[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 105 (Monday, June 26, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9017-S9023]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CYBERPORN
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, there is an article from Time magazine
and an article from the Spectator magazine that I ask unanimous consent
to have printed in the Record at the end of my remarks.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(See exhibit 1.)
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, this morning I want to speak on a topic
that has received a lot of attention around here lately. My topic is
cyberporn, and that is, computerized pornography. I have introduced S.
892, entitled the Protection of Children from Computer Pornography Act
of 1995.
This legislation is narrowly drawn. It is meant to help protect
children from sexual predators and exposure to graphic pornography.
Mr. President, Georgetown University Law School has released a
remarkable study conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon
University. This study raises important questions about the
availability and the nature of cyberporn. It is this article I ask to
have printed in the Record.
Later on, on this subject, some time during the middle of July, I
will be conducting hearings before the full Judiciary Committee to
fully and completely explore these issues. In the meantime, I want to
refer to the Carnegie Mellon study, and I want to emphasize that this
is Carnegie Mellon University. This is not a study done by some
religious organization analyzing pornography that might be on computer
networks.
The university surveyed 900,000 computer images. Of these 900,000
images, 83.5 percent of all computerized photographs available on the
Internet are pornographic. Mr. President, I want to repeat that: 83.5
percent of the 900,000 images reviewed--these are all on the Internet--
are pornographic, according to the Carnegie Mellon study.
Now, of course, that does not mean that all of these images are
illegal under the Constitution. But with so many graphic images
available on computer networks, I believe Congress must act and do so
in a constitutional manner to help parents who are under assault in
this day and age. There is a flood of vile pornography, and we must act
to stem this growing tide, because, in the words of Judge Robert Bork,
it incites perverted minds. I refer to Judge Bork from the Spectator
article that I have permission to insert in the Record.
My bill, again, is S. 892, and provides just this sort of
constitutional, narrowly focused assistance in protecting children,
while also protecting the rights of consenting adults to transmit and
receive protected pornographic material--protected, that is, under the
first amendment.
Also, according to the Carnegie Mellon University study, cyberporn is
really big business. Some computer networks which specialize in
computer pornography take in excess of $1 million per year.
Later this week, I am going to introduce the Antielectronic
Racketeering Act of 1995 which will target organized crime which has
begun to use the awesome powers of computers to engage in criminal
activity.
As we all know from past debates in this body, organized crime is
heavily involved in trafficking illegal pornography. The Antielectronic
Racketeering Act will put a dent into that.
In closing, Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to give this study by
Carnegie Mellon University serious consideration, and I urge my
colleagues to support S. 892. I yield the floor.
Exhibit 1
[From the Spectator, Feb. 4, 1995]
An Electronic Sink of Depravity
New York.--If last year it was merely modish to be seen
speeding down the information superhighway, this year it is
fast becoming essential, at least in America. Hitch your
wagon to cyberspace, says the new Speaker of the House, Mr.
Newt Gingrich, and your democracy will become absolute, with
all America joined together for the first time into one vast
and egalitarian town meeting.
Mr. Gingrich made this all clear two weeks ago when he
unveiled a new system for bringing Congress to the
electronically connected populace, which in honour of
President Jefferson is called ``Thomas''. Anyone with a
computer and a modem at home or in the office (or even up in
the skies, courtesy of USAir's new back-of-the-seat
telescreens) may now, with only the click of a few buttons,
find the text of any bill, any resolution, any government
statement.
Mr. Gingrich is hugely excited by this idea--going so far
as to suggest, and not at all facetiously, that perhaps every
citizen be given a thousand-dollar tax deduction to allow him
to buy himself a laptop computer. Thus will all America be
conjoined, he argues, and thus will its democracy be ever
strengthened as in no other country on earth.
Fine, say I, and not just because I will become richer by
$1,000. For the last three years or so I have been a
dedicated and enthusiastic user of the Internet. (The
Internet--``the net'' to those in the know--began innocently
enough 20 years ago as a vast worldwide network of computers,
linked together by government-funded telephone
[[Page S9018]]
lines, with high-powered government-funded ``exchanges'' to
speed calls on their way, which enabled universities and
governments to swap information. Five years or so ago, its
controllers opted to make it more democratic, and now anyone
is able to connect to it; tens of thousands of new
subscribers join every day, and the net is becoming truly
global, with at least 20 million regular users.)
I am a typical enough user. I send electronic mail--e-
mail--to everyone who is similarly hooked up (it is lightning
fast and essentially free); and I browse through the world's
libraries and data-bases to do research for whatever book I
happen to be writing. I bask happily in the
Panglossian principle that the Internet seems to enshrine.
By virtue of the net, I have complete freedom to explore
and trawl for anything I want in what has become by custom
an untrammelled, uncontrolled, wholly liberated ocean of
information. The Internet seems and sounds to be something
almost noble. One can understand why the US Congress named
its own portion of the net after Jefferson: all knowledge
there is is on hand for all the people--just the kind of
thing the great man would have liked.
