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_INTERNET CENSORSHIP _
By: CEDRIC CANN
Censoring the Internet The internet offers a huge wealth of information both
good and bad, unfortunately the vary nature of the internet makes policing
this new domain practically impossible. The internet began as a small
university network in the United States and has blossomed into a vast
telecommunications network spanning the globe. Today the internet is ruled by
no governing body and it is an open society for ideas to be developed and
shared in. Unfortunately every society has its seedy underside and the
internet is no exception. To fully understand the many layers to this problem,
an understanding of net history is required. Some thirty years ago the RAND
corporation, Americas first and foremost Cold War think-tank faced a strange
strategic problem. The cold war had spawned technologies that allowed
countries with nuclear capability to target multiple cities with one missile
fired from the other side of the world. Post-nuclear America would need a
command and control network, linked from city to city, state to state and base
to base. No matter how thoroughly that network was armored or protected, its
switches and wiring would always be vulnerable to the impact of atomic bombs.
A nuclear bombardment would reduce any network to tatters. Any central
authority would be an obvious and immediate target for enemy missiles. The
center of a network would be the first place to go. So RAND mulled over this
puzzle in deep military secrecy and arrived at their solution. In 1964 their
proposed ideas became public. Their network would have no central authority,
and it would be designed from the beginning to operate while in tatters. All
the nodes in the network would be equal in status to all other nodes, each
node having its own authority to originate, pass and receive messages. The
messages themselves would be divided into packets, each packet separately
addressed. Each packet would begin at some specified source node and end at
some other specified destination node. The particular route that the packet
took would be unimportant, only the final results counted. Each packet would
be tossed around like a hot potato from node to node, more or less in the
direction of its destination, until it ended up in the proper place. If big
chunks of the network were blown away, which wouldn't matter, the packets
would still stay airborne, moving across the field by whatever nodes happened
to survive. This system was efficient in any means (especially when compared
to the phone system), but it was extremely tough. In the 1960's this concept
was thrown around by RAND, MIT and UCLA. In 1969 the first such node was
installed in UCLA. By December of 69, there were four nodes on the network,
which was called ARPANET, after its Pentagon sponsor. The nodes of the network
were high-speed supercomputers. (supercomputers at the time, desktop machines
now) Thanks to APRANET scientists and researchers could share one another's
computer facilities over long-distances. By the second year of its operation
however, APRANET's users had warped the high cost, computer sharing network
into a dedicated, high-speed, federally subsidized electronic post office. The
main bulk of traffic on ARPANET was not long-distance computing, it was news
and personal messages. The incredibly expensive network using the fastest
computers on the planet was a message base for gossip and schmooze. Throughout
the 70s this very fact made the network grow, its software allowed many
different types of computers to become part of the network. Since the network
was decentralized it was difficult to stop people from barging in and linking
up. In fact nobody wanted to stop them from joining up and this branching
complex of networks came to be known as the internet. In 1984 the National
Science Foundation got into the act, and the new NSFNET set a blistering pace
for technical advancement, linking newer, faster, shinier supercomputers
through thicker, faster links. ARPANET formally expired in 1989, a victim of
its own success, but its users scarcely noticed as ARPANET's functions not
only continued but improved. In 1971 only four nodes existed, today tens of
thousands of nodes make up the network and 35 million of users make up the
internet community. The internet is and institution that resists
institutionalization. The internet community, belonging to everyone yet
no-one, resembles our own community in many ways, and is susceptible to many
of the same pressures. Business people want the internet put on sounder
financial footing. Government people want the Internet more fully regulated.
Academics want it dedicated exclusively to scholarly research. Military people
want it spyproof and secure. All these sources of conflict remain in a
stumbling balance and so far the internet remains in a thrivingly anarchial
condition. This however is a mixed blessing. Today people pay ISP's or
Internet Service Providers for internet access. ISP's usually have fast
computers with dedicated connections to the internet. ISP's now more than ever
are becoming the backbone of the internet. The average netcitizen uses their
computer to call and ISP, and the netcitizens computer temporarily becomes a
part of the internet. The user is free to browse or transfer information with
others. Most ISP's even allow their users to set up permanent homepages on the
ISP's computer for the whole internet community to view. This is where many
ethical and moral questions arise regarding the internet. Not every user wants
his homepage to deal with the spin rates of atoms or the airspeed of South
African swallows. Some users wish to display "objectionable" material on their
homepages. This may have started out as a prank to some, but now net- porn is
an offshoot industry on the information superhighway. Companies like Playboy
and Hustler run their own servers that are permanent parts of the internet,
and on their pages they charge user to view Playboy and Hustler type material.
