Testimony of

                              Mike Godwin
    
                             Staff Counsel
                                of the  
                   Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

                              Regarding

 The "Protection of Children From Computer Pornography Act of 1995" 
                               (S. 892)

                                before

                    the Senate Judiciary Committee

                             July 24, 1995


I.	The Challenge of a New Medium

My name is Mike Godwin, and I am staff counsel for the Electronic 
Frontier Foundation. I'd like to thank you, Mr. Chairman, on behalf of 
my organization, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for allowing EFF to 
submit testimony concerning the important issues, and significant 
problems, we believe are raised by S. 892. One of our goals at EFF is to 
assist policymakers and legislators in developing a framework to 
understand the legal and social significance of what is, in effect, a 
wholly new medium -- computer communications. EFF is dedicated to 
expanding and preserving the democratic potential of this new medium, 
whose social and political significance may ultimately exceed that of 
the very first mass medium, the printing press. The issues raised by 
computer communications transcend partisan politics and require of us 
all that we stretch our imaginations -- the worst mistake we can make on 
the threshold of this revolution is to assume that this new medium is, 
so far as the Constitution and laws of the United States are concerned, 
essentially the same as broadcasting, or more or less similar to 
telephony. Computer communications -- and especially those 
communications that depend on computer networks of national or global 
reach, raise new problems and questions for lawmakers. At the same time, 
this medium promises to be the fulfillment of our oldest First Amendment 
values. 

But I come here not just as a lawyer who is concerned about the First 
Amendment. I'm also a father. My little girl will be the first person in 
my family to have grown up with the Internet. As a parent, I'm deeply 
concerned with protecting Ariel from bad material and from bad people. 
And this concern is the other reason for my being here -- I want to help 
ensure that whatever legislation or policy comes from Congress regarding 
the Internet will help me as a parent in protecting my little girl, 
while at the same time ensuring that she's able to benefit fully from 
access to the Net.

While I do want to talk a bit about some of the Constitutional issues 
raised by S. 892, I don't want to duplicate the thoughtful, thorough 
analysis submitted to this committee by Jerry Berman of the Center for 
Democracy and Technology. Instead, I want to focus on giving you a 
better historical and technical understanding of why computer 
communications are fundamentally new and different from previous 
communications media. 

Now, figuring out the proper legal framework for the Net is tricky. Even 
if you didn't know anything else about computer communications, you'd 
know it's tricky from one simple fact: you've got Rush Limbaugh and Newt 
Gingrich and the ACLU on one side of the issue, and Senators Robert Dole 
and Dianne Feinstein on the other side. What this tells us, I think, is 
that one's approach to making policy about computer communications 
derives less from one's political affiliations than it does from how one 
sees it in relation to traditional communications media. 

You see, the more you know about computer networks and the Internet, the 
clearer it becomes that the these networks are different in several 
respects from traditional communications media such as print, 
broadcasting, and the telephone. And these differences, once grasped, 
entail that top-down, government-centered approaches to protecting 
children will be ineffective. They also entail that the "least 
restrictive means" test of First Amendment jurisprudence will lead to 
different results in this medium from those results we've seen in 
traditional media, such as telephony. (See, e.g., Sable Communications 
v. FCC, 1989). We begin with what I promise will be a short history of 
the Internet. 


II.	The Humble Beginnings

In spirit, at least, the Internet--the global "network of networks" that 
is increasingly the link among commercial online providers, businesses, 
government, computer bulletin-board systems, and other modes of computer 
communications -- was conceived 30 years ago by Paul Baran, a RAND 
Corporation researcher. In a highly theoretical paper, Baran addressed a 
quintessentially Cold War problem: How could U.S. authorities 
successfully communicate in the aftermath of a nuclear war? 

The problem was that traditional communications network designs were 
vulnerable to strategic attacks. Hubs and main arteries could be 
destroyed, isolating whole sections of the country. And any central 
control authority would be a particularly enticing target for a surgical 
strike.

Baran developed a theory of a truly decentralized, "distributed" 
communications network, with no central authority, and no main hubs or 
arteries. Any given communication on the network was sliced into what 
later were called "packets," and each packet was separately addressed, 
then thrust by the network in the general direction of the 
communication's destination. Each packet might take a separate route 
across the network, and some of those routes might involve serious 
detours (a packet might travel from Chicago to Seattle by way of Texas, 
for example). If a particular route had been damaged by natural disaster 
or military attack, a given packet would simply continue trying new 
routes until it found one that worked. The recipient computer on the far 
end would collect each packet as it arrived and assemble it in the 
correct order. This kind of network design probably sounds highly 
inefficient. That's because it is -- but it is also highly robust, and 
it turns out to be very difficult to guarantee that you've stopped a 
given message from reaching its destination.

