the meaning of "Censoring the Net" must be explained.

Simply,it is the banning of offensive material. To see if the government should censorthe Net, it is imperative to list the advantages and disadvantages of the"censor the Net" approach. The advantage of government censorship isthat ideally, children and teenagers could be kept away from unsuitablematerial. However, many experts have pointed out that government censorship isnot possible. Howard Rheingold, the editor of the Whole World Review, observesthat, "the 'censor the Net' approach is not just morally misguided.

It'sbecoming technically and politically impossible" (Rheingold n.p.). First,it is not fair to exclude the freedom and damage the atmosphere of freelyexpressing ideas just for the safety of children.

Corn-Revere, an expert onInternet censorship at the Howgan & Harson Law Firm, points out that"the purpose of indecency regulation is to keep adult material from fallinginto the hands of kids. When he first introduced a similar bill last year,Senator Exon said he was concerned that the Information Superhighway was indanger of becoming an electronic 'red light district' and that he wanted to barhis granddaughter's access to unsuitable information" (Corn-Revere 24). Itis clear that Senator Exon introduced the bill to prevent minors from viewingunsuitable material on the Net. In addition, Meleedy, a computer sciencegraduate student at Harvard University, questions that if "the Internetmakes democracy this accessible to the average citizen, is it any wonderCongress wants to censor it?" (Meleedy 1) Allison and Baxter assert that,"the most significant new properties of the Internet media are thediversity of information sources and their ability to reach almost anywhere inthe world. Authors range from major corporations such as IBM and Disney toschool children" (Allison and Baxter 3). As predicted by Corn-Revere,"At the very least, the law will force content providers to make accessmore difficult, which will affect all users, not just the young"(Corn-Revere 70).

Censoring the Net is technically and politically impossible;it will damage the atmosphere of freedom and free idea expression on the Net;therefore, government should not encourage censorship. Most Internet users areenjoying their freedom of speech on the Net, which is supposed to be protectedby the First Amendment of the United States. According to Corn-Reverse, "ithas been suggested that, 'on-line systems give people far more genuinely freespeech and free press than ever before in human history'" (Corn-Reverse71). Rheingold predicts that "Heavy-handed attempts to impose restrictionson the unruly but incredibly creative anarchy of the Net could kill the spiritof cooperative knowledge-sharing that makes the Net valuable to millions" (Rheingoldn.

p.). The freedom of idea expression is what makes the Internet important andenjoyable, and it should not be waived for any reason. Additionally, only a verysmall portion of the Net contains offensive material, most people do not use theNet for pornography.

Caragata from Maclean's magazine observes that, "it ispornography that stirs the most controversy. But while there is no doubt thatpornography is popular, it amounts to a trickle compared with everything elseavailable on the Net" (Caragata 51). The Net is mostly being used forcommunication and information exchange, and only a tiny portion of the Netcontains pornography and other offensive material. It must be understood thatcensoring the Net is technically impossible. According to Allison and Baxter,"in principle, it is impossible to monitor all material being transmittedon the Internet. Considering the difficulties with international boundaries, alicensing system faces many obvious practical hurdles" (Allison and Baxter6).

As described by Allison and Baxter, "Any good Computer Science graduatecan create a completely secure encryption system for concealment purposes. Thematerial can even be disguised, for example hidden 'inside' a perfectlyinnocuous picture" (Allison and Baxter 6). Therefore, if a person wants topublish offensive material, he/she can design a formula to change the materialwith respect to a key, and secretly tell other users what the key is. In thisway, they can retrieve the same material and pass through the governmentcensorship.

While people are concerned about Internet pornography, it should berecognized that pornography is sometimes legal; for example, pornography islegal in video and magazines. Therefore, it is inconsistent to ban the Internetequivalents. According to Rheingold, "Citizens should have the right torestrict the information-flow into their homes. They should be able to excludefrom their home any subject matter that they do not want their children to see.

But sooner or later, their children will be exposed to everything from whichthey have shielded them , and then they will have left to deal with theseshocking sights and sound in the moral fiber they helped them cultivate" (Rheingoldn.p.). The Internet is definitely not the only medium for teenagers to findinappropriate material.

