A few words concerning "indecency" and the "Communities Decency Act"

A few words concerning "indecency" and the "Communities Decency Act"
By: Robert Turk	I had to mail to CBS news to voice my concerns about their report on the Supreme Court situation today. The Justices are hearing of the government's appeal of the lower-court ruling declaring the CDA unconstitutional. The CDA does NOT stand for "Communities Decency Act" but rather "Communications Decency Act". Also, the segment about the fifth grader who had accessed a topless photograph of a woman was insulting. The boy knew he had done something "wrong", even though I don't personally believe that people should be shamed for their curiosity about grown-up issues such as sexuality, yet he would not be accountable for his actions. This is just another example of parents and people in general seeking to find a scapegoat for their problems. In this case, the problem is that people think that viewing images of other people's bodies is a "bad" thing, and their problem is that photographs like this are available online, and they want the government to do something about it for them. If parents could be accountable for their motivations to "protect" their children (and other people's children) from "indecent" material -- the tacit message to these children is that sex is bad, human bodies are bad, or that people should be ashamed of their bodies or their curiosity about other people's bodies. In any case, these people should not want the government to be making these kinds of judgement calss about moral questions that are best left to parents, families, and individuals. Certainly, the broad brush of the CDA covers more issues than simple nudity! This is where the "Communications" part of the law's title becomes important. You see, this law does much more than simply make it a crime to be an American citizen who operates a website that has potentially offensive imagery available. In any communications mediated by the Internet -- e-mail, USENET postings, database searches, or whatever -- somebody could decide that the material publicly available is offensive and attempt to prosecute the hosts of the "offending" material. In this case, we webmasters and system administrators could find ourselves on the business end of a $200,000 fine and 2 years of jail time for materials we may have actually had nothing to do with being accessed via hosts we administer. This risk will certainly do MAJOR damage to the nascent information technology in America. Of course, we could all move to a country without a CDA-type law in effect. But then we would leave America with a sanitized, if existant, sorta-Net, where the "offensive" materials would still be available from offshore hosts and sites. Parents would still need to be accountable for their fears of their children's exposure to "the real world" with all of its warts and "indecency", and kids would still be able to explore their curosity -- except that they too could be held responsible for something "indecent" and find themselves indentured to the State for $200,000 and locked up earning $0.13 per hour in some federal prison for the "crime" of intellectual curiosity.

I had to mail to CBS news to voice my concerns about their report on the Supreme Court situation today. The Justices are hearing of the government's appeal of the lower-court ruling declaring the CDA unconstitutional. The CDA does NOT stand for "Communities Decency Act" but rather "Communications Decency Act". Also, the segment about the fifth grader who had accessed a topless photograph of a woman was insulting. The boy knew he had done something "wrong", even though I don't personally believe that people should be shamed for their curiosity about grown-up issues such as sexuality, yet he would not be accountable for his actions. This is just another example of parents and people in general seeking to find a scapegoat for their problems. In this case, the problem is that people think that viewing images of other people's bodies is a "bad" thing, and their problem is that photographs like this are available online, and they want the government to do something about it for them.

If parents could be accountable for their motivations to "protect" their children (and other people's children) from "indecent" material -- the tacit message to these children is that sex is bad, human bodies are bad, or that people should be ashamed of their bodies or their curiosity about other people's bodies. In any case, these people should not want the government to be making these kinds of judgement calss about moral questions that are best left to parents, families, and individuals. Certainly, the broad brush of the CDA covers more issues than simple nudity!

This is where the "Communications" part of the law's title becomes important. You see, this law does much more than simply make it a crime to be an American citizen who operates a website that has potentially offensive imagery available. In any communications mediated by the Internet -- e-mail, USENET postings, database searches, or whatever -- somebody could decide that the material publicly available is offensive and attempt to prosecute the hosts of the "offending" material. In this case, we webmasters and system administrators could find ourselves on the business end of a $200,000 fine and 2 years of jail time for materials we may have actually had nothing to do with being accessed via hosts we administer.

This risk will certainly do MAJOR damage to the nascent information technology in America. Of course, we could all move to a country without a CDA-type law in effect. But then we would leave America with a sanitized, if existant, sorta-Net, where the "offensive" materials would still be available from offshore hosts and sites. Parents would still need to be accountable for their fears of their children's exposure to "the real world" with all of its warts and "indecency", and kids would still be able to explore their curosity -- except that they too could be held responsible for something "indecent" and find themselves indentured to the State for $200,000 and locked up earning $0.13 per hour in some federal prison for the "crime" of intellectual curiosity.