Baran's theoretical design remained just that -- theory -- for several 
years. Then, in 1969, a group of engineers working for ARPA (the federal 
government's Advanced Research Projects Agency), actually planted the 
first seeds of what later became known as the Internet. Although these 
engineers had never heard of Paul Baran or his paper, they'd brought his 
theory to fruition anyway. And once the RAND Corporation and other early 
participants in this network recognized that ARPA had implemented a 
working version of Baran's concept, they lost no time in playing up the 
military value of the new network (which turned out to be a plus when 
seeking appropriations under the constraints of the Mansfield 
Amendment). 

At first it was called the ARPAnet -- only later was the term "Internet" 
coined. The new network grew quickly: in late 1969, there were only four 
computers on the network, but by 1972 there were 37 sites. By the 1990s, 
the number of computer sites on the Internet had grown exponentially -- 
in 1992, Internet sites numbered in the hundreds of thousands; this year 
they number in the millions.

One reason the Internet grew so rapidly is that one doesn't have to 
construct special wires or conduits to connect to it -- connectivity 
depend on software standards, and not on hardware. And connecting to the 
Internet cost the taxpayer little or nothing, since each node was 
independent, and had to handle its own financing and its own technical 
requirements. It is no wonder that communications traffic on the 
Internet has increased 1000 times between January 1988 and October 1994. 

Also fueling the explosive growth of the Internet was the increasing 
availability and decreasing price of desktop computers. Any one of the 
desktop (or even laptop) computers commonly sold today can become part 
of the Internet.

III. Democratic and Economic Opportunities 

But the cheapness of computing power these days tells only part of the 
story. The rest lies in the answer to the question of why so many people 
want to be connected to the Internet. While there are many uses of the 
Internet --
e-mail, long-distance computing, file transfers, searches of remote 
databases -- there is no doubt that one of the most compelling reasons 
people are excited about the Internet is freedom of speech. 

You see, unlike every other mass medium that has ever existed, the 
Internet (and similar computer networks) has no central authority. There 
is no person in charge of the "printing press," no "editor-in-chief," no 
holder of a broadcast license. Americans have discovered that one can 
reach a large audience on the Internet without having to assemble a lot 
of capital or seek the approval of an editor. In this the Internet is 
similar to the telephone (no one tries to edit your phone conversations 
while they're happening), but the potential scope of the communications 
are far greater. While it might take millions of dollars to start on 
urban newspaper or TV station, it takes only a few hundred dollars to 
reach large audiences. If, as A.J. Liebling once commented, freedom of 
the press belongs to those who own one, the Internet suggests that we 
all may someday own one.

In short, the First Amendment's free-press clause, which many citizens 
still take to be a right reserved to the highly capitalized media 
establishment, has suddenly become a meaningful right for every 
individual American.

This kind of empowerment of individuals is something new under the sun, 
and it blurs traditional distinction between "content producers" and 
"consumers" (everyone on these computer networks can produce "content"). 
This may blur the line between reporter and reader -- to take only the 
most recent example: it was an ad-hoc group of individual Internet users 
who assembled the material that demonstrated the flaws in the Martin 
Rimm/Carnegie Mellon pornography study that you may have heard about. 
And while the mainstream media might have taken months to discover the 
study's flaws, these individuals uncovered them in mere weeks. 

To touch briefly on some other things that make this medium different: 
since computer hardware and software are ubiquitous and less expensive 
all the time, the medium cannot be considered a "scarce" resource in the 
way the Supreme Court characterized the broadcasting spectrum in Red 
Lion. 

And since content is primarily "pulled" by user choices rather than 
"pushed" by content producers, the medium lacks the "pervasive" 
character of broadcasting that was central to the Court's decision in 
the Pacifica case.

Finally, the relatively low cost of acquiring access to the Internet 
means that would-be entrepreneurs face relatively low barriers to entry 
into this new market. Now that the government no longer plays even a 
nominal role in administering the Internet, the international network of 
networks is becoming a playing field for pure capitalism. To start a 
successful business on the Internet, you don't need to be a millionaire, 
and you don't need venture capital -- all you need is a good idea. 

Ill-considered regulation, however, could thwart both the democratic and 
the economic promise of computer communications. S. 892, with its clear 
intent to impose new duties and broader legal risks for service 
providers, would simultaneously chill freedom of speech and distort the 
market for services by raising barriers to entry. What exacerbates this 
problem is that a provider's liability for content hinges not on legal 
obscenity, but on the far broader, far vaguer concept of "indecency," a 
term imported from the realm of broadcasting regulation whose meaning 
has never been defined by either Congress or the Supreme Court. And even 
if the term had been defined, it would be inapplicable to a medium that 
is neither "scarce" nor "pervasive" in the Constitutional senses of 
those terms. Our federal government's special role in regulating the 
content of the broadcast media and of the dial-a-porn services is 
grounded in particular factual findings about the characteristics of 
those media. There have been no such findings with regard to computer 
communications, and, given the nature of the medium as discussed above, 
it is difficult to see how there could be.