Even if the Net does not have any, teenagers could alsobe exposed to indecorous material in many other places. For example, Allison andBaxter say that, "most authors using electronic media do not producematerial that is any 'worse' than that available from news agents, video shops,or mail-order sources" (Allison and Baxter 8). On that account, if thepurpose of censoring is to prevent minors from being exposed to indecorousmaterial, not only the Net has to be censored. Censoring the Net will onlyeliminate one single medium for minors to find irrelevant material. Governmentcensorship is not the solution to the problem, and alternatives measures thathave same effects as censorship can be practiced.

There are many alternativemeasures to government censorship which would prevent misuse of the Net andwould have the same effects as censorship. According to Hentoff, "there areways to protect children without the Act's intervention: blockage of certainareas, passwords, parental supervision. And adults--under protection of theFirst Amendment--can remain protected from government thought control. However,if the censorship bill is passed, the First Amendment may effectively beexcluded from cyberspace" (Hentoff 1).

It is very important for parents toprovide moral guidance for their children, and parents should have thisresponsibility. Moral guidance is the foremost long-term solution to theproblem. Rheingold believes that, "this technological shock (pornography onthe Net) to Americans' moral codes means that in the future, Americans are goingto have to teach their children well. The only protection that has a chance ofworking is to give their sons and daughters moral grounding and some commonsense" (Rheingold n.

p.). In America, minors can be exposed to sexualmaterial in many media. Providing children with moral guidance is the foremostsolution to the problem. However, at the same time that parents carry out moralguidance, Americans have to come out with some short term approaches to solvethe problem in a more efficient way as well. An alternative to governmentcensorship is the technological fix, which would prevent misuse of the Net andwould have the same effects as government censorship.

This involves the designof intelligent software to filter information. There is a rush to developinformation filtering software and get it to market. One example oftechnological fix is the "SurfWatch" software, as described by Allisonand Baxter, "SurfWatch is a breakthrough software product which helpsparents deal with the flood of sexual material on the Internet. By allowingparents to be responsible for blocking what is being received at any individualcomputer, children and others have less chance of accidentally or deliberatelybeing exposed to unwanted material.

SurfWatch is the first major advance inproviding a technical solution to a difficult issue created by the explosion oftechnology. SurfWatch strives to preserve Internet freedom by lettingindividuals choose what they see" (Allison, Baxter 6). The SurfWatch vendorintends to provide monthly updates to cope with the fast changing Internet.Also, commercial Internet service providers, such as "America Online",allow parents to control what Internet relay chat (IRC) sessions are availableto their children (Cidley 59). Parental Control is a feature in many commercialInternet service providers, users can turn on the Parental Control function, andthey will automatically be kept away from offensive words in IRC. In this way,children can be kept away from offensive material and adults can continue toenjoy their Internet freedom.

Another technological fix is for parents andguardians to have a separate "proxy server" for their children's webbrowser. A "proxy server" is a program that disallows uses of somespecified Internet sites or Usenet newsgroups. The parents need to activelyselect sites their proxy server can access. Parental control tools is a verypossible solution to the problem, as stated in the "Communications DecencyAct Issues Page" by the Center for Democracy and Technology, "whatwill help parents control their children's access to the Internet is ParentalControl tools and features, such as those provided by several major onlineservices and available as over-the-counter software" ("Stop theCommunications ...

" n.p.). Tools for controlling Internet access bychildren are widely available, and parents can already control their children'saccess to the material on the Net. There are no computer programs toautomatically and reliably classify material; only people can do it.

As aresult, while practicing technological fixes, the classification of the contentsof the material when posting is very important. Nowadays, most Internet usersclassify their postings with standard categories, and leave signatures at theend of postings. According to Allison and Baxter, "items are signed with asecure digital signature that can be traced to a real person, company ororganization" (Allison, Baxter 4). The strengths of the material are oftenclassified as "strong" or "weak", and attitudes of a givendocument towards a topic are often classified as "advocates","discusses", "deplores", or "does not discuss".Additionally, in order to reduce the effort of classifying many individualitems, particularly in the case of FTP and WWW, classifications are oftenattached to directories and inherited by subdirectories and documents. In thisway, readers can make informed decisions regarding access of Internet material,and the programming of intelligent software will be much easier: just byrecognizing a small number of terms of classification.

