Porn patrol
The digerati are screaming `censorship' over Mayor Menino's Internet sex ban at the Boston
Public Library. But cybersmut is more disgusting -- and Menino's proposal more reasonable --
than his critics are willing to admit.
In cyberspace, everyone can hear you scream. And at those outposts favored by the
technosavvy elite, they've been screaming bloody murder ever since Mayor Tom
Menino issued a decree banning Internet porn from the Boston Public Library.
In most quarters, including the editorial pages of the Boston Globe and
the Boston Herald, Menino's action has been seen as measured and
sensible -- especially if, as now seems likely, he backs away from a misguided
attempt to extend the ban to adults as well as children.
But to the digerati, given to hyperlibertarian politics and a utopian,
messianic belief in the ability of the Internet to transport humanity to a
higher level of consciousness, Menino is an ignorant, jackbooted thug, and
those who support him are technological illiterates trying to escape a culture
they neither like nor understand.
Parts of Usenet, a portion of the Internet comprising interactive discussion
groups, have been filled with angry posts from cyberlibertarians, most of them
in a thread titled "The Demise of Mayor Menino." For the most part, postings
have consisted of vitriolic assertions that children have the same right to
uncensored Internet access as adults, and of dire warnings of the political and
even personal consequences Menino will suffer if he doesn't back down.
Among the most incensed is Jim D'Entremont, of the Boston Coalition for
Freedom of Expression. D'Entremont has been especially angry with the
Globe for failing to disclose that its publisher, William Taylor, is
president of the BPL's board of trustees. In a letter to Globe ombudsman
Mark Jurkowitz that was also posted on the Net, D'Entremont accused Taylor of
living "in an ethical vacuum," and added with more portentousness than logic:
"It's very clear to us now, at least in general terms, just what has been going
on." For good measure, D'Entremont, in a brief interview with the
Phoenix, accused Globe technology writer Hiawatha Bray --
who wrote a generally accurate if pollyannaish piece on the porn-blocking
software that may be installed on library computers -- of being "a former
Christian-right activist in the Midwest." (A bemused Bray concedes that he was
a member of the Chicago-based Pro-Life Action League before coming to
Boston.)
D'Entremont's outburst is far from an isolated phenomenon. Indeed, his passion
is an article of faith among the digerati, a faith that has best been expressed
by Wired editor/publisher/founder Louis Rossetto. In a 1995
anti-censorship manifesto titled "Fuck, Piss, Shit, etc.," Rossetto called
government officials "power-hungry sociopaths . . . wiping their
asses with our Constitution." The intellectual framework for this rage has been
laid out by the media critic Jon Katz, who, in an essay for Wired titled
"The Rights of Kids in the Digital Age," blasted V-chips, movie and TV ratings,
Internet censorship, and other attempts to protect kids from the media as
evidence of "anxiety and arrogance," imposed by "brute authority."
It's an appealing, powerful argument, invoking as it does an eminently
justified anger against mindless government authority, an ode to individual
responsibility, and a gauzy, optimistic vision of the future. But it's an
argument without nuance, leaving its adherents unable to draw the kinds of
important moral distinctions most of us make all the time.
We don't let kids buy alcohol or tobacco or lottery tickets -- or, more to the
point, Playboy or Penthouse. Yet the digerati argue that we
should do nothing to prevent kids from viewing violent, degrading, hardcore
pornography. Such fare, as the cyberlibertarians never tire of arguing, makes
up just a tiny part of what's available on the Internet. But it is nevertheless
voluminous in its own right and remarkably easy to find.
Free-speech absolutists would have us believe that there is no moral
distinction between a library that removes The Catcher in the Rye or
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from its shelves and one that
installs software on computers in the children's room to block out pictures of
bestiality or sexual torture. It's a slippery slope, they say, noting that such
software can block out sites devoted to the politics of homosexuality, or to
denying the truth of the Holocaust. That's a valid criticism, but to invoke it
as a reason to do nothing is to deny our ability to reason and to
choose.
