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Government Censorship would damage the atmosphere of the freedom to express
ideas on the Internet; therefore, government should not encourage
censorship
Thesis: Government Censorship would damage the atmosphere of the freedom to
express ideas on the Internet; therefore, government should not encourage
censorship.
Introduction
I. In the Internet community, there is a large volume of technical terms.
For this reason, it is first necessary to examine the terminology specific
to Internet.
1. The internet is a world wide computer network.
1. Electronic mail (email), which is one component of the Internet,
approximates person to person letters, memoranda, notes and even phone
calls.
2. Another term that is often used is electronic news (enews/Usenet), enews
is a broadcast, free to the Internet medium.
3. The term FTP is also frequently used. File transfer protocol (FTP)
started as an Internet archival and retrieval medium, somewhat analogous to
traditional libraries.
4. The world-wide web (WWW), which is another component of the Net, can be
used to "publish" material that would traditionally appear in journals,
magazines, posters, books, television and even on film.
2. It is also essential to give a brief history on the internet.
3.The U.S. government is now trying to pass bills to prevent misuse of the
Net.
II. In order to understand the need for the ever-growing body of
legislation, it is important to explore the controversy, and the current
problems involved with the Net as it exists must be introduced.
1. The problem that concerns most people is offensive materials such as
pornography.
2. Another crucial internet crime is the stealing of credit card numbers.
III. One reaction to this inapplicability has been the "Censor the Net"
approach (the censorship bill), we are now to compare its advantages and
disadvantages.
1. First, the meaning of "Censoring the Net" must be explained.
2. However, many experts have pointed out that government censorship is not
possible.
1. First, it is not fair to exclude the freedom and damage the atmosphere
of freely expressing ideas just for the safety of children.
2. Most internet users are enjoying their freedom of speech on the Net,
which is supposed to be protected by our First Amendment.
3. Additionally, only a very small portion of the Net contains offensive
material, most people do not use the Net for pornography.
4. It must be understood that censoring the Net is technically impossible.
5. While people are concerned about Internet pornography, it should be
recognized that pornography is sometimes legal; for example, pornography is
legal in video and magazines.
IV. There are many alternative measures to government censorship which
would prevent misuse of the Net and would have the same effects as
censorship.
1. It is very important for parents to provide moral guidance for their
children, and parents should have this responsibility.
2. However, at the same time as we carry out moral guidance, we have to
come out with some short term approaches to solve the problem in a more
efficient way as well.
3. An alternative to government censorship is the technological fix, which
would prevent misuse of the Net and would have the same effects as
government censorship.
1. One example of technological fix is the "SurfWatch" software.
2. Also, commercial Internet service providers, such as "America Online",
allow parents to control 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 no computer programs to automatically and reliably classify
material; only people can do it. As a result, while practicing
technological fixes, the classification of the contents of the material
when posting is very important.
5. Nowadays, most internet users classify their postings with standard
categories, and leave signatures at the end of postings.
6. The combination of the installation of censoring software and the
classification of materials is a much better solution than government
censorship.
Conclusion
The Internet is a wonderful place of entertainment and education but like
all places used by millions of people, it has some murky corners people
would prefer children not to explore. In the physical world society as a
whole conspires to protect children, but there are no social or physical
constraints to Internet surfing.
The Internet Censorship Bill of 1995, also known as the Exon/Coats
Communications Decency Act, has been introduced in the U.S. Congress. It
would make it a criminal offense to make available to children anything
that is indecent, or to send anything 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 discourse on the Internet suitable for young children. The issue
of whether is it necessary 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, or asking people to sign the petition to stop
government censorship.
The Internet was originally a place for people to freely express their
ideas worldwide. It is also one of America’s most valuable types of
technology; scientists use email for quick and easy communication. They
post their current scientific discoveries on the Usenet newsgroups so other
scientists in the same field of study all over the world can know in
minutes. Ordinary people use the Net for communication, expressing their
opinions in the newsgroups, obtaining up-to-date information from the WWW,
acquiring files by using FTP, etc. Censorship would damage the atmosphere
of the freedom to express ideas on the Internet; therefore, government
should not encourage censorship.