But this week, while I was peering into an area of the
Internet where I have hitherto not lingered, I discovered
something so appalling as to put all such high-minded
sentiments into a quite different perspective.
I had stumbled, not entirely accidentally, into a sinkhole
of electronic but very real perversion. The first thing I
read, almost as soon as I entered it, was a lengthy, very
graphic and in stylistic terms quite competently composed
narrative that presented in all its essentials the story of a
kidnapping, and the subsequent rape, torture, mutilation and
eventual murder of the two victims. That author called
himself by a code-name, Blackwind; and while it is quite
likely that he is American, almost as certain that he is
well-educated and quite possible that he is at least a
peripheral member of the academic community, we know, and are
allowed to know, nothing else about him.
His anonymity is faultlessly safeguarded by a system of
electronics which has been built into the Internet, and which
even the police and the other agents of the state are unable,
technically or in law, to penetrate. This is, from their
point of view, highly regrettable. Blackwind's offerings--and
the very similar stories currently being published on the
Internet by scores of men who are in all likelihood as
deranged as he seems to be--should be subject to some kind of
legal sanction, and for one very understandable reason: the
victims of the story he has written are small children.
One is a six-year old boy named Christopher, who, among
other indignities, suffers a castration--reported in loving
detail--before being shot. The other is a girl named Karen,
who is seven years old and is raped repeatedly by no fewer
than nine men, before having her nipples cut off and her
throat slashed.
At the moment of my writing this, I find that there are
perhaps 200 similar stories presently circulating and
available on one of the so-called ``newsgroups'' on the
Internet. The choice of tales is endlessly expanded and
refreshed by new and ever more exotic stories that emerge
into this particular niche in the other every day, almost
every hour. You want tales of fathers sodomizing their three-
year-old daughters, or of mothers performing fellatio on
their prepubescent sons, or of girls coupling with horses, or
of the giving of enemas to child virgins? Then you need do no
more than visit the newsgroup that is named
``alt.sex.stories'' and all will reliably be there, 24 hours
a day, for everyone with a computer and a telephone, anywhere
on (or above) the face of the earth.
There are about 5,000 separate newsgroups on the net, each
one of them presenting chatter about some scintilla of human
knowledge or endeavour. I have long liked the system, and
found it an agreeable way to discover people around the world
who have similar interests. I used to tell others who were
not yet signed up to the net that using newsgroups was like
going into a hugely crowded pub, finding in milliseconds
those who wanted to talk about what you wanted to know,
having a quick drink with them before leaving, without once
having encountered a bore.
And so, with an alphabetical list running from `ab.fen'--
which shows you how much fun you can have in Alberta--down to
something in German called `zer.zmetz.Wissenschaft.physlk',
the enthusiasms of the world's Internet-connected population
are distilled into their electronic segments. Alberta-philes
can chat with each other, as can German physicists, and those
who would bore these are left to chat among themselves. In
theory, an admirable arrangement.
By Jeffersonian rights it should be uplifting to the
spirit. In reality it is rather less so. In far too many
groups the level of discussion is execrable and juvenile.
Arguments break out, insults are exchanged, the chatter
drifts aimlessly in and out of relevance. This is a reality
of the electronic world that few like to admit. It is
prompting many browsers to suspect, as I do, that a
dismayingly large number of users of this system are not at
all the kind of sturdy champions of freedom and democracy and
intellect that Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Gore would like them to
be.
More probably, to judge from the tone and the language in
many of the groups, they are pasty-faced and dysfunctional
men with halitosis who inhabit damp basements. And it is for
them, in large measure, that the newsgroups whose titles
begin with the code-letters `alt.sex' seem to exist.
There are 55 of these, offering manna for all diets. Some
are fairly light-hearted; `alt.sex.anal', for example
contains much spirited chat about amusing uses to which you
can put the colonic gateway; `alt.sex.voyeurism' seems to
contain reasonably harmless chatter between a whole worldful
of civic-minded Peeping Toms, who like to advise one another
which public loos in which national parks have eye-sized
knotholes in their doors. There is also `alt.sex.nasal.hair',
into which I have not thus far been tempted.
There are a number of the groups, though, which are not so
amusing. There is `alt.sex.intergen', where the last letters
stand for `intergenerational', which is the current
paedophile bulletin-board; and there is my current target,
`alt.sex.stories'. I came across it by accident, and I
double-clicked my mouse to open it, briefly enthralled. It
did not take many seconds before I realized I had been ill-
prepared for what was on offer.
There is a kind of classification system. Each story entry
lists a title, an author (invariably either a pseudonym, or
posted via an anonymous computer that has laundered the words
and made the detection of the author impossible), and a
series of code-words and symbols that indicate the
approximate content.
Blackwind's many offerings--there were about 200 stories in
all, with Blackwind contributing perhaps 15 of them--
usually fell into the categories that are denoted by the
codes `m-f, f-f, scat.pedo.snuff', meaning that they
contain scenes of male-female sex, female-female sex,
scatological imagery, paedophiliac description and the
eventual killing of the central victim. You quickly get, I
think, the drift. Others are more horrifying still--those
that end with the invariable `snuff' scene, but whose
enticements on the way include `best', `torture', `gore'
or `amputees', and which refer to sex with animals,
bloodlettings, sadistic injury, and the limitless erotic
joy of stumps.