A close reading of Rossetto and Katz reveals some important nuances
that D'Entremont and company gloss over.
Rossetto's anger was aimed not at those who would keep hardcore porn from
kids, but at the Communications Decency Act, a heavy-handed attempt to ban
"indecent" speech from the Net. Congress passed the CDA in 1995 in the wake of
an infamous Time cover story on cyberporn, which hyped a phony study by
an ambitious graduate student named Martin Rimm. A federal appeals court put
the CDA on ice, citing the very software that Menino wants to install as
evidence that the free market could solve the problem of Net porn. (The Supreme
Court will hear arguments on the CDA next month.)
Katz's bill of rights is aimed not at young children, but at teenagers --
"socially responsible" teenagers, to be exact. And Katz takes the
non-absolutist position that "Blocking, censoring, and banning should be the
last resort in dealing with children, not the first."
At the institutional level, Menino's ban is opposed by the American Civil
Liberties Union and the American Library Association. Their rhetoric, though,
has been distinctly lacking in bite. The ALA opposes in principle the use of
any kind of blocking software, but does not require its members to go along
with that position. As for the ACLU, John Roberts, executive director of the
Massachusetts chapter, says, "We sort of take the position that it's a risky
business making it [pornography] available, but it's better to pay that
price."
At the cyberlibertarian grassroots, though, passions are white-hot, and are
often expressed in the kind of extremist terms favored by Jim D'Entremont. It's
an extremism that is entirely blind to the true nature of cyberporn.
Indeed, to listen to those seeking a piece of Tom Menino's flesh, you'd think
that what was at stake was the right of kids to view, say, an online version of
the women's-health book Our Bodies, Ourselves, or to snicker over
Playboy.com. Yes, you can find such benign
fare on the Net. But that's hardly the extent of it.
These days, when most people speak of the Internet, they mean the World-Wide
Web, a graphics-rich, interconnected series of millions of "pages" ranging from
those offered by huge companies such as Time Warner to the scrawlings of small
self-publishers. You'll find porn on the Web, some of it pretty hardcore. For
instance, it's not at all difficult to find photo-animations of a young woman
performing fellatio above the inscription COCK HUNGRY TEENS, and of two men
having anal sex; both are just one click from Yahoo, the big Internet search
engine, which maintains an extensive guide to online sex.
But despite the explicit nature of such photos, Web porn has its limits.
During the past year, most porn sites have started requiring users to verify
that they are at least 18 years old. Some of these are on the honor system;
others, though, require elaborate procedures (including credit card
verification) that are almost guaranteed to keep out prying young eyes. Then,
too, the operators of websites easily can be located by authorities. A site
with anything prosecutable would likely get shut down in a hurry.
The opposite, however, is true of Usenet, an older part of the Internet
consisting of thousands of so-called newsgroups. The vast majority of these
groups are interactive discussion boards, such as
ne.general (reserved for New England topics) and
alt.journalism, where much of the debate
over the BPL has taken place. But it's also possible to post pictures to a
Usenet group, and several hundred groups are devoted to pornographic and
violent images.
It's difficult to exaggerate the offensiveness of some of this stuff, the
likes of which few people ever laid their eyes on before technology made it
possible. You can find photos of women tied up, gagged, and being tortured with
heavy lead weights suspended from their pierced nipples and genitals. Photos of
women administering fellatio to dogs. Photos of women literally eating feces
(if you see a pattern here, it's no accident: men rarely star in these twisted
plots), and photos of lifeless victims of horrible accidents.
And it gets worse. Child pornography is not ordinarily found out in the open,
because law-enforcement officials regularly surf the Net looking for
pedophiles; witness last week's bust of an Internet provider in Texas. Yet some
foreign Usenet servers, easily accessed from the US, routinely include groups
devoted to such disturbing fare as a photo of a very young girl, perhaps seven
or eight years old, being orally raped, her face covered with semen.