Compounding the "chilling effect" this legislation would have on lawful 
speech is the sheer ineffectiveness of the measure when it comes to 
willfully illegal communications. Because of the decentralized, "bomb-
proof" nature of the Internet, an individual provider's decision to 
censor certain content may have no effect at all with regard to its 
general availability. This is especially true when one remembers that an 
increasing number of Internet sites are operated in foreign countries, 
and their owners, while theoretically extraditable and prosecutable in 
the United States, would rarely be meaningfully deterred -- they know 
that only a very few foreign offenders will ever be pursued by a U.S. 
attorney. In general, a foreign criminal using computer networks to 
commit a crime in the United States can dodge both the providers' 
attempts at monitoring and the law-enforcement agencies' attempts at 
policing by originating message traffic offshore or by routing illegal 
information through a chain of intermediate sites that obscures its 
origin. S. 892 would not even pose a meaningful threat to those who prey 
on children -- no limit on "indecency" prevents the solicitation of 
innocent children with nonobscene, nonindecent speech.

IV.	A Better Approach.

As a parent who happens to be a lawyer, I know that federal and state 
laws already define a framework for the prosecution of those trafficking 
in obscenity, those who possess or distribute child pornography, and 
those who prey on children. It is clear that the legal tools are in 
place, but Senator Grassley's instincts are right when he perceives that 
there is still a gap in the defense of children that needs to be filled. 
One thing we know about those who engage in child sexual abuse, for 
example, is that they are rarely deterred by legal risks -- even in the 
face of likely prosecution they are driven by their sickness to continue 
preying on children. And as a parent I can assure you that it is little 
comfort to me to know that if such an offender harms my child, that 
person may be caught, prosecuted, and imprisoned at some point -- the 
damage, which may last a lifetime, has already been done.

This is why I believe that the right role for Congress to play is to 
encourage the development of software filters that prevent my child and 
others from being harmed in the first place. 

Recall that the basic technology we're talking about here is the 
computer -- the most flexible, programmable, "intelligent" technology we 
build and market. Filtering software enables parents to screen certain 
language, certain kinds of content, certain people, or certain areas on 
the networks from their children.

Such an approach does no damage to First Amendment values (it does not, 
for example, put a nonlawyer hobbyist who operates a tiny computer 
bulletin-board system in the position of having to determine what is 
"indecent"), yet it does solve the problems (e.g., solicitation through 
nonindecent communications, or offenders who conceal the origin of their 
harmful communications) that S. 892 has no hope of addressing. 

Furthermore, since such tools are designed to be customizable, parents 
are empowered to set their own standards of what is acceptable for their 
children, rather than relying on what the nonelected officials at the 
FCC choose to include under the definition of "indecency." For example, 
even if the FCC determines that detailed information about safe-sex 
techniques is not indecent, a parent who believes that her children 
should receive all their sexual information from her and not from the 
Internet could customize the family computer's "filters" to block that 
information. 

V. Conclusions

We already have the laws in place. Federal and state laws prohibit the 
distribution of obscenity, every state I know of has laws prohibiting 
the exposure of children to inappropriate or harmful material. Federal 
and state laws prohibit child porn and child abuse, regardless of the 
medium used to facilitate it.

Speaking as a concerned parent and a lawyer, I believe the question 
isn't "Do we need more criminal laws?" -- it's "What can we do to 
supplement the legal framework with policies and tools that empower 
parents to protect their children and preserve the values of their 
families?" And answering that question will require the Congress to 
draft laws and support policies that are grounded not in simplistic 
analogies to old media, but in a thorough understanding of this new 
medium and of what makes it different. 

Members of the committee, you are at a crossroads. Down one road lies a 
future in which parental rights are supported by a Congress that has 
abandoned the outdated, big-government approach to solving social 
problems. Like the parents and children whose letters to you follow my 
statement here, we hope for a Congress that does not set the First 
Amendment and welfare of families against other, but that instead 
chooses policies that strengthen both.



LETTERS FROM MAMIE AND HOWARD RHEINGOLD


To the Members of the Committee,

I am Mamie Rheingold. I am ten years old, and I have been using e-mail 
since I was eight years old. I also use the World Wide Web sometimes to 
help with my homework.

When I started using e-mail, my dad told me to use good sense. Like when 
somebody calls my house on the telephone and asks me whether I am home 
alone, I know I don't have to answer that person. And my parents taught 
me that if somebody calls on the telephone and I don't know them, and I 
feel funny about something they say or ask, I should talk to my mom and 
dad and not say anything. The same thing with e-mail. If people ask me 
personal questions and I dont know them, I ask my dad. I like to send e-
mail to my dad when he travels, and get e-mail from him. And I have a 
few penpals. It really isnt a problem.