It is important to note that no one polices or, to use the
Internet word, `moderates', this group, (Some of the more
obscure and non-sexual newsgroups do have a volunteer,
usually a specialist in the field, who tries to keep order in
what might, if unchecked, become an unruly discussion.) On
`alt.sex.stories' there is only one man, a Mr. Joshua Laff of
the University of Illinois at Urbana, who oversees the group,
in a somewhat lethargic way. He helpfully suggests the code-
words for the various kinds of perverse interests. He
indicates to people who want to talk about sex stories,
rather than actually contributing them, that they would be
better advised to post their gripes on
`alt.sex.stories.discussion', next door, and so on.
But Mr. Laff has no admitted scruples about what is
permitted to go out over the air. So far as he is concerned,
the First Amendment to the Constitution protects all that is
said on `alt.sex.stories' as free speech. What is
demonstrated on these thousands of electronic pages is a
living exhibition of the birthright of all who are fortunate
enough to be born in the land that has given us the National
Rifle Association, the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, and
Blackwind.
In truth, Mr. Laff and those who support the published
existence of such writings are technically right. No obscene
pictures are published--these could be banned in law. No
obscene truths are proffered, so far as we know--no
confessions of real rapes, nor of actual acts of pedorasty.
And since all the stories are prefaced with warnings that
those under 18, or those of sensitive disposition, should
read no further--devices that presumably attract precisely
those they purport to deter--so, the authors seem to agree,
their ramblings do no harm at all.
Most individual states legislate firmly or less so against
printed pornography: but so far no one has successfully
prosecuted the Internet--not least for the reason that with
so amorphous, so global and so informal a linking of
computers, who out there can be held responsible? People like
Blackwind simply open accounts at what are known as
`anonymous posting systems', and their words become filtered
through two or three computers in such a way that the
original source can never be known, and the perpetrator of
any possible crime becomes impossible to find. And, anyway,
those who endlessly cry First Amendment! Here we want to say
that the publishing of more words, even those from so clearly
depraved an individual as Blackwind, can do no harm at all.
Commonsense would argue otherwise. A long and graphic
account of exactly how and at what hour you wait outside a
girls' school, how best to bundle a seven-year-old into your
van, whether to tell her at the start of her ordeal that she
is going to be killed at the end of it (Blackwind's favoured
modus operandi), how best to tie her down, which aperture to
approach first, and with what--such things can only tempt
those who verge on such acts to take a greater interest in
them.
Surely such essays tell the thinker of forbidden thoughts
that there exists somewhere out there a like-minded group of
men for whom such things are really not so bad, the enjoyment
of which, if no one is so ill-starred as to get caught, can
be limitless. Surely it is naive folly--or, at the other end
of the spectrum, gross irresponsibility--to suppose
otherwise.
[[Page S9019]]
Such material is not, I am happy to say, universally
available. Some of the big corporations which offer public
access to the Internet--America On-Line, CompuServe, Prodigy,
Mr. Murdoch's Delphi--have systems in place that filter out
the more objectionable newsgroups. On America On-Line you may
read the ramblings on `alt.sex.voyeurism' and probably even
`alt.sex.nasal.hair', but you may read no `alt.sex.stories',
nor may you learn techniques for having real relationships,
as paedophiles like to say they have, with young children.
But for those with the wherewithal to find more robust and
uncontrolled access to cyberspace--and that means, quite
frankly, most of the world's computer users, be they 90 years
old or nine--all newsgroups are equally available, the evil
along with the excellent. The question we have to ask is
whether that should continue to be the case.
One might not mind so much if the material were being
confined to the United States, where most of it originates.
But in fact it manages to seep its electronic way everywhere,
from Wiltshire to Waziristan. And crucially, no mechanism is
yet in place allowing foreigners--whose laws might well be
far less tolerantly disposed to it--to filer it out.
A computer owner in Islington or Islamabad can have easy
and inexpensive access to material over the net which would
be illegal for him or her to read or buy on any British or
Pakistani street. In China, pornographers would be imprisoned
for publishing material that any Peking University students
can read at the click of a mouse; and the same is true in
scores of other countries and societies. The Internet, we
smugly say, has become a means of circumventing the
restrictive codes of tyrannics. But the reverse of this coin
is less attractive; it also allows an almost exclusively
American contagion to ooze outwards, unstoppable, like an oil
spill, contaminating everyone and everything in its path.
We cannot, of course, prevent: such things being thought.
We may not prevent them being written for self-gratification
alone. But, surely, science and the public can somehow
conspire and co-operate to see that such writings as are
represented by `scat.pedo.torture.snuff' and the like are
neither published nor read, and that they do not in
consequence have the opportunity to spread outwards as an
electronic contagion from the minds of those who, like
Blackwind, first create them.
The Jeffersonian model for universal freedom which Mr.