In the Internet community, there is a large volume of technical terms. For
this reason, it is first necessary to examine the terminology specific to
Internet. The Internet is a world wide computer network. The "Net" is
frequently used in place of Internet. In the words of Allison and Baxter,
two experts on Internet Censorship at the Monash University, "the Internet
is comprised of various digital media subsuming many of the distinct roles
of traditional media" (Allison and Baxter 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 for private communication. Electronic mailing lists are rather like
club newsletters and readers have to contract-in or subscribe to a list.
Another term that is often used is electronic news (enews/Usenet), enews is
a broadcast, free to the Internet medium. It has some properties of radio
or television, particularly talk-back radio or television, in that the
destination is indiscriminate.
The term FTP is also frequently used. File transfer protocol (FTP) started
as an Internet archival and retrieval medium, somewhat analogous to
traditional libraries. Files can be retrieved from distant computers using
a traditional text-based interface.
The world-wide web (WWW), which is another component of the Net, can be
used to "publish" material that would traditionally appear in journals,
magazines, posters, books, television and even on film. The term UNIX, "a
widely heard computer term, is a multi-user, multitasking operating system
originally developed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, at AT&T Bell
Laboratories, in 1969 for use on minicomputers" ("UNIX" n.p.).
To understand the background of the controversy, it is also necessary to
give a brief history on the Internet. The Internet was created about twenty
years ago in an attempt to connect a U.S. Defense Department network called
the ARPAnet and various other radio and satellite networks. The ARPAnet was
an experimental network designed to support military research; in
particular, research about how to build networks that could withstand
partial outages (such as bomb attacks) and still function. At about the
same time the Internet was coming into being, Ethernet local area networks
("LANs") were developed. Most of these workstations came with Berkeley UNIX,
which included 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. The demand keeps growing today. Now that most four-year colleges
are connected to the Net, people are trying to get secondary and primary
schools connected. People who have graduated from college where they have
used the resources of the Net in classes, know what the Internet is good
for, and talk their employers into connecting different corporations. All
this activity points to continued growth, networking problems to solve,
evolving technologies, and job security for networkers (Willmott 107).
The Internet can also be compared to a church. In many ways the Internet is
like a church: it has its council of elders, every member has an opinion
about how things should work, and they can either take part or not. It’s
the choice of the user. The Internet has no president, chief operating
officer, or Pope. The constituent networks may have presidents and CEO’s,
but that’s a different issue; there is no single authority figure for the
Internet as a whole. As stated by Frances Hentoff, the staff writer for The
Village Voice and the author of First Freedoms, "on an info superhighway
driven by individuals, there are no cops preventing users from downloading"
(Hentoff 1). Internet users can broadcast or express anything they want.
The fact that the Net has no single authority figure sets forth a problem
about what kind of materials could be available on the Net.
The U.S. government is now trying to pass bills to prevent misuse of the
Net. The Internet Censorship Bill of 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 a purity 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 a university, where some
students may be under 18 years old, carries the alt.sex.* newsgroups, which
contains adult material, it breaks the law. According to George Melloan
from the Wall Street Journal, a censorship bill was passed by the Senate
84-16 in July, and an anticensorship bill was passed by the House 420-4 in
August. There are now four different sets of censorship and anticensorship
language in the House and Senate versions of the Telecomm reform bill,
which contradict each other and will have to be reconciled (Melloan, n.p.).
In order to understand the need for the ever-growing body of legislation,
it is important to explore the controversy, and the current problems
involved with the Net as it exists must be introduced.
The problem that concerns most people is offensive material 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, coarse language, sexual/gender
orientation, [and] sexuality" (Allison and Baxter 3). Since the Internet is
open to everyone, children are very easily exposed to such material.
According to Allison and Baxter, "the information provided on the Internet,
particularly through the WWW, ranges across train time-tables, university
lecture notes, books, art exhibits, film promotions, the wisdom and ravings
of individuals and, yes, pornographic pictures" (Allison and Baxter 3).