Sometimes, I can use the World Wide Web for homework. My dad found a 
place where I can type in the name of what I am looking for and then I 
can click on what it finds and see pictures from outer space or other 
things. It's like having an encyclopedia that has movies, too. 

I think kids need to learn how to use things and parents need to trust 
us to use them the right way and not use them the wrong way. 

Mamie Rheingold
mame@well.com

----------

To the United States Senate and the Members of the Committee: 

I am a parent, a PTA member, and an active volunteer in our daughter's 
public school. I believe very strongly that parents have an obligation 
to teach our children values, to give them the opportunity to make their 
own moral choices, and to help them understand the media such as 
television and internet that are so important in their lives today. 

I would like to be able to have control over the information my daughter 
receives through the television or the internet, but I don't believe it 
is right to give the State the power to exercise that control. Parents 
and teachers, not the government, are the ones who ought to determine 
what information and values are appropriate in our homes and schools. 

Democracy in America was founded upon freedom of expression. 
Communications technologies have made it possible to spread 
objectionable material. I know that tools for FILTERING information that 
comes into the home, rather than CENSORING it at the source, are much 
more practical, easier to administer, and most importantly, do not erode 
our liberties. I support filtering tools for parents, including rating 
systems. 

Most importantly, I feel that parents need to understand that we have a 
responsibility to instill good sense in our children, to sit down with 
them in front of the television and in front of the computer screen, to 
ask them questions, and to answer their questions. Taking that 
responsibility out of the hands of parents is going to further weaken 
the family, and create a censorship bureaucracy that we might later come 
to regret.

I personally paid for an internet and WWW link to my daughter's 6th 
grade classroom. I spoke to the students and told them that there are 
indecent pictures out there on the net, and that I trust that they will 
use this tool responsibly. I said: "If you do anything that you wouldn't 
want your parents to know, then probably you will get caught at it and 
you won't have the Internet in your classroom any more. And there 
probably won't be Internet in any other classrooms around here. But if 
you are responsible pioneers, you will show the other classrooms and 
teachers in this school, and in this school district, that kids and 
teachers can use this new tool. I'm counting on you to be pioneers." 
That's what I told them, and they didn't fail me. If we don't give our 
kids the opportunity to make moral choices, and yes, the chance of 
failing, then how are they going to learn? 

Howard Rheingold
hlr@well.com


About Mamie Rheingold:

Age ten, student at Tam Valley elementary school, a public school in 
Mill Valley California. This year, Mamie was selected from all the 
students in Marin County to receive the Terwilliger Award for community 
service, because of her work in community recycling programs and in 
regularly entertaining seniors in local retirement and convalescent 
communities. 


About Howard Rheingold:

Author of "Virtual Reality" (Simon & Schuster, 1985), "The Virtual 
Community," (Addison Wesley, 1993), founding executive editor of 
HotWired, Wired Magazines commercial publication on the World Wide Web, 
author of "Tomorrow," a newspaper column syndicated in 16 newspapers 
nationwide by King Features.


LETTERS FROM JENNIE BROWN AND PAT MCGREGOR 

To the Members of the Committee,

I am 15, and a sophmore at Oak Ridge HS in Eldorado Hills, CA. Mom 
showed me how to do things on the net to do research on papers and 
things when I was about 10; I've done papers on the Holocaust, plant 
growth under differing lights, absorbency of paper diapers, Hero 
symbolism in Indiana Jones, Nuclear waste and radiation's affect on the 
body, and looked for clip art to put on papers and charts.

My mom and dad are divorced, and I've used email to keep in touch with 
the one I'm not living with since 4th grade. I also talk to my cousins 
in England every day by email, and some of my aunts and uncles. Email is 
a really good thing.

This year I discovered Mudding, and it's really cool. I've met loads of 
people all over the world and have talked with them and worked with 
them. Mom has always been really firm that I shouldn't tell my phone 
number or address to people on the net, and I don't. It's like not 
giving it to people you meet at the Mall until you know them better. I 
feel like the Net's a pretty safe place if you take care of yourself and 
pay attention to what you're doing.

There's a lot of really cool stuff on the net. Restricting what people 
can put up isn't the way to go: parents and school should do what they 
do now: make rules and agreements, with consequences if you break them. 

Jennie Brown (jbrown@spider.lloyd.com)

------------

To the Members of the Committee,

I worried for a long time about letting Jen go "out" mudding by herself, 
but she seems to be paying attention to our basic ground rules and 
keeping herself safe from unwanted attention. I worry when she and her 
friends go out for a day to the local shopping strip, too. ;-) 

Jennie uses the Net like she uses other research tools --and sometimes 
she finds out weird and unusual stuff in the library at school, too. To 
our minds (her parents) the Net is an unparalleled communication tool, 
and it's helped us stay close to Jennie when she's been in the custody 
of one or the other of us.