Gingrich so rightly applauds could not take into account the
barbarisms of the modern mind. Nor could it imagine the
genius by which such barbarisms can be disseminated as they
are today, in seconds, to the remotest and still most
innocent corners of the world. Someone, perhaps even the
Speaker of the House of Representatives, is going to have to
consider soon the implications, for ill as well as good, of
our venture out onto the information superhighway, or else
there are going to be some very messy electronic traffic
accidents.
____
[From Time Magazine, June 1995]
Cyberporn--On a Screen Near You
(By Philip Elmer-Dewitt)
It's popular, pervasive and surprisingly perverse,
according to the first survey of online erotica. And there's
no easy way to stamp it out.
Sex is everywhere these days--in books, magazines, films,
television, music videos and bus-stop perfume ads. It is
printed on dial-a-porn business cards and slipped under
windshield wipers. It is acted out by balloon-breasted models
and actors with unflagging erections, then rented for $4 a
night at the corner video store. Most Americans have become
so inured to the open display of eroticism--and the arguments
for why it enjoys special status under the First Amendment--
that they hardly notice it's there.
Something about the combination of sex and computers,
however, seems to make otherwise worldly-wise adults a little
crazy. How else to explain the uproar surrounding the
discovery by a U.S. Senator--Nebraska Democrat James Exon--
that pornographic pictures can be downloaded from the
Internet and displayed on a home computer? This, as any
computer-savvy undergrad can testify, is old news. Yet
suddenly the press is on alert, parents and teachers are up
in arms, and lawmakers in Washington are rushing to ban the
smut from cyberspace with new legislation--sometimes with
little regard to either its effectiveness or its
constitutionality.
If you think things are crazy now, though, wait until the
politicians get hold of a report coming out this week. A
research team at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, has counted an exhaustive study of online
porn--what's available, who is downloading it, what turns
them on--and the findings (to be published in the Georgetown
Law Journal) are sure to pour fuel on an already explosive
debate.
The study, titled Marketing Pornography on the Information
Superhighway, is significant not only for what it tells us
about what's happening on the computer networks but also for
what it tells us about ourselves. Pornography's appeal is
surprisingly elusive. It plays as much on fear, anxiety,
curiosity and taboo as on genuine eroticism. The Carnegie
Mellon study, drawing on elaborate computer records of online
activity, was able to measure for the first time what people
actually download, rather than what they say they want to
see. ``We now know what the consumers of computer pornography
really look at in the privacy of their own homes,'' says
Marty Rimm, the study's principal investigator. ``And we're
finding a fundamental shift in the kinds of images they
demand.''
What the Carnegie Mellon researchers discovered was:
There's an awful lot of porn online. In an 18-month study,
the team surveyed 917,410 sexually explicit pictures,
descriptions, short stories and film clips. On those Usenet
newsgroups where digitized images are stored, 83.5 percent of
the pictures were pornographic.
It is immensely popular. Trading in sexually explicit
imagery, according to the report, is now ``one of the largest
(if not the largest) recreational applications of users of
computer networks.'' At one U.S. University, 13 of the 40
most frequently visited newsgroups had names like
alt.sex.stories, rec.arts.erotica and alt.sex.bondage.
It is a big moneymaker. The great majority (71 percent) of
the sexual images on the newsgroups surveyed originate from
adult-oriented computer bulletin-board systems (BBS) whose
operators are trying to lure customers to their private
collections of X-rated material. There are thousands of these
BBS services, which charge fees (typically $10 to $30 a
month) and take credit cards; the five largest have annual
revenues in excess of $1 million.
It is ubiquitous. Using data obtained with permission from
BBS operators, the Carnegie Mellon team identified (but did
not publish the names of) individual consumers in more than
2,000 cities in all 50 states and 40 countries, territories
and provinces around the world--including some countries
like China, where possession of pornography can be a
capital offense.
It is a guy thing. According to the BBS operators, 98.9
percent of the consumers of online porn are men. And there is
some evidence that many of the remaining 1.1 percent are
women paid to hang out on the ``chat'' rooms and bulletin
boards to make the patrons feel more comfortable.
It is not just naked women. Perhaps because hard-core sex
pictures are so widely available elsewhere, the adult BBS
market seems to be driven largely by a demand for images that
can't be found in the average magazine rack: pedophilia (nude
photos of children), hebephilia (youths) and what the
researchers call paraphilia--a grab bag of ``deviant''
material that includes images of bondage, sadomasochism,
urination, defecation, and sex acts with a barnyard full of
animals.
The appearance of material like this on a public network
accessible to men, women and children around the world raises
issues too important to ignore--or to oversimplify. Parents
have legitimate concerns about what their kids are being
exposed to and, conversely, what those children might miss if
their access to the Internet were cut off. Lawmakers must
balance public safety with their obligation to preserve
essential civil liberties. Men and women have to come to
terms with what draws them to such images. And computer
programmers have to come up with more enlightened ways to
give users control over a network that is, by design, largely
out of control.