Moreover, many high schools in the United States provide Internet access to
students, which is very useful for looking up information, but if a student
intends to look for inappropriate material, he/she is very likely to find
such material
simply by doing an Internet search.
Another crucial Internet crime is the theft of credit card numbers.
Companies do business on the Net, and credit card numbers are stored on
their servers; everyone with the necessary computer knowledge could hack in
and obtain such databases for illegal purposes. To cite an instance, the
most infamous computer terrorist, Kevin Mitnick, "waived extradition and is
now in jail in California, charged with computer fraud and illegal use of a
telephone access device. The list of allegations against him include theft
of many files and documents, including twenty-thousand credit card numbers
from Netcom On-Line Services, which provides thousands with access to the
Internet" (Warren 52). Americans have to come up with a solution in order
to keep children away from inappropriate material and to prevent misuses of
the Net.
One reaction to this inapplicability has been the "Censor the Net" 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 censor the Net, it is imperative to list the advantages and
disadvantages of the "censor the Net" approach. The advantage of government
censorship is that ideally, children and teenagers could be kept away from
unsuitable material.
However, many experts have pointed out that government censorship is not
possible. Howard Rheingold, the editor of the Whole World Review, observes
that, "the ‘censor the Net’ approach is not just morally misguided. It’s
becoming technically and politically impossible" (Rheingold n.p.).
First, it is not fair to exclude the freedom and damage the atmosphere of
freely expressing ideas just for the safety of children. Corn-Revere, an
expert on Internet censorship at the Howgan &
Harson Law Firm, points out that "the purpose of indecency regulation is to
keep adult material from falling into the hands of kids. When he first
introduced a similar bill last year, Senator Exon said he was concerned
that the Information Superhighway was in danger of becoming an electronic ‘
red light district’ and that he wanted to bar his granddaughter’s access to
unsuitable information"
(Corn-Revere 24). It is clear that Senator Exon introduced the bill to
prevent minors from viewing unsuitable material on the Net. In addition,
Meleedy, a computer science graduate student at Harvard University,
questions that if "the Internet makes democracy this accessible to the
average citizen, is it any wonder Congress wants to censor it?" (Meleedy 1)
Allison and Baxter assert that, "the most significant new properties of the
Internet media are the diversity of information sources and their ability
to reach almost anywhere in the world. Authors range from major
corporations such as IBM and Disney to school children" (Allison and Baxter
3). As predicted by Corn-Revere, "At the very least, the law will force
content providers to make access more 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 are enjoying their freedom of speech on the Net, which
is supposed to be protected by the First Amendment of the United States.
According to Corn-Reverse, "it has been suggested that, ‘on-line systems
give people far more genuinely free speech and free press than ever before
in human history’" (Corn-Reverse 71). Rheingold predicts that "Heavy-handed
attempts to impose restrictions on the unruly but incredibly creative
anarchy of the Net could kill the spirit of cooperative knowledge-sharing
that makes the Net valuable to millions" (Rheingold n.p.). The freedom of
idea expression is what makes the Internet important and enjoyable, and it
should not be waived for any reason.
Additionally, only a very small portion of the Net contains offensive
material, most people do not use the Net for pornography. Caragata from
Maclean’s magazine observes that, "it is pornography that stirs the most
controversy. But while there is no doubt that pornography is popular, it
amounts to a trickle compared with everything else available on the Net"
(Caragata 51). The Net is mostly being used for communication and
information exchange, and only a tiny portion of the Net contains
pornography and other offensive material.
It must be understood that censoring the Net is technically impossible.
According to Allison and Baxter, "in principle, it is impossible to monitor
all material being transmitted on the Internet.
Considering the difficulties with international boundaries, a licensing
system faces many obvious practical hurdles" (Allison and Baxter 6). As
described by Allison and Baxter, "Any good
Computer Science graduate can create a completely secure encryption system
for concealment purposes. The material can even be disguised, for example
hidden ‘inside’ a perfectly innocuous picture" (Allison and Baxter 6).