The computer that Jennie uses is in the living room, and we all talk 
about what we find online. Jennie asked about porn on the net after the 
discussion erupted this spring: we talked about what sort of stuff was 
available and she said, and I quote, "Yuch." 

Parents who set up sensible guidelines and communicate with their 
children are the best filtering technology for the Internet. 

Pat McGregor (JennieUs mom)
Consultant, Lloyd Internetworking
Cameron Park, CA
+1 916 676 1147
+1 916 676 3442 (fax)
http://spider.lloyd.com/~patmcg
pat@lloyd.com
Co-Author, "Mastering the Internet," Sybex Books, Feb 1995 Staff Writer, 
I/O Magazine (http://www.mother.com/iomag) 


LETTER FROM BRAD NEUBERG

To the Members of the Committee,

Howdy. My name is Brad Neuberg. I am 19 and currently live in South 
Texas.

I grew up using bulletin board systems and the internet. As a matter of 
fact, I learned how to read and do mathematics on an old Texas 
Instruments computer! In my high school, the Science Academy of South 
Texas, I communicated with professors, educators, and children from all 
over the world using internet access which my school provided. 
Currently, I use the internet to keep in touch with breaking news, 
congressional legislation using Thomas, and vast discussion groups on 
many different topics. My life has been very enriched due to computers 
and online networks.

Today you will probably hear convincing legislation that the internet is 
full of a massive amount of pornography. You will be told that a recent 
Carnegie Mellon research report, used by Time magazine in an article, 
documents that 85% of the internet is pornography. A large number of 
experts have disputed this article, and have shown, in fact, that there 
is an extremely small amount of pornography available on the internet, 
more around 0.5%.

Some people here today may not truly understand what the internet is. 
One important part of the internet, called newsgroups, is like a huge 
cork bulletin board, such as the bulletin board inside the entrance of a 
common super-market. People with their home computers call up, using 
their telephone line, onto this huge cork bulletin board from all over 
the world, where they can put up messages. So just as at the super-
market I can put up a message saying, "I lost my little dog; if you have 
seen it call 631-2142," someone on the internet can type a message on 
their keyboard and post it to this huge bulletin board, accessible by 
people from all over the world. Now, there can be millions of these huge 
bulletin boards on the internet, so instead of only having one bulletin 
board at the super-market, imagine if there were thousands in the store, 
and each bulletin board had a different topic. Let's say one bulletin 
board at the super-market had a sign on top with the word "Agriculture" 
on it, or another bulletin board with a sign saying "Movies." Well, on 
the "Movies" bulletin board people who are interested in movies could 
post message, or even sounds clips, because one of the special things 
about the internet is that you can post many different kinds of data, 
from text, to voice, to pictures. And so, all over the world, through 
the internet, communities are forming, where people are discussing, 
every imaginable topic, from scientists talking about lasers, to 
kindergarden teachers talking about the techniques they use to teach 
their class. So many people talking is truly a phenomenal thing (well, 
unless it's a talk show :).

There are about ten-thousand of these "cork-bulletin" boards on the 
internet, filled with every imaginable topic, from kids talking about a 
particular video game to Chinese dissidents discussing how to create a 
democracy in China. What the Time magazine article was talking about was 
roughly about 15 of these=7F bulletin boards. These fifteen bulletin 
boards are discussing mostly sexual topics, such as pedophilia or 
homosexuality, and=7F are the "cork boards" where there are a great deal 
of dirty pictures. When the author of the Time magazine article wrote 
that 85% of the internet was filled with dirty pictures, what he=7F was 
really saying was that 85% of the messages on these fifteen sexual 
bulletin boards were actually pornographic pictures. Keep in mind that 
this is 85% of the ten sexual bulletin boards of the ten-thousand 
bulletin boards available on the internet. In other words, a very small 
amount. With other factors included this means that only one-half 
percent of the internet contains pornographic images! This is almost 
like the two dirty books at a library with tens of thousands of books. 

A parent would still like to prevent their children from seeing these 
pictures, even if only 0.5% of the internet contains this pornography. 
In spite of the fact that it actually takes quite complex software to 
see these dirty images, there are already companies who see a need for 
software that can prevent children from seeing the bad 0.5% of the 
internet. These pieces of software scan for dirty words, block access to 
the sexual bulletin boards, record the locations children visit, or use 
other techniques to help parents monitor what their children are doing. 
This software, without government censorship, without government 
control, can help keep children from accessing the bad portions of the 
internet, and allow adults to continue to communicate their thoughts. 

If one of the reasons for the Republican sweep of Congress was to help 
remove government from our lives, and to restore our free-market 
economy, then why should we allow the government to have more control 
over what we say by censoring our thoughts on the internet? We should 
empower parents by letting the free- market provide solutions for the 
pornography problem; let's keep government out of our lives.