The Internet, of course, is more than a place to find
pictures of people having sex with dogs. It's a vast
marketplace of ideas and information of all sorts--on
politics, religion, science and technology. If the fast-
growing World Wide Web fulfills its early promise, the
network could be a powerful engine of economic growth in the
21st century. And as the Carnegie Mellon study is careful to
point out, pornographic image files, despite their evident
popularity, represent only about 3 percent of all the
messages on the Usenet newsgroups, while the Usenet itself
represents only 11.5 percent of the traffic on the Internet.
As shocking and, indeed, legally obscene as some of the
online porn may be, the researchers found nothing that can't
be found in specialty magazines or adult bookstores. Most of
the material offered by the private BBS services, in fact, is
simply scanned from existing print publications.
But pornography is different on the computer networks. You
can obtain it in the privacy of your home--without having to
walk into a seedy bookstore or movie house. You can download
only those things that turn you on, rather than buy an entire
magazine or video. You can explore different aspects of your
sexuality without exposing yourself to communicable diseases
or public ridicule. (Unless, of course, someone gets hold of
the computer files tracking your online activities, as
happened earlier this year to a couple dozen crimson-faced
Harvard students.)
The great fear of parents and teachers, of course, is not
that college students will find this stuff but that it will
fall into the hands of those much younger--including some,
perhaps, who are not emotionally prepared to make sense of
what they see.
Ten-year-old Anders Urmacher, a student at the Dalton
School in New York City who likes to hang out with other kids
in the Treehouse chat room on America Online, got E-mail from
a stranger that contained a mysterious file with instructions
for how to download it. He followed the instructions, and
then he called his mom. When Linda Mann-Urmacher opened the
file, the computer screen filled with 10 thumbnail-size
pictures showing couples engaged in various acts of sodomy,
heterosexual intercourse and
[[Page S9020]]
lesbian sex. ``I was not aware that this stuff was online,''
says a shocked Mann-Urmacher. ``Children should not be
subjected to these images.''
This is the flip side of Vice President Al Gore's vision of
an information superhighway linking every school and library
in the land. When the kids are plugged in, will they be
exposed to the seamiest sides of human sexuality? Will they
fall prey to child molesters hanging out in electronic chat
rooms? It's precisely these fears that have stopped Bonnie
Fell of Skokie, Illinois, from signing up for the Internet
access her three boys say they desperately need.
``They could get bombarded with X-rated porn, and I
wouldn't have any idea,'' she says. Mary Veed, a mother of
three from nearby Hinsdale, makes a point of trying to keep
up with her computer-literate 12-year-old, but sometimes has
to settle for monitoring his phone bill. ``Once they get to
be a certain age, boys don't always tell Mom what they do,''
she says.
``We face a unique, disturbing and urgent circumstance,
because it is children who are the computer experts in our
nation's families,'' said Republican Senator Dan Coats of
Indiana during the debate over the controversial anti-
cyberporn bill he co-sponsored with Senator Exon.
According to at least one of those experts--16-year-old
David Slifka of Manhattan--the danger of being bombarded with
unwanted pictures is greatly exaggerated. ``If you don't want
them you won't get them,'' says the veteran Internet surfer.
Private adult BBSs require proof of age (usually a driver's
license) and are off-limits to minors, and kids have to
master some fairly daunting computer science before they can
turn so-called binary files on the Usenet into high-
resolution color pictures. ``The chances of randomly coming
across them are unbelievably slim,'' says Slifka.
While groups like the Family Research Council insist that
online child molesters represent a clear and present danger,
there is no evidence that it is any greater than the thousand
other threats children face every day. Ernie Allen, executive
director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children, acknowledges that there have been 10 or 12 ``fairly
high-profile cases'' in the past year of children being
seduced or lured online into situations where they are
victimized. Kids who are not online are also at risk,
however; more than 800,000 children are reported missing
every year in the U.S.
Yet it is in the name of the children and their parents
that lawmakers are racing to fight cyberporn. The first blow
was struck by Senators Exon and Coats, who earlier this year
introduced revisions to an existing law called the
Communications Decency Act. The idea was to extend
regulations written to govern the dial-a-porn industry into
the computer networks. The bill proposed to outlaw obscene
material and impose fines of up to $100,000 and prison terms
of up to two years on anyone who knowingly makes ``indecent''
material available to children under 18.
The measure had problems from the start. In its original
version it would have made online-service providers
criminally liable for any obscene communications that passed
through their systems--a provision that, given the way the
networks operate, would have put the entire Internet at risk.
Exon and Coats revised the bill but left in place the
language about using ``indecent'' words online. ``It's a
frontal assault on the First Amendment,'' says Harvard law
professor Laurence Tribe. Even veteran prosecutors ridicule
it. ``It won't pass scrutiny even in misdemeanor court,''
says one.
The Exon bill had been written off for dead only a few
weeks ago. Republican Senator Larry Pressler of South Dakota,
chairman of the Commerce committee, which has jurisdiction
over the larger telecommunications-reform act to which it is
attached, told Time that he intended to move to table it.
