On June 26, 1997 the Supreme Court did what we all expected. And "Netizens" reacted with jubilation when the Supreme Court confirmed the unique characteristics of cyberspace and struck down the Communication Decency Act. The court ruled 7-2 that all key parts of the law violated the First Amendment by impinging on otherwise permissible speech among adults.
However, like the protestors outside the Supreme Court (in the picture above), many individuals and groups were ready to go on the offensive again. Firing up an organized and well produced media blitz, groups that supported the law countered that children were at risk without the legal protection. Never mind that these groups completely ignore all the available facts.
"Millions of children will be victimized by the failure of this court to protect them from the most vile hardcore pornography and exploitation on the Internet," said Tom Minnery, vice president of Focus on the Family, an advocacy group based in Colorado.
Cathy Cleaver, director of legal policy at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., said the court’s opinion left room for Congress to write a narrower law to protect children.
"As of today, the floodgates are open and pornographers can invite children in," she said. "But we’re not going to stop fighting for protection for kids on-line. We will go back (to Congress) and you will be seeing a more narrowly drafted statute."
Hey, Mr. Minnery and Ms. Cleaver, the solution to this non-problem already exists, without your righteous intervention. And without your knowledge, so it seems.
Michael Sears, general manager of SurfWatch, said filtering software already exists that can help keep objectionable material away from minors. "What the court is doing here is putting the choice back in the parent’s hand and that’s where it should be," Sears said. He agreed with the lower court’s finding that software to keep sexually explicit material away from children will soon be widely available.
"The content is going to continue to grow, he said. There’s 100,000 new sites a day and we’ll continue with our technology to scrub those sites as soon as they come on-line. It takes technology."
The Supreme Court soundly rejected the government’s argument that the CDA was constitutional. The court left little room for legislators wanting to create another version of the law, said E. Leonard Rubin, an attorney with Gordon & Glickson in Chicago who specializes in Internet law. The key is that a large, well financed and highly motivated group of people are going to try.
Perhaps most frightening is that Rubin said any future attempts to regulate content on the Internet may be done under civil law, rather than criminal law. What the government can't kill, it sure as hell can regulate to death.
The original law was approved by Congress as part of the sweeping Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Former Sen. James Exon, who led the campaign to protect children from Internet pornography, said he hopes Congress will take another run at the bill.
Why do free people, who would easily be the first harmed by the loss of rights, want to work so hard to surrender their freedom. Do they want to control other's lives? Do they fear freedom? Or do they simply fear the unknown? Do they fear the future?
The Supreme Court has now guaranteed that I can keep this bottle in front of me. But you can count on congress to now try to regulate us all into getting a frontal lobotomy.