Thank you very much,
Brad Neuberg
McAllen, Tx

P.S. - Don't forget the oath you took at the beginning of your term to 
uphold the Constitution of the United States -- as well as the Bill of 
Rights.


LETTERS FROM CHRISTOPHER O'CONNELL AND CHRISTINA O'CONNELL 

To the Members of the Committee,

I am a seventeen year old who has been using BBSs, America Online, and 
the Internet for 7 years. It has been an educational and priceless 
experience for me. From the start on local Bulletin Board Systems I have 
made friends and learned skills that will help me when I enter the 
workplace. Because of my experiences online I was able to assist my 
fellow students at my high school with the library's computers and CD-
Rom system. I have learned programming languages, computer skills, and 
played chess with a former Semi-Grand Master. In fact, many of my 
friends are in occupations and areas that I am considering studying in 
college, and much of my interest is due to their support and help. 

And their support went beyond that. During my parents divorce I had them 
to talk to, and it was an immeasurable aid during that trying time. 
During my seven years online, I have never felt anything but safe, and 
have never been made uncomfortable in any way. Sure, there is 
pornography available, but it is just as available in magazine or book 
form to my friends at school who are not online and don't even own 
computers.

Through the online discussion forums, I have been able to discuss 
everything from religion to politics to computers to science fiction to 
poetry. It has given me a chance to speak my mind, develop my thoughts, 
and be heard in a way that most teenagers never have. It has developed 
my thinking and reading skils, and has helped my writing ability in a 
way that no high school english class could hope to match, despite the 
very high quality of the local public school that I attend. I have also 
become a staff-member of one of the online games I frequent, where I am 
learning the value of helping and aiding others. 

All of this has also made me aware of the issues facing our nation 
today. In a day and age when legislators are stressing the value of 
putting religious education, and many other values and moral concerns, 
back in the hands of the family and not the government, why are the same 
legisators proposing to take away a clear right of the parents? The idea 
of laws to censor the Internet ignores not only the first amendment but 
the very basic rights of Americans to govern what their children see and 
raise them as they see fit. My mother, who is a single-parent to my 
sister and myself, has always governed what we see and read. From a 
young age she imposed limits on the amount of television viewing and 
what I was allowed to watch. This has made me an avid reader of books 
who would much rather take in a book of poetry or literature than a 
sitcom any day. This has not made me hate her or get angry, it has 
brought us closer together as a family. All of us spend evenings over 
dinner conversing about our reading, whether it be a science fiction 
book that I am reading, one of my mother's favorite mystery novels, or 
the books on horses that my 9 year old sister, soon to get her own 
Internet account, has begun to read. For that matter, we also spend 
hours discussing what I see on the Internet, ensuring that I understand 
and am not harmed by anything I see. The very idea that this would be 
taken away from us is not only abhorrent and disgusting, but insulting 
to myself, my mother, and every other American family. It says that you 
do not trust parents to do their jobs. 

Christopher O'Connell
Rindge, New Hampshire
Vulpine@gold.mv.net






---------------
To the Members of the Committee,

I'm the mother of two chidren, a son 17 and a daughter 9. My son has 
been online via BBSs, AOL and the Internet from age 10. We have always 
discussed his time online, what he was doing, who he was talking with. 
His experiences have been overwhelmingly positive - he's had the chance 
to learn chess from a state champion, discuss authors with both friends 
from several online games and the rec.arts.* newsgroups he follows, 
debate politics with people of all ages, learn a new programming 
language, and more. But perhaps most importantly, he has found a genuine 
community of friends online, from many countries, backgrounds and age 
groups who have helped him through some rough times and who he has 
helped in return. 

As a parent, I am very angry at the attempts to censor the Internet in 
the guise of protecting children. I have seen firsthand the value of 
being online in my son's life. On the rare occasions when he has run 
into questionable material, he has not suddenly lost his good sense nor 
the morals he has been raised with -- just as with tv, music, books, we 
discuss things which bother him. Just because material is on the Net, it 
does not somehow magically destroy the relationship we have built nor 
the strong inner sense of right and wrong he has developed over the 
years. And to those who somehow feel that the government must interfere 
here because "parents are too busy" let me just note that I am a 
divorced mother raising my children alone - I work long hours to support 
myself and my children, but that does not stop me from parenting them! 

My daughter has had several internet penpals, an activity which is 
encouraging her writing skills. I have just gotten her her first 
separate net account and she is joining a mail list for young riders. In 
fact, we are planning on using this list in September as part of the 
activities of our local 4H group.