That was before Exon showed up in the Senate with his
``blue book.'' Exon had asked a friend to download some of
the rawer images available online. ``I knew it was bad,''
he says. ``But then when I got on there, it made Playboy
and Hustler look like Sunday-school stuff.'' He had the
images printed out, stuffed them in a blue folder and
invited his colleagues to stop by his desk on the Senate
floor to view them. At the end of the debate--which was
carried live on c-span--few Senators wanted to cast a
nationally televised vote that might later be
characterized as pro-pornography. The bill passed 84 to
16.
Civil libertarians were outraged. Mike Godwin, staff
counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, complained
that the indecency portion of the bill would transform the
vast library of the Internet into a children's reading room,
where only subjects suitable for kids could be discussed.
``It's government censorship,'' said Marc Rotenberg of the
Electronic Privacy Information Center. ``The Amendment
shouldn't end where the Internet begins.''
The key issue, according to legal scholars, is whether the
Internet is a print medium (like a newspaper), which enjoys
strong protection against government interference, or a
broadcast medium (like television), which may be subject to
all sorts of government control. Perhaps the most significant
import of the Exon bill, according to EFF's Godwin, is that
it would place the computer networks under the jurisdiction
of the Federal Communications Commission, which enforces,
among other rules, the injunction against using the famous
seven dirty words on the radio. In a Time/CNN poll of 1,000
Americans conducted last week by Yankelovich Partners,
respondents were sharply split on the issue: 42 percent were
for FCC-like control over sexual content on the computer
networks; 48 percent were against it.
By week's end the balance between protecting speech and
curbing pornography seemed to be tipping back toward the
libertarians. In a move that surprised conservative
supporters, House Speaker Newt Gingrich denounced the Exon
amendment. ``It is clearly a violation of free speech, and
it's a violation of the right of adults to communicate with
each other,'' he told a caller on a cable-TV show. It was a
key defection, because Gingrich will preside over the
computer-decency debate when it moves to the House in July.
Meanwhile, two U.S. Representatives, Republican Christopher
Cox of California and Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon, were
putting together an anti-Exon amendment that would bar
federal regulation of the Internet and help parents find ways
to block material they found objectionable.
Coincidentally, in the closely watched case of a University
of Michigan student who published a violent sex fantasy on
the Internet and was charged with transmitting a threat to
injure or kidnap across state lines, a federal judge in
Detroit last week dismissed the charges. The judge ruled that
while Jake Baker's story might be deeply offensive, it was
not a crime.
How the Carnegie Mellon report will affect the delicate
political balance on the cyberporn debate is anybody's guess.
Conservatives thumbing through it for rhetorical ammunition
will find plenty. Appendix B lists the most frequently
downloaded files from a popular adult BBS, providing both the
download count and the two-line descriptions posted by the
board's operator. Suffice it to say that they all end in
exclamation points, many include such phrases as ``nailed to
a table!'' and none can be printed in Time.
How accurately these images reflect America's sexual
interests, however, is a matter of some dispute. University
of Chicago sociologist Edward Laumann, whose 1994 Sex in
America survey painted a far more humdrum picture of
America's sex life, says the Carnegie Mellon study may have
captured what he calls the ``gaper phenomenon.'' ``There is a
curiosity for things that are extraordinary and way out,'' he
says. ``It's like driving by a horrible accident. No one
wants to be in it, but we all slow down to watch.''
Other sociologists point out that the difference between
the Chicago and Carnegie Mellon reports may be more apparent
than real. Those 1 million or 2 million people who download
pictures from the Internet represent a self-selected group
with an interest in erotica. The Sex in America respondents,
by contrast, were a few thousand people selected to represent
a cross section of all American. Still, the new research is a
gold mine for psychologists, social scientists, computer
marketers and anybody with an interest in human boards, they
left a digital trail of their transactions, allowing the
pornographers to compile data bases about their buying habits
and sexual tastes. The more sophisticated operators were able
to adjust their inventory and their descriptions to match
consumer demand.
Nobody did this more effectively than Robert Thomas, owner
of the Amateur Action BBS in Milpitas, California, and a kind
of modern-day Marquis de Sade, according to the Carnegie
Mellon report. He is currently serving time in an obscenity
case that may be headed for the Supreme Court.
Thomas, whose BBS is the online-porn market leader,
discovered that he could boost sales by trimming soft- and
hard-core images from his data base while front-loading his
files with pictures of sex acts with animals (852) and nude
prepubescent children (more than 5,000), his two most popular
categories of porn. He also used copywriting tricks to better
serve his customers' fantasies. For example, he described
more than 1,200 of his pictures as depicting sex scenes
between family members (father and daughter, mother and son),
even though there was no evidence that any of the
participants were actually related. These ``incest'' images
were among his biggest sellers, accounting for 10 percent of
downloads.
The words that worked were sometimes quite revealing.
Straightforward oral sex, for example, generally got a
lukewarm response. But when Thomas described the same images
using words like choke or choking, consumer demand doubled.
Such findings may cheer antipornography activists; as
feminist writer Andrea Dworkin puts it, ``the whole purpose
of pornography is to hurt women,'' Catharine MacKinnon, a
professor of law at the University of Michigan, goes further.
