So here we go again!
From one of the former "fight censorship" newsgroup participants I just received the following:
Civil liberties advocates are bracing themselves for a closed-door debate in Congress that could institute serious Internet content controls similar to the Communications Decency Act, defeated last year.
In July, the Senate unanimously passed a major spending bill with two controversial amendments: Sen. Dan Coats's (R-Indiana) so-called CDA II makes it a crime for commercial Web sites to distribute "harmful" material to minors; and Sen. John McCain's (R-Arizona) bill mandates the filtering of "inappropriate" sites at schools and libraries that receive federal discounts on Net access.
Soon after the House returns to session next week, a conference committee is expected to be established to resolve any differences between the House version of the fiscal 1999 appropriations bill for the Commerce, State, and Justice departments, and the Senate bill which included the Coats and McCain bills.
The fate of CDA II and the filtering mandate will likely be decided by the approximately dozen members of that conference committee.
Civil liberties advocates agree that swaying the conference members to strip the final bill of the provisions is their best chance at derailing the passage of the first sweeping online content restrictions proposed since the Supreme Court threw out portions of the CDA last summer.
But there is little public outcry about the First Amendment issues the bills raise, and many members of Congress have remained committed to passing a law that purports to limit children's access to sexual content.
Well now - who told you so? All America needs to do is take a look at Germany's law that was first invoked in the indexing of 8 documents on the Zundelsite in August of last year - on grounds that their content was "ethically disorienting" to youngsters. There are some lessons there.
But the story started much earlier, with the Zundelsite once again right in the middle:
On July 24, 1996 I reported in a ZGram that
". . . German officials are calling for the United Nations to help create international standards for acceptable content on the Web, a plea that comes just as Hamburg prosecutors accuse America Online's German service of being used for transmitting child pornography through email.
"Claudia Nolte, German's minister for family affairs, appeared Tuesday before the United Nations to discuss how the international body could play a role in developing standards to protect women and children from violence and sexual exploitation online. Nolte said that international standards will be necessary to prevent pornographers and neo-Nazis from operating outside national jurisdictions . . ."
Sept 30, 1996, Bild wrote this, pertaining the Zundelsite:
"According to Germany's leading tabloid paper "Bild" (Saturday edition), Federal Minister for Familiy Affairs, Claudia Nolte (Christian-Democrat), in an unprecedented decision has formally had several Web pages banned for being "X"-rated by the "Federal Office for the Evaluation of Literature Hazardous to Minors".
"Ms Nolte is quoted as saying: "It is not tolerable that the Internet should be an island with special privileges, on which thoughtless or unscrupulous providers may pursue their infamous activities with impunity."
The very next day, Oct 1, 1996, I shipped a press release that said, in part:
"In an unprecedented decision that will reverberate again across the globe in the ever-more polarizing "Freedom-of-Speech versus Censorship" struggle, Germany's Federal Minister for Family Affairs, Claudia Nolte, has formally banned eight documents posted on the Zundelsite as "Literature Hazardous to Minors".
"These "X-rated" articles are classical Revisionist documents featured by Ernst Zundel, a world-renown historical Revisionist located in Canada. Zundel's politically incorrect views have triggered one world-wide "cyberspace standoff" already that ended in defeat for Germany in February of this year when Zundel-Mirrors sprang up spontaneously at many universities worldwide to ward off politically motivated censorship of material that challenges the Holocaust."
A year and a half later, on March 16, 1998, I wrote:
"(There) are eight documents on the Zundelsite, indexed by the Government of Germany's Claudia Nolte, Minister for the Protection of Youth, Families and the Aged, as ". . . ethically disorienting to minors."
"These documents have been indexed since August of 1997 and have been recently reaffirmed as still being ". . . harmful to minors." As far as we know, this was one of the first times ever that documents on a website had been indexed and thus censored by a government.
"Since then, approximately 100 other pages or documents have been so targeted by the German censors.
"Ernst Zundel's attorney, Jurgen Rieger, is fighting this variation of censorship by government decree in expensive court battles, which have already cost many thousands of dollars. Not one of these documents was written by Ernst Zundel, but still he has been charged with ". . . ethically disorienting minors", and has to pay the endless legal bills and put up with the hassle.
"Should this indexing not be overturned by higher courts, Ernst faces arrest for the "offence" next time he visits Germany. (...) When I first reported this censorship act to the fight-censorship community, the response was a collective yawn."
So here we are, six months later. There is going to be a "closed hearing"?
Where were the cyber braves when we needed them? Behaving like a bunch of mice before the cat - because a horde of Nizkorites invaded them and started screeched "Nazi!"
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"They are ignoring us at their peril."
(Ernst Zundel, yesterday)