Usenet contains so much more depravity than the Web for a simple reason: no
one is in charge. Newsgroups, once created, exist almost in perpetuity,
propagating across the world onto the servers of Internet service providers
(ISPs) both large and small. An individual ISP may refuse to carry some of
these groups, especially if they contain material that might be considered
legally obscene, which could make the provider liable. But it's no big deal to
access a server somewhere else, in a place where the laws and/or enforcement
are lax. As for tracing individuals who post this stuff, forget it: the ease of
editing "headers," and the ability to upload porn through "anonymous remailers"
that strip out identifying information, make it difficult (though not
necessarily impossible) to find pedophiles. For instance, the photo of the
young girl was posted by a Biteme@freeway.net.
Now, you could argue (and some have) that Usenet is irrelevant to the Boston
Public Library, since its computers offer access only to the Web. Yet Yahoo
lists a number of free, public Usenet servers that can actually be accessed
through the Web. How simple is it? Last week I sat at an Internet work
station in the BPL children's room (for ages eight to 13), a bright, cheerful
environment with toys and rows of kids' books. A mother sat quietly reading to
her toddler. Older kids worked on school projects. And within five minutes I
was looking at the descriptions of photos in a hardcore-bondage group. One more
click, and the photos would have appeared on screen. If it was that easy for
me, how difficult would it be for a technically adept, hormonally challenged
12-year-old? Not very.
And there's not much doubt that kids go looking for porn. June Eiselstein, the
BPL's assistant to the director for community library services, says the low
number of complaints (about five in 18 months) shows the pornography issue is
"much ado about nothing." But BPL staffers say that kids regularly log on to
pornographic sites, often sharing hot Net addresses with their friends.
Over the past couple of years, there's been a rush to develop software that
allows parents, teachers, librarians, and others to block out offensive
locations on the Internet. If anything, such software has been promoted more by
free-speech liberals than by anti-porn conservatives, who have made it clear
through such odious measures as the Communications Decency Act that their
ultimate goal is to transform the entire Net into a G- and PG-rated parallel
universe.
In Boston, Menino's staff has proposed that Cyber Patrol, the industry's
leading program (about 85 percent of the market) for blocking out sites, be
installed on every public Internet-accessible computer at the BPL and its
branches, and at the city's community centers.
Cyber Patrol, manufactured by Microsystems, of Framingham, prevents users from
accessing websites and Usenet groups in any one of 12 categories, ranging from
partial nudity, full nudity, and sexual acts to illegal activities (example:
how to hack into and damage a company's computers), gross depictions, and hate
groups. A librarian (or parent, or teacher) can choose to block out sites in
any or all of the 12 categories, and can exclude additional sites -- or make
available sites that Cyber Patrol normally blocks.
Trouble is, Cyber Patrol (like its competitors) is a flawed solution. For one
thing, Microsystems has been caught on several occasions blocking out sites
merely because they were controversial, such as those of gay and lesbian
organizations. For another, the identity of excluded sites (the "CyberNOT"
list) is semi-secret: though a user is informed when she or he hits a site
that's been blocked, Microsystems does not publish a full list, for the obvious
reason that kids would use it as a guide to forbidden locations. Although
Microsystems has put in place an appeals process for those who operate sites
that have been blocked, the pseudo-secrecy makes it difficult (or at least
inconvenient) for an operator to find out whether her site is on the list.
Still, attempts by digital guerrillas such as CyberWire Dispatch's
Brock Meeks to depict Microsystems as the Darth Vader of censorship ("a tale of
broken codes, betrayal of a social contract, and morality run amuck," Meeks
wrote last year in a much-cited exposé of Cyber Patrol and its
competitors) don't square with what seems like a genuine attempt on the
company's part to respect free speech and show some social responsibility. For
instance, representatives of political organizations whose websites were
originally blocked -- among them, the National Organization for Women, the
National Rifle Association, and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation
-- now sit on a Cyber Patrol advisory committee that helps set policy.