As a matter of fact, theclassification of material has already been done on the Net for a period oftime. Most Internet materials are well classified, and people will have an ideaof what they are going to see beforehand. For instance, the articles in aparticular Usenet newsgroup can be accurately predicted by the name of thegroup. For example, soc.

culture.hongkong.entertainment contains discussion ofthe entertainment industry of Hong Kong; alt.binaries.sex.pictures containsencoded binary files of dirty pictures.

Internet users know what they areapproaching beforehand, and minors know that they are not supposed to browsethose alt.sex.* newsgroups. The combination of the installation of censoringsoftware and the classification of material is a much better solution thangovernment censorship.

Hentoff mentions that "flexibility of interactivemedia...enables parents to control what content their kids have access to, andleaves the flow of information free for those adults who want it" (Hentoff1).

This prevents unwanted material from reaching children and allows adults tocontinue enjoying their Internet freedom. The problem of the Net is that it iseasy for minors to obtain inappropriate materials. The American government cameup with a proposal to censor the Net, but as proved earlier, the "Censorthe Net" approach is both technically and politically impossible. Theforemost solution to the problem is for parents to provide moral guidance fortheir children.

At the same time they are providing moral guidance for theirchildren, Americans also need short term technical solution. Intelligentcensoring software and proxy servers can let parents disallow their childrenaccess to certain sites. In this way, parents can keep their children from theoffensive materials on the Net. "Like other dilemmas and unansweredquestions of the digital age, traditional approaches (government censorship)simply won't work. Americans are going to have to accept less intrusive,probably more exotic solutions, such as providing intelligent software filtersto those who want a version of Internet Lite [sic]" (Baker 65).

Forintelligent software and proxy servers to operate successfully, it is necessaryto classify the information available on the Net, and the classification ofmaterials has already been done by Internet users for years. Parents can thencensor the Net for their children, and adults can continue to enjoy theirInternet freedom. This will provide the same effect as government censorship,but will not damage the atmosphere of free idea expression and freedom on theNet. Moreover, indecorous materials are not only on the Net, minors can obtainsuch materials without accessing the Internet at all. Internet censorship is notthe solution to keeping minors away from sexual material.

The real and foremostsolution to preventing minors from viewing sexual material is for parents totake a stronger role in their children's viewing. "This technological shock(pornography on the Net) to Americans' moral codes means that in the future,Americans are going to have to teach their children well. The only protectionthat has a chance of working is to give their sons and daughters moral groundingand some common sense" (Rheingold n.p.).

BibliographyAllison, L., and R. Baxter. Protecting Our Innocents. http://www.

cs.monash.edu.au/~lloyd/tilde/InterNet/Innocent/1995.224.

html.Caragata, Warren. "Crime in the Cyberspace." Maclean's 22 May 1995:50+. Cidley, Joe.

"Red light district." Maclean's 22 May 1995: 58+.Corn-Revere. "New Age Comstockery: Exan vs the Internet Policy Analysis No.

232." Diss. Howgan & Hartson Law Firm, 1995. Hentoff, Frances."Indecent Proposal.

" Entertainment Weekly 31 March, 1995. Meleedy,David. "Internet Censorship." Diss. Harvard University, 1995. Melloan,George.

"Science Miracles Sprout From Creative Freedom." The WallStreet Journal 26 June 1995: A13. Philip, Elmer-Derwitt. "Porn on theInternet.

" Time 3 July 1995: 38+. Rheingold, Howard. Rheingold's Tomorrow:Why Censoring Cyberspace is Dangerous & Futile. http://www.well.com/user/hlr/tomorrow/tomorrowcensor.

html.Sanchez, Robert. "A Wired Education." Internet World 4 October 1995:71+. "Stop the Communications Decency Act.

" CDT's CommunicationsDecency Act Issues Page. http://www.cdt.org/cda.html. "UNIX.

"Microsoft Encarta. Vers. 95. Computer Software. Encyclopedia Software, 1995. MSWindows 3.

1, 0.6 GB, CD-ROM. Willmott, Don. "Activities on theInternet." PC Magazine 10 October 1995: 106+.