What makes matters worse is evolution of the internet newsgroup system. USENET
in its infancy was ARPANET's news and message component. Today USENET is a
huge database with thousands of newsgroups that all internet users have access
to. Millions use groups like alt.comp.disscussion.games to share ideas, and
millions use groups like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.teen to share ideas and
pictures that are less family oriented. Average users can also set up
homepages on ISP's. In fact, most packages ISP's offer usually include space
for your own homepage. They are easy to create and the ISP's maintain them for
free so the entire online community can see what you have to say.
Unfortunately not everyone wants to set up homepages dealing with the spin
rates of atoms or the airspeeds of South American swallows. Most ISP's are
more than willing to set up homepages dealing with the most gratuitous of acts
aimed at very specialized audiences. This is where the problem of net
censorship arises. It is true that there is a wealth of pornography and other
indecent material online for all to see. All that a person has to do is to
type in an "indecent" word and modern search engines will point to sites where
the word crops up. Typing in a popular for letter expletive into two of the
most popular search engines yielded 17224 hits for Lycos and 40000 for
AltaVista, the worlds biggest search engine. However both of these engines
have over 60 million cataloged web pages. Although this material makes up less
that 1% of all messages on USENET or pages on the world-wide-web, that is
still a staggering number as there are millions of messages and web-pages on
the internet. Most of this material is extremely hard to access as advanced
knowledge of computers is required, however it is the youth in most families
that know how to use the computer best. Problems arise when minors left alone
on the computer are free to browse some of the most graphic pictures ever
taken, or to learn the easy way to make a pipe bomb from house-hold
ingredients. The media has a tendency to magnify certain aspects of reality
while completely forgetting about others. The mass media so far has not been
too kind to the internet. Mainly because television and print magazines view
it as a long-term threat encroaching in on their market. The July 3 1995
article of Time magazine featured a cover story labeled "CYBERPORN". Spanning
eight pages the article tries to expose the "red light district" of the
information superhighway. It was the publishing of this article in a high-
profile magazine that sparked the whole cyberporn debate. When Time published
a cover story on Internet pornography a certain amount of controversy was to
be expected. Computer porn, after all, is a subject that stirs strong
passions. So does the question of whether free speech on the Internet should
be sharply curtailed, as some Senators and Member of Congress have proposed.
But the "flame war" that ensued on the computer networks when the story was
published soon gave way to a full-blown and highly political conflagration.
The main focus of discontent was a new study, "Marketing Pornography on the
Information Superhighway", purportedly by a team of researchers at Carnegie
Mellon University, which was a centerpiece of Time's story. In the course of
the debate, serious questions have been raised regarding the study's
methodology, the ethics by which its data were gathered and even its true
authorship. Marty Rimm, who wrote it while an undergraduate at Carnegie
Mellon, grossly exaggerated the extent of pornography on the Internet by
conflating findings from private adult-bulletin-board systems that require
credit cards for payments (and are off limits to minors) with those from the
public networks (which are not). Many of Rimm's statistics, are either
misleading or meaningless; for example, the study's now frequently cited claim
that 83.5 percent of the images stored on the USENET newsgroups are
pornographic. A more telling statistic is that pornographic files represent
less than one- half of 1 percent of all messages posted on the Internet. Other
critics point out that it is impossible to count the number of times those
files are downloaded; the network measures only how many people are presented
with the opportunity to download, not how many actually do. Rimm has developed
his own credibility problems. When interviewed by Time for the cover story, he
refused to answer questions about his life on the grounds that it would shift
attention away from his findings. But quite a bit of detail has emerged, much
of it gathered by computer users on the Internet. It turns out that Rimm is no
stranger to controversy. In 1981, as a 16-year-old junior at Atlantic City
High School, he conducted a survey that purported to show that 64 percent of
his school's students had illicitly gambled at the city's casinos. Widely
publicized (and strongly criticized by the casinos as inaccurate), the survey
inspired the New Jersey legislature to raise the gambling age in casinos from
18 to 21. According to the Press of Atlantic City, his classmates in 1982
voted Rimm most likely to be elected President of the U.S. The next year,
perhaps presciently, they voted him most likely to overthrow the government.