Besides, even some of the outrages cited by Meeks and others are more
ambiguous than they might first appear. The digerati often point to Cyber
Patrol's blocking of an animal-rights group's photo of slaughtered greyhounds.
But even though a 12-year-old doing a school report clearly ought to have
access to such information, should a six-year-old?
Menino, to his credit, has not behaved precipitately. Though he's reportedly
miffed that his order wasn't obeyed instantly, he's done nothing to undermine
incoming BPL president Bernard Margolis, who's put off taking final action
until he can study the best way of keeping cyberporn away from kids while
protecting the free-speech rights of adults.
A reasonable solution would appear to exist: Cyber Patrol or something like it
could be installed on computers in the children's room and perhaps also in the
young adults' room, where an appropriately lighter touch could be applied to
what's blocked out. The computers in the general library could be restricted to
adults -- and left wide open. (Although Menino originally indicated he wanted
porn blocked on computers used by adults as well as children, his spokesperson,
Jacque Goddard, now suggests that he's willing to be flexible. For instance,
she says librarians may be allowed to "unlock" a computer with a password so
that an adult patron can obtain unimpeded access.)
At the cyberlibertarian extreme, children are to be viewed as miniature
adults possessing a fully formed set of values and capable of judging what they
should and shouldn't be exposed to. Mike Godwin, the staff counsel for the
Electronic Freedom Foundation and a respected combatant in the war against
Internet censorship, is an articulate spokesman for this view.
"The role of public libraries is to facilitate access to information. It's
perverse for government officials to force them to do the opposite," he says.
"If you're worried about your child's choosing to see content you disapprove
of, there is only one solution that works reliably, in my view, and that is to
teach your child to disapprove of the same things you do."
But Godwin is missing the point, or part of it, anyway. Parents can't watch
their kids every minute. And even when parents are successful in teaching their
children values, kids' natural curiosity is going to lead them to the
forbidden. A generation ago, a child might surreptitiously flip through the
photos of bare-breasted women in National Geographic, and eventually
graduate to Playboy and Penthouse. Today, that natural curiosity
is going to lead to photos of screaming women, suspended from a ceiling with
leather straps, being whipped, beaten, and mutilated. You don't have to
subscribe to the anti-pornography theories of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea
Dworkin to wonder whether that might be harmful to impressionable minds.
The cyberlibertarians perform a crucial role. They push us, challenging the
mainstream to defend and explain itself. If it weren't for people like Louis
Rossetto and Jon Katz and Brock Meeks and Mike Godwin, the Communications
Decency Act would be the law of the land, and Punch Sulzberger's lawyers would
break into a cold sweat every time the New York Times published the
words "damn" or "breast" on its website.
And we should remain on guard against any attempts at real censorship.
Menino's instincts aren't necessarily to be trusted. Last week, for instance,
he vowed to crack down on racy soft-drink labels -- hardly the response of a
person who values free speech. Vigilance will be needed to make sure Menino
doesn't, say, quietly order the BPL to block out sex-education sites aimed at
teenagers.
But just as we don't want Internet content to be dictated by the likes of Pat
Robertson or Ralph Reed, neither would we be well served by a mediascape shaped
by the utopian visions of the digerati.
The humorist and writer Barry Crimmins, a children's-rights activist who's
incurred the wrath of some free-speech absolutists for his crusade against
online child porn, says the issue isn't so much about blocking out pornography
as it is about deciding what's appropriate for different age groups.
"Let's deal with reality," he says. "If anyone is going so far as to say
10-year-olds have a right to see this stuff, then they've identified themselves
as fringe and ridiculous. Ten-year-olds are not prepared to see depictions of
rape and violence. Let them have some innocence."