>From my experience, I'd say that the proponents of net censorship 
should 
learn more firsthand about what is available on the Net. I know that 
there is material online which does not fit my morality - but I'm not 
forced to look at it and neither are my children. I know that there are 
some sick people online as well - but there are sick people in my small 
rural town too - I've taught my children to take proper precautions with 
strangers and that teaching stands online or at the local shopping 
center. And while I've seen a lot of scandal-sheet type headlines about 
kids and the net, in over 7 years of experience, as a mother and a net 
reader, I have yet to see anything that remotely reflects those over 
hyped headlines. 

Christina O'Connell, parent [of Christopher O'Connell] Rindge, New 
Hampshire
coco@gold.mv.net


LETTER FROM SHARON HENDERSON

To the Members of the Committee,

I felt it was important to tell you about my son, Brian. 

Brian is 12 years old, almost thirteen. When he was a little tot, he was 
diagnosed as neo-autistic: "sort-of, kinda autistic, but not really, so 
we don't know what else to call him." Until he was almost four, he did 
not speak at all--only tears and laughter, with far more laughter. He 
was a bright, responsive baby and toddler, charming, funny, and 
fascinated by technology. When he finally learned to talk, he was 
entirely echolalic for almost three more years--a condition which 
essentially boils down to his ability to repeat back to you, verbatim 
and in your vocal intonation, anything you have said to him. Or anything 
he has heard on TV. Or anything he has heard .... at all. This made him 
a fine mimic--and gave him, as a kind of compensation for his 
disability, a spectacular memory. He may not always pay attention--but 
when he does, you only need to tell him something once. He remembers it 
forever. His language is now age-appropriate--and then some; he 
expresses himself like the learned young man that he is.

His intro to technology came through the family's Atari game system and 
the TV. He comes of a long line of engineers on his Dad's side--folks 
who like to take things apart and put them back together. Computers have 
always fascinated him, and this remains the case to this day. Games, 
programming, email, the WorldWide Web, you name it, he loves it. Other 
people memorize mathematical theorems; Brian memorizes the Gopher and 
FTP sites where he can find information on history, maps, railroad 
trains, collectible card games, and metal gaming miniatures. His peers 
can name all the Power Rangers and their abilities; Brian can tell you 
which Web sites will grant you access to pictures from the American 
Civil War, which ones will tell you about the re- enactment of 
Revolutionary War battles, and where you go to find out the history of 
armored vehicles as used in the armies of the world, since armored 
vehicles existed. 

Does he know there is pornography on the Internet? Sure, he does. He can 
read as well as anyone else. But because he is an American citizen, and 
knows the Constitution better than many of our Congresspeople, he knows 
there is freedom of speech, expression, and pursuit of life, liberty, 
and happiness. He knows these things are (and I'm quoting him, here) 
"ucky, gross stuff for people with little imagination," and he knows how 
to stay away from them. If he did not know how, I would do my parental 
duty and teach him--and I would probably put software on our home 
computer that would keep him from involuntarily running across anything 
my husband and I didn't want him to see.

This child, who uses the local libraries to the hilt, realizes there are 
libraries and archives and universities all over the world to which he 
will probably never get in person. But he knows the Internet can reach 
them, and a lot faster and cheaper than an airplane flight could get him 
to the exact same place. So he comes to work with me on weekends, and 
helps beta-test software by using it. He looks to see what new card 
collectibles there are. He checks stock quotes on his Mom's work benefit 
stock plan. He looks at pictures of old trains. He reads the history of 
the great air, sea and armor battles of WW2. He goes to movie sites and 
checks to see whether "Braveheart" or "First Knight" would be a better 
choice. (he chose "First Knight," because: "Well yeah, the history 
stinks and nobody ever wore stuff like that, but it's got Sean Connery, 
Mom, and he played Indiana Jones' Dad!!") He has recently downloaded 
pictures of parts of England and Germany from which his ancestors came, 
and a really neat map of the Chicago railway transportation system that 
was found online. He has printed out PICTs and JPEGs of US Navy vessels, 
and old British steam trains. Do we supervise his use of the Net? Sure 
we do. That's the kind of parents we are. We try to live our religion 
and our belief in love, democracy, and learning. 

A world has opened up to this terrific, intelligent child who, because 
of lingering bits of his "neo-autism," is shy among people his own age. 
He learns things that he can tell his friends about, and so seem less 
"different" and separate from them. He can sit for hours in front of the 
computer, surfing the 'Net, having a grand exploration for himself--and 
then he goes out to play, excited, happy, his mind engaged in a way that 
television rarely affects him, and delighted to live in such a diverse, 
wonderful world. He lives daily with the InterNet, since I develop 
software for it, and he is a good citizen of the Net because he was 
first a good citizen of his country, and a good Virginia gentleman. Do 
you flame people in email or on the newsgroups, or use bad or nasty 
language? "Nope. That's really tacky manners." Do you mass-mail 
advertisements to newsgroups you've never read? "Uh-uh. That's invasion 
of privacy." Do you look at things your parents don't want you to? "No, 
that would be wrong." So should that stuff be there? "Yes, because not 
everybody likes what I like."