Therefore, if a person wants to publish offensive material, he/she can
design a formula to change the material with respect to a key, and secretly
tell other users what the key is. In this way, they can retrieve the same
material and pass through the government censorship.
While people are concerned about Internet pornography, it should be
recognized that pornography is sometimes legal; for example, pornography is
legal in video and magazines. Therefore, it is inconsistent to ban the
Internet equivalents. According to Rheingold, "Citizens should have the
right to restrict the information-flow into their homes. They should be
able to exclude from 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 which they have shielded them , and then they will have
left to deal with these shocking sights and sound in the moral fiber they
helped them cultivate" (Rheingold n.p.). The Internet is definitely not the
only medium for teenagers to find inappropriate material. Even if the Net
does not have any, teenagers could also be exposed to indecorous material
in many other places. For example, Allison and Baxter say that, "most
authors using electronic media do not produce material that is any ‘worse’
than that available from news agents, video shops, or mail-order sources"
(Allison and Baxter 8). On that account, if the purpose of censoring is to
prevent minors from being exposed to indecorous material, not only the Net
has to be censored. Censoring the Net will only eliminate one single
medium for minors to find irrelevant material. Government censorship is
not the solution to the problem, and alternatives measures that have same
effects as censorship can be practiced.
There are many alternative measures to government censorship which would
prevent misuse of the Net and would have the same effects as censorship.
According to Hentoff, "there are ways to protect children without the Act’s
intervention: blockage of certain areas, passwords, parental supervision.
And adults—under protection of the First Amendment—can remain protected
from government thought control. However, if the censorship bill is passed,
the First Amendment may effectively be excluded from cyberspace" (Hentoff
1).
It is very important for parents to provide moral guidance for their
children, and parents should have this responsibility. Moral guidance is
the foremost long-term solution to the problem. Rheingold believes that,
"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 protection that has a chance of working is to give
their sons and daughters moral grounding and some common sense" (Rheingold
n.p.). In America, minors can be exposed to sexual material in many media.
Providing children with moral guidance is the foremost solution to the
problem.
However, at the same time that parents carry out moral guidance, Americans
have to come out
with some short term approaches to solve the problem in a more efficient
way as well. An
alternative to government censorship is the technological fix, which would
prevent misuse of the
Net and would have the same effects as government censorship. This involves
the design of
intelligent software to filter information. There is a rush to develop
information filtering software and
get it to market. One example of technological fix is the "SurfWatch"
software, as described by
Allison and Baxter, "SurfWatch is a breakthrough software product which
helps parents deal with
the flood of sexual material on the Internet. By allowing parents to be
responsible for blocking
what is being received at any individual computer, children and others have
less chance of
accidentally or deliberately being exposed to unwanted material. SurfWatch
is the first major
advance in providing a technical solution to a difficult issue created by
the explosion of technology.
SurfWatch strives to preserve Internet freedom by letting individuals
choose what they see" (Allison, Baxter 6). The SurfWatch vendor intends 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 available to
their children (Cidley 59). Parental Control is a feature in many
commercial Internet service providers, users can turn on the Parental
Control function, and they 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 to enjoy their Internet freedom.
Another technological fix is for parents and guardians to have a separate
"proxy server" for their children’s web browser. A "proxy server" is a
program that disallows uses of some specified Internet sites or Usenet
newsgroups. The parents need to actively select sites their proxy server
can access. Parental control tools is a very possible solution to the
problem, as stated in the "Communications Decency Act Issues Page" by the
Center for Democracy and Technology, "what will help parents control their
children’s access to the Internet is Parental Control tools and features,
such as those provided by several major online services and available as
over-the-counter software" ("Stop the Communications ..." n.p.). Tools for
controlling Internet access by children are widely available, and parents
can already control their children’s access to the material on the Net.