Women are doubly violated by pornography, she writes in
Vindication and Resistance, one of three essays in the
forthcoming Georgetown Law Journal that offer differing views
on the Carnegie Mellon report. They are violated when it is
made and exposed to further violence again and again every
time it is consumed. ``The question pornography poses in
cyberspace,'' she writes, ``is the same one it poses
everywhere else: Whether anything will be done about it.''
But not everyone agrees with Dworkin and MacKinnon, by any
means; even some feminist think there is a place in life--and
the Internet--for erotica. In her new book, Defending
Pornography, Nadine Strossen argues that censoring sexual
expression would
[[Page S9021]]
do women more harm than good, undermining their equality,
their autonomy and their freedom.
The Justice Department, for it part, has not asked for new
antiporn legislation. Distributing obscene material across
state lines is already illegal under federal law, and child
pornography in particular is vigorously prosecuted. Some 40
people in 14 states were arrested two years ago in Operation
Longarm for exchanging kiddie porn online. And one of the
leading characters in the Carnegie Mellon study--a former
Rand McNally executive named Robert Copella, who left book
publishing to make his fortune selling pedophilia on the
networks--was extradited from Tijuana, and is now awaiting
sentencing in a New Jersey jail.
For technical reasons, it is extremely difficult to stamp
out anything on the Internet--particularly images stored on
the Usenet newsgroup. As Internet pioneer John Gilmore
famously put it, ``The Net interprets censorship as damage
and routes around it.'' There are border issues as well.
Other countries on the Internet--France, for instance--are
probably no more interested in having their messages
screened by U.S. censors than Americans would be in having
theirs screened by, say, the government of Saudi Arabia.
Historians say it should come as no surprise that the
Internet--the most democratic of media--would lead to new
calls for censorship. The history of pornography and efforts
to suppress it are inextricably bound up with the rise of new
media and the emergence of democracy. According to Walter
Kendrick, author of The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern
Culture, the modern concept of pornography was invented in
the 19th century by European gentlemen whose main concern was
to keep obscene material away from women and the lower
classes. Things got out of hand with the spread of literacy
and education, which made pornography available to anybody
who could read. Now, on the computer networks, anybody with a
computer and a modem can not only consume pornography but
distribute it as well. On the Internet, anybody can be Bob
Guccione.
That might not be a bad idea, says Carlin Meyer, a
professor at New York Law School whose Georgetown essay takes
a far less apocalyptic view than MacKinnon's. She argues that
if you don't like the images of sex the pornographers offer,
the appropriate response is not to suppress them but to
overwhelm them with healthier, more realistic ones. Sex on
the Internet, she maintains, might actually be good for young
people. ``[Cyberspace] is a safe space in which to explore
the forbidden and the taboo,'' she writes. ``It offers the
possibility for genuine, unembarrassed conversations about
accurate as well as fantasy images of sex.''
That sounds easier than it probably is. Pornography is
powerful stuff, and as long as there is demand for it, there
will always be a supply. Better software tools may help check
the worst abuses, but there will never be a switch that will
cut it off entirely--not without destroying the unbridled
expression that is the source of the Internet's (and
democracy's) greatest strength. The hard truth, says John
Perry Barlow, co-founder of the EFF and father of three young
daughters, is that the burden ultimately falls where it
always has: on the parents. ``If you don't want your children
fixating on filth,'' he says, ``better step up to the tough
task of raising them to find it as distasteful as you do
yourself.''
Mr. EXON addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nebraska.
Mr. EXON. Mr. President, I thank my friend and colleague from my
neighboring State of Iowa, whose usual good judgment has never been
questioned by this individual. I thank him very much for addressing
this matter.
I, too, read the article that he referenced in Time magazine. I got
in on just the end of his remarks.
May I inquire of my friend from Iowa, did he have printed in the
Record that portion of the Time magazine article from this morning's
Time magazine?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair will observe he did.
Mr. EXON. I thank the Chair.
If it was not referenced, I would reference the graphic picture on
the front of Time magazine today, which I think puts into focus very
distinctly and directly what my friend from Iowa and this Senator has
been talking about for a long, long time.
I would also reference for the Record and ask unanimous consent to
have printed in the Record, interestingly enough, simultaneously a
similar story along the same lines that appeared in this morning's
weekly edition of Newsweek magazine.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From Newsweek, July 3, 1995]
No Place for Kids?
A Parent's Guide to Sex on the Net
(By Steven Levy)
When the annals of cyberspace are uploaded for future
generations, digital historians will undoubtedly include a
scene from the Senate chamber earlier this month: Nebraska
Democrat James Exon brandishing a thin binder now known as
the blue book. Inside were images snatched from the shadows
and thrust into the center of public discourse. Women bound
and being burned by cigarettes. Pierced with swords. Having
sex with a German shepherd. As Exon puts it, images that are
``repulsive and far off base.'' Images from the Net.