More damaging to Rimm are two books that he wrote, excerpts of which have
begun to circulate on the Internet. One is a salacious privately published
novel, An American Playground, based on his experience with casinos. The
other, also privately published, is titled "The Pornographer's Handbook: How
to Exploit Women, Dupe Men &Make Lots of Money". Rimm says it's a satire;
others saw it offering practical advice to adult-bulletin-board operators
about how to market pornographic images effectively. Neither Carnegie Mellon
nor the Georgetown Law Journal has officially backed away from the study
(although the university is forming a committee to look into it). Rimm's
faculty adviser, Marvin Sirbu, a professor of engineering and public policy,
continues to support him, saying the research has been deliberately
mischaracterized by people with a political agenda. But Sirbu himself has been
attacked by Carnegie Mellon colleagues for not properly supervising his
student and for helping him secretly gather data about the pornography-viewing
habits of the university's students. Meanwhile, some of the researchers listed
as part of Rimm's "team" now say their involvement was minimal; at least one
of them had asked Rimm to remove his name. Brian Reid Ph.D who is the director
of the Network System Laboratory at Digital Equipment Corporation is the
author of the network measurement software tools that Rimm used to compile his
statistics. He had this to say about the Rimm study: "I have read a preprint
of the Rimm study of pornography and I am so distressed by its lack scientific
credibility that I don't even know where to begin critiquing it." As a rule,
computer-wise citizens of cyberspace tend to be strong civil libertarians and
First Amendment absolutists. Some clearly believe that Time, by publicizing
the Rimm study, was contributing to a mood of popular hysteria, sparked by the
Christian Coalition and other radical-right groups, that might lead to a
crackdown. It would be a shame, however, if the damaging flaws in Rimm's study
obscured the larger and more important debate about hard-core porn on the
Internet. So as a response to the hysteria wide-sweeping legislational
machinery was put into motion and Senators Exon and Coats drafted up the
infamous Communications Decency Act. Section 502: "Whoever ... uses any
interactive computer service to display in a manner available to a person
under 18 years of age, any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or
other communication that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently
offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory
activities or organs... shall be fined under Title 1, United States Code, or
imprisoned not more than two years...." This act outlaws any material deemed
"obscene" and imposes fines up to $100 000 and prison terms up to two years on
anyone who knowingly makes "indecent" material available to children under 18,
as directly quoted from section 502. The measure had problems from the start.
The key issue to senators like Exon is whether to classify the internet as a
print medium like newspapers, or a broadcast medium like television.
Unfortunately it is a communications medium and should be treated as such. If
such legislation was passed to control telephone conversations, many teenagers
would get the electric chair at age fifteen. The Communications Decency Act
never passed, but a line in the telecommunications bill that did pass
denounces anything "indecent" being transmitted. The legal ramifications are
still being fought over in government as the vague nature of the clause leaves
it open to multiple interpretations. As the issue stands now, there are only
two real solutions. One would be the adoption of government controls that
would infringe on peoples rights to free speech, but also make the net a safe
place to be. The other would for parents to use filtering software to control
what their computer is receiving. Government controls may seem attractive as
it limits information like bomb plans and chemical analysis of explosive that
terrorist groups or your next door neighbor can exploit to do evil. This could
help the world to be a safer place. Controls like this would protect the
interest of developing minds or sensitive people and make the risk of them
viewing obscene material almost zero. This way parents need not worry what
their children are looking at when they sit them down infront of the computer.
A huge market for sending and receiving pornography would be eliminated, and
this would be a positive step towards creating a more sensitive and caring
society. Unfortunately the technological realities of the internet makes
censorship like this impossible. Since there is no one main hub of the
internet, it is impossible to censor material as it comes from different
countries with different laws towards information. A popular web page called
CandyLand receives over half a million hits per week. It is run by the
"CandyMan" as he calls himself as he does not want to divulge his identity. He
was recently interviewed in The Net magazine. His web page has topics like
"Getting In" which deals with the art and science of lockpicking. "Cons and
Scams" details how to scam free stuff in stores, counterfeit money, rip off
change machines and decode scrambled pay TV signals. "Drugs!" tells you how to
grow psychedelic mushrooms, cook marijuana and get high off household
items."Bombs! All About Those Things That Go Boom!" gives explicit
instructions on making bombs using dry ice, bleach, match heads and more. He
was asked what would bring CandyLand down, and if he could find a way to still
get his message out. This was his response: "I am unable to foresee any
situations or circumstances that would totally bring CandyLand down.
Governmental censorship would most likely be an unenforceable joke. If
censorship did pose a serious threat, then one would only need to upload a
compressed copy of the content to a World Wide Web site within another country
and open shop over there where the domestic laws of the USA would be null and
void." His views are shared by hundreds of people in his situation in
cyberspace. The U.S. government can only limit the content of computers in the
U.S. if that, it can never control the content of computers outside the U.S.
border. Since the internet is a worldwide network, computers from the U.S. are
always linked to countries like Amsterdam and France; countries whose
commercials have more graphic sex that most Hollywood movies. Even if the
government could somehow set up watchdog groups monitoring information passing
over the border, huge problems still exist. Currently it would take a task
force of thousands to man sophisticated computers to monitor all the data
transactions coming into the country. Many of these transactions taking place
are now using encryption. This is a technology that scrambles data so only the
host and receiving computer can decode it. This would thwart any watchdog
group. The very nature of the internet keeps it in a state of dynamic
equilibrium. This constant change also works against watchdog groups.
Thousands of homepages are moving, going up and going down every day. This
makes it logistically impossible for all the pages to be tracked by any
agency. In the end, people want most what they cannot have. In the days of
prohibition rum-runners smuggled alcohol over the border in defiance of
government legislation. The government thought it would bring days of
intellectual enlightenment to the people, instead it brought days of bathtub
gin. So if the government bans media like this, the net populace will only
have a greater hunger for it. The government has an extremely bad track record
when dealing with the high-tech community. The government set up the Software
Piracy Association to combat the piracy (illegal copying) of programs in the
early days of computing. Companies even added copy protection to their
software to make it difficult to duplicate. Unfortunately in the high-tech
world the safe cracker is infinitely more resourceful than the safe maker.
"Hackers" as they loved to call themselves made short work of these
strategies. Software companies no longer ad copy protection as they realize
that it will be broken easily, some even measure the success of their programs
on how much they are pirated. Hackers and all the work they do are still alive
in the days of the information superhighway, making bank computers nervous,
but at the same time making the internet a more open place to communicate. The
government also difficult task in defining what exactly "indecent" means. It
was left in as a clause in the telecommunications bill and is extremely vague.
Where would the government draw the line, does late night TV (NYPD blue) have
the right to broadcast nudity while people communicating on the internet do
not have the right to type in what they want in a chat room, in complete
privacy? The biggest drawback of censorship is the fear it creates. Anyone who
actively uses the internet knows the realities of the online world and is
excited about where the internet is heading. None of them surf the internet in
fear of being offended as you control the path you are taking. Unfortunately
once the government sets a precedent, it is difficult to break. America
Online, one of the biggest online service providers, decided to actively
sensor content in its message bases. This seemed like a good idea at first.
Unfortunately people in breast cancer newsgroups had to refer to it as "hooter
cancer" as their messages would be automatically deleted if they used the word
"breasts". Pregnancy newsgroups also suffered similar communications
difficulties. Hundreds of America Online subscribers were outraged as they
could not communicate on the internet about the same things they could on
other medium, so they canceled their subscriptions. Today America Online is
less strict with its censorship policies. America Online is a tiny news base
when compared with the internet and if they had such difficulties with their
article and message base, it would be horrifying to see what would become of
the internet if it were subjected to tampering. The U.S. government wants to
make the internet more family oriented but it will never succeed because of
the technological infeasibility of their proposal and the driving force of
human nature to beat the system and strive against the establishment. Although
the problem of censorship is complex it is not without a sensible solution
that keeps a sense of decency in the online world without infringing on its
rights to free speech. The decision making matrix clearly outlines a
responsible solution to this problem. Today there are numerous software
packages like SurfWatch and Net Nanny that filter out material that is deemed
"objectionable" by the user. The software once installed on the users computer
will black out pages containing material the user does not want to see. These
programs usually have blacklists of the most popular "objectional" sites and
can steer the novice web-surfer away from anything indecent or unacceptable by
any community standard. These software packages are available now, are free
and are extremely effective. This solution is the most easily implemented as
it is available now and does nothing to alter the structure of the internet as
it stands now. You cannot gain access to indecent material unless you are
actively looking for it, so the prospect of a small child stumbling across a
huge cache of indecent material is extremely unlikely. Also more and more web
pages require an age verification of some sort before anything "bad" is
displayed on the screen. This makes it extremely difficult for minors to gain
access. Many right wing groups argue that this is merely a band-aid solution
and the objectional material is still out there. Unfortunately these are the
same groups that want Power Rangers to be banned from TV as they think it is
responsible for the violent nature of some of our children. The ideas of
people have never been homogenous and what one person deems objectionable is
completely acceptable to another. Tolerance of ideas is what makes society
work and that is why mediums like television have taken the middle road with
positive results. Networks have not banned Power Rangers or NYPD Blue and have
put responsibility in the hands of the parents where it should be. Television
is not a baby sitter, and the internet is not a baby sitter either. Concerned
parents can have a V-chip installed so the responsibility is on them to raise
their children as they seem fit. The same goes for the online community,
concerned individuals can install software that is the internet equivalent of
the V-chip, something that can be turned on or off, with varying degrees of
sensitivity. If parents must place their children infront of mechanical medium
because they are too busy to take care of them, then the parents are concerned
about the wrong things in their lives. The internet now is a thriving, teeming
world bursting with new ideas and new concepts. We all have the opportunity to
take part in it and to be part of its landscape. Although it has grown so much
in the past few years it is still it is infancy. With technology changing so
fast the video-conferencing capabilities of computers could make videophones
available at last in every home. People who can shop today for CD's in online
boutiques can tomorrow shop for clothes in virtual malls or design the home of
their dreams on their desktop. The internet of the future, will probably not
resemble anything we recognize today as it will be more tightly integrated
into our lives than ever before. By breaking down the barriers of culture and
spanning huge distances it can be one of the greatest forces for change in the
twentieth century. However, if it is tampered with by people who do not fully
recognize what it is, let alone its potential, the internet will never blossom
into what it should become: a way to bring us all closer together.
Bibliography Burroughs, Rice. "Cause for Alarm". Available
http://www.teleport.com/~richieb/cause/ December 7 1996 "Decency Undressed".
Hotwired Magazine. Available http://www.hotwired/special/censorship Ellerman,
Sarah. "Conversation with the CandyMan". Internet Underground Magazine. Warner
Publishing Services: Nashville January 1996 Elmer-Dewitt, Philip. "Cyberporn".
Time Magazine. Time Canada: Toronto. July 3, 1995. "Internet Guide to the
CDA". Available http://www.velcome.iupui.edu/~droy1/cdaguide.html September 26
1996 Lucyga, Dierk. "Drop out! by Net Censorship". Available
http://www.unikonstanz.de/~dierk/censorship March 23 1996 Rimm, Marty.
"Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway". Available
http://TRFN.pgh.pa.us/guest/mrstudy.html November 7 1995 Waters, Crystal.
"What's Sex Got to Do With It?". The Net Magazine. Future Publishing Ltd:
London, England. September 1995. pg 23. Witbrock, Michael. "Censorship at
CMU". Available http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/kcf/www/censor/
December 1 1995
_Bibliography _
Bibliography Burroughs, Rice. "Cause for Alarm". Available
http://www.teleport.com/~richieb/cause/ December 7 1996 "Decency Undressed".
Hotwired Magazine. Available http://www.hotwired/special/censorship Ellerman,
Sarah. "Conversation with the CandyMan". Internet Underground Magazine. Warner
Publishing Services: Nashville January 1996 Elmer-Dewitt, Philip. "Cyberporn".
Time Magazine. Time Canada: Toronto. July 3, 1995. "Internet Guide to the
CDA". Available http://www.velcome.iupui.edu/~droy1/cdaguide.html September 26
1996 Lucyga, Dierk. "Drop out! by Net Censorship". Available
http://www.unikonstanz.de/~dierk/censorship March 23 1996 Rimm, Marty.
"Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway". Available
http://TRFN.pgh.pa.us/guest/mrstudy.html November 7 1995 Waters, Crystal.
"What's Sex Got to Do With It?". The Net Magazine. Future Publishing Ltd:
London, England. September 1995. pg 23. Witbrock, Michael. "Censorship at
CMU". Available http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/kcf/www/censor/
December 1 1995
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