There are no computer programs to automatically and reliably classify
material; only people can do
it. As a result, while practicing technological fixes, the classification
of the contents of the material
when posting is very important. Nowadays, most Internet users classify
their postings with
standard categories, and leave signatures at the end of postings. According
to Allison and Baxter,
"items are signed with a secure digital signature that can be traced to a
real person, company or
organization" (Allison, Baxter 4). The strengths of the material are often
classified as "strong" or
"weak", and attitudes of a given document towards a topic are often
classified as "advocates",
"discusses", "deplores", or "does not discuss". Additionally, in order to
reduce the effort of
classifying many individual items, particularly in the case of FTP and WWW,
classifications are
often attached to directories and inherited by subdirectories and documents.
In this way, readers
can make informed decisions regarding access of Internet material, and the
programming of
intelligent software will be much easier: just by recognizing a small
number of terms of classification. As a matter of fact, the classification
of material has already been done on the Net for a period of time. Most
Internet materials are well classified, and people will have an idea of
what they are going to see beforehand. For instance, the articles in a
particular Usenet newsgroup
can be accurately predicted by the name of the group. For example,
soc.culture.hongkong.entertainment contains discussion of the entertainment
industry of Hong
Kong; alt.binaries.sex.pictures contains encoded binary files of dirty
pictures. Internet users know what they are approaching beforehand, and
minors know that they are not supposed to browse those alt.sex.* newsgroups.
.
The combination of the installation of censoring software and the
classification of material is a much better solution than government
censorship. Hentoff mentions that "flexibility of interactive
media...enables parents to control what content their kids have access to,
and leaves the flow of information free for those adults who want it"
(Hentoff 1). This prevents unwanted material from reaching children and
allows adults to continue enjoying their Internet freedom.
The problem of the Net is that it is easy for minors to obtain
inappropriate materials. The American government came up with a proposal to
censor the Net, but as proved earlier, the "Censor the Net" approach is
both technically and politically impossible. The foremost solution to the
problem is for parents to provide moral guidance for their children. At the
same time they are providing moral guidance for their children, Americans
also need short term technical solution. Intelligent censoring software and
proxy servers can let parents disallow their children access to certain
sites.
In this way, parents can keep their children from the offensive materials
on the Net. "Like other dilemmas and unanswered questions 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 filters to
those who want a version of Internet Lite [sic]" (Baker 65).
For intelligent software and proxy servers to operate successfully, it is
necessary to classify the information available on the Net, and the
classification of materials has already been done by Internet users for
years. Parents can then censor the Net for their children, and adults can
continue to enjoy their Internet freedom. This will provide the same effect
as government censorship, but will not damage the atmosphere of free idea
expression and freedom on the Net.
Moreover, indecorous materials are not only on the Net, minors can obtain
such materials without accessing the Internet at all. Internet censorship
is not the solution to keeping minors away from sexual material. The real
and foremost solution to preventing minors from viewing sexual material is
for parents to take 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 protection that has a chance of working is to give
their sons and daughters moral grounding and some common sense" (Rheingold
n.p.).
WORKS CITED
Allison, 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 Wall
Street Journal 26 June 1995: A13.
Philip, Elmer-Derwitt. "Porn on the Internet." 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 Communications Decency Act
Issues Page. http://www.cdt.org/cda.html.
"UNIX." Microsoft Encarta. Vers. 95. Computer Software. Encyclopedia
Software, 1995. MS Windows 3.1, 0.6 GB, CD-ROM.
Willmott, Don. "Activities on the Internet." PC Magazine 10 October 1995:
106+.
ADDITIONAL FEATURED ESSAYS
Internet Censorship
Intro: Censorship is when a third party makes decisions about what can be communicated between two people; even if the t
Internet Censorship
Intro: Censorship is when a third party makes decisions about what can be communicated between two people; even if the t
Censorship In The United States
Censorship within these United States is not only an immoral and big-brotherly practice, but also an insult to all of th
1984 Short Essay On Freedom
Nineteen Eighty Four Short Essay In Canada, we have the freedom to do almost anything. In the novel Nineteen Eighty Four
1984 7
Nineteen Eighty Four Short Essay In Canada, we have the freedom to do almost anything. In the novel Nineteen Eighty Four
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