Caught In The Web Bill That Would Push Schools, Libraries To ‘Filter’ Sexual Material On Internet Debated

A Senate bill that would pressure schools and libraries to “filter” sexual material from the Internet was scorned as unworkable and unconstitutional at a congressional hearing this week.

But several senators and some high-tech industry executives praised the bill, insisting that the nation’s children must be protected against what they consider widespread online obscenity, child pornography and e-mail between pedophiles and unsuspecting kids.

At stake in the censorship debate: which schools or libraries will be able to pay for new Internet service with cash from a new $2 billion-a-year fund, to be paid by telecommunications companies and collected by the Federal Communications Commission.

Under the proposed legislation, schools that did not use software “blockers” or take other steps to censor pornography would be denied money from the fund.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and other supporters of the bill said the rule was needed to prevent the American public from supporting access in schools to Internet sites that would be blocked in most homes.

Critics, though, said the technology is far from foolproof, and that control decisions should be made locally - and with great respect for the First Amendment.

The hearing was weighted with witnesses who claimed the Internet is making child molestation easy. Failure to pass some measure “will guarantee that hard-core pornography is available to every child in every classroom,” according to Andrew Sernovitz, president of the Association for Interactive Media, an industry group.

An audience packed into the Senate Commerce committee’s hearing room heard graphic testimony from an undercover police detective from Huntington Beach, Calif., who arrived wearing a black hood and spoke from behind a screen.

And the panel heard from a 24-year-old Seattle man who runs an on-line porn empire and wants to segregate all sexual material on the Internet into a new red-light zone.

The detective, Daryk Rowland, said “unfiltered or unsupervised access to the Internet and on-line services” has led to an explosion of children “being enticed and lured away from home, sexually molested and victimized through the distribution of child pornography.”

Children can freely view images on the Internet of sex and violence including “bestiality, defecation, urination and hard-core torture and even ‘snuff’ images.”

Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., read a letter from teachers and administrators at a rural Indiana high school describing Internet images seen in their school library of “tattooed penises and testicles.”

McCain called such images “horrific” and said he was so “shocked and taken aback” that he would not allow anyone in the hearing room other than members and their staff to see them. He slammed critics of federal attempts to control Internet content, especially the American Civil Liberties Union, calling many of his opponents “radical elements” and predicting that if on-line sexual imagery proliferated, there would be a “backlash” by the American public.

“There will come a time where Americans will say we are willing to sacrifice some of our civil liberties” in an effort to censor such content on the Internet, he said.

The porn executive, Seth Warshavsky, agreed some purveyors of on-line sex pose a threat to children. But he said the problem could be solved by segregating adult content to a special set of Internet addresses, or domains, labeled adult.

Those easily could be blocked by software, and laws could be enacted forcing users of those domains to verify their users were adults before allowing them to view the wares. He said his sites already were careful to screen users for age and he knew of no substantial complaints from parents or schools about minors using his services.

But Warshavsky got a tongue-lashing from McCain, who said the publicly available Internet images produced by his company, Internet Entertainment Group, were graphic enough to be obscene.

Some witnesses counseled caution in enacting any federal controls on Internet content, and warned that even existing screening technology falls short of the goal of placing a definitive barrier between kids and on-line sex.

The sharpest critics of the proposed legislation were not asked to testify.

They included the National Education Association, the American Library Association and the Internet Free Expression Alliance, an ad-hoc group whose members include the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Society of Newspaper Editors and People for the American Way.

“We think there is no need for a federal mandate,” said Lynne E. Bradley, deputy executive director of the ALA’s Washington office. “We can work at the local level to solve this. We know our libraries are not taking kids to these kinds of sites. We think that decisions on controls are best made as a local decision.”

Other critics said they saw another Communications Decency Act in the making - destined for the same fate at the Supreme Court.

“Both (McCain’s and Coats’) bills make the same mistake,” said Daniel Weitzner, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington public interest group. The links between on-line images and pedophilia “seem entirely unsubstantiated.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: WHAT THE LAW SAYS From the Communications Decency Act of 1995: “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.