You know what I like?

I like my kid. I like his style. I like his sense of history, his 
understanding of the laws of his democratic country, his tolerance of 
other people, and his love of learning. I like the fact that, when it 
comes my time to face St. Peter, I can do so with a mother's humble 
pride: I can say yessir, my life had one overwhelming worth, besides 
what I was able to accomplish on my own: my husband and myself worked 
together to create, raise, and teach the wonderful, marvelous, honest, 
honorable young Virginia Gentleman and American, Brian Henderson. He 
doesn't misuse the Net, because he doesn't misuse anything else. Good 
rearing, good manners, and proper adult supervision can, after all, 
produce some real, tangible results. I wish people would stop blaming 
the faceless entity known as the Internet, and start looking in their 
own mirrors. I wish the Powers that Be would wake up and realize that 
regulating the Internet won't change a single, solitary thing--because 
change is only effective when it is learned from home. For too long, we 
have all lived by the credo of "don't do as I do, do as I say." And our 
kids today are far too intelligent to swallow that old dog. If we raise 
them right--if we actually do the things we tell them they should do--
they will be good people who love their country, understand and obey its 
laws, worship the deity of their choice, and behave the way they have 
been taught to, whether they are interacting with their friends at 
school, colleagues at work, or with computer systems all over the world 
on the Internet. 

It's that simple. It always has been. It always will be. 

So the legislatures need to wise up, no? 

Thanks for letting me use your soapbox. Feel free to contact me: 

Sharon Henderson
Brian's Loving Mom
Quality Control Engineer and Net Surfer
5521 Starboard Court
Fairfax, VA 22032-4011
(703) 425-8284


LETTER FROM BETTY HARRIS AND JIM GLOVER

To the Members of the Committee,

We have a 14 year old daughter, and over that last few months have 
encouraged her to use the World Wide Web to explore topics that interest 
her. When Christopher Reeve had his riding accident, we searched the web 
and found a frequently asked questions (FAQ) file on spinal cord 
injuries that contained some excellent information. We also found a 
graphic that illustrated the relationship between level of injury and 
loss of function. The web was also very useful for one of her school 
projects on UFOs where we searched and found information and graphics. 
She has also used the web to find information about her favorite music 
groups. We live in Oklahoma City and have also used the web for keeping 
current on information about the OKC bombing.

We keep hearing via the media how easy it is for children to find 
sexually related images and had discussed this with her (Quotes like 
"Your children probably already have found this information."). We 
discussed this with her and she told us that as a result of our 
conversation, she'd looked for over FOUR hours and had only found the 
Playboy magazine home page. We then initiated a discussion with her 
about how we believe the images she found tended to portray women as 
objects and why we object to this type of thing. Her difficulty in 
finding what she was looking for validates my experience (of six years) 
and my husband's experience (of 5 years) with the internet. Sexually 
related images do not just appear on your computer, you have to 1) know 
what you are looking for, 2) understand how the net is set up and know 
how to use the various tools (FTP, gopher, etc) to find what you are 
looking for and 3) you have to spend time searching. If the child is 
spending this amount of time on the computer, the parent should be aware 
of it and should be participating and guiding the child's efforts in 
healthy directions. It is the parent's place to control their children's 
access to the internet, just as they should in regards to other sources 
of information and entertainment (e.g., books, movies, radio, and 
television).

From what we've read on current legislation designed to address access 
to information on the net, we do NOT support the Communications Decency 
Act, or the Protection of Children from Computer Pornography Act. We DO 
support the Leahy study, because we believe that when making decisions 
that could have quite serious ramifications regarding freedom of speech 
on the internet, we need to consider carefully the possible alternatives 
and choose alternatives that provide the best outcomes (protecting 
children) with the fewest adverse effects (more restrictions on freedom 
of speech). Our local internet service providers (ISP) have already 
initiated procedures requiring proof of age (e.g., photo identification) 
prior to allowing access to clearly adult areas such as the adult Usenet 
news groups. We suspect that software developers and service providers 
will be able to come up with creative solutions to restrict children's 
net access to domains that their parents are comfortable with. For us, 
the combination of parental supervision and voluntary ISP cooperation is 
more than adequate to protect our daughter from any potentially adverse 
effects of the internet, while allowing her to reap great benefits from 
the diversity of information and people available on the internet. We 
use the internet, just like we use TV and the other media--we attempt to 
restrict access to age-appropriate content and use these sources to 
initiate discussions of what's right and wrong to help our daughter 
develop her own code of ethics.


Thanks for your time,

Betty Harris & Jim Glover
PSYCHE@drycas.club.cc.cmu.edu
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma