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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.

by Dan Kennedy

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."


The Don't Quote Me archive


Dan Kennedy's work can also be accessed from his Web site: http://www1.shore.net/~dkennedy/


Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com


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