Exon compiled his blue book to persuade his Senate
colleagues to pass his Communications Decency Act. Partially
moved by a private showing in the Senate cloakroom, they did
so, overwhelmingly. It is not clear whether the act, which
places strict limits on all speech in computer networks, will
find its way into law, but its Senate passage was a
transforming blow against the Internet empire. Even the most
vehement of the Internet's defenders now face a real problem:
how to maintain free speech when well-chronicled excesses
give the impression that much of cyberspace is a cesspool.
Indeed, most of the dispatches from the electronic world
these days seem to dwell on the dark side. The most prevalent
type of anecdote involves someone like Susan Tilghman, a
medical doctor in Fairfax, Va. Last fall she hooked the
family computer to America Online (AOL). Her sons, 12 and 15
years old, enjoyed it so much that she and her husband sought
to find out why. Clicking on files their boys had read, the
astonished parents found ``pornographic pictures in full
color,'' says Tilghman, ``We were horrified.'' She pulled the
modem plus immediately.
Then there are the actual busts of online pornographic
rings. Just as in the physical world, traffic in obscene
material is illegal in cyberspace, and authorities are
beginning to prosecute zealously. The most recent raid
occurred last week in Cincinnati, targeting not only
purveyors of porn but more than 100 individuals who had
allegedly downloaded pornographic images of children via AOL.
Most disturbing of all are the tales of sexual predators
using the Internet and commercial online services to spirit
children away from their keyboards. Until now parents have
believed that no physical harm could possibly result when
their progeny were huddled safely in the bedroom or den,
tapping on the family computer. But then came news of cases
like the 13-year-old Kentucky girl found in Los Angeles after
supposedly being lured by a grown-up cyberpal.
These reports have triggered a sort of parental panic about
cyberspace. Parents are rightfully confused, faced with hard
choices about whether to expose their children to the alleged
benefits of cyberspace when carnal pitfalls lie ahead. As our
culture moves unrelentingly toward the digital realm, some
questions--and answers--are finally coming into focus.
how much sex is there in cyberspace?
A lot. Brian Reid, director of the Network Systems
Laboratory at Digital Equipment Corp., reports that one of
the most popular of the thousands of Usenet discussion groups
is the ``alt.sex'' group. He estimates that on a monthly
basis between 180,000 and 500,000 users drop in. A glance at
some World Wide Web sites shows that while the digital home
of the Smithsonian Institution took seven weeks to gather 1.9
million visits, or ``hits,'' Playboy's electronic
headquarters received 4.7 million hits in a seven-day period
last month.
And this week the Georgetown Law Journal will release a
survey headed by Marty Rimm, a 30-year-old researcher at
Carnegie Mellon University. In his paper, ``Marketing
Pornography on the Information Superhighway,'' Rimm
concentrated mostly on adults-only bulletin boards (the
equivalent of X-rated bookshops). He provides solid evidence
that there's loads of hard-core stuff in cyberspace. Rimm
wrote a computer program to analyze descriptions of 917,410
dirty pictures (he examined about 10,000 actual images, to
check the realiability of the descriptions). His conclusion:
``I think there's almost no question that we're seeing an
unprecedented availability and demand of material like
sadomasochism, bestiality, vaginal and rectal fisting,
eroticized urination . . . and pedophilia.''
how easy is it to avoid the sexual material?
Donna Rice Hughes (yes, that Donna Rice), spokesperson for
an anti-pornography group called Enough is Enough!, claims
that ``children are going online innocently and naively
running across material that's illegal even for adults.'' But
the way the Internet works, that sort of stuff doesn't tend
to pop up uninvited. ``When you watch TV it comes right to
you,'' says Donna Hoffman, associate professor of business at
Vanderbilt University. ``But on the Internet, you're in an
environment with 30 million channels. It's up to you to
decide where to go. You don't have to download the images on
alt.sex.binaries.''
Groups with ``binaries'' are the picture files, the ones
containing the most shocking images. To find them, one needs
a good sense of digital direction. Depending on the software
you have, you may need a mastery of some codes in the
notoriously arcane Unix computer language, or it can involve
a few well-chosen clicks of the mouse. In any case, there's
no way you get that stuff by accident.
Kids are very hungry to view sexual materials, and left to
their own devices they will
[[Page S9022]]
find that the Internet provides them with an unprecedented
bonanza. In predigital days, getting one's hands on hot
pictures required running an often impenetrable gantlet of
drugstore clerks and newsstand operators, and finding really
hardcore material was out of the question. Not so with the
Net. Frank Moretti, associate headmaster of the Dalton School
in New York City, which offers Internet access beginning in
junior high, thinks that we can deal with that. ``There's a
candy store around the corner from our school that has just
about every kind of pornographic image,'' he says. ``The
challenge is to help our children use self-discipline.''
is the internet a haven for predators?
After years of online activity, ``there have been about a
dozen high-profile cases,'' says Ernie Allen, president of
the Arlington, Va.-based National Center for Missing and
Exploited Children. ``It's not a huge number, but it does
indicate that there are risks. But there are risks in
everything a child does. Our concern is the nature of the
technology. It creates a false sense of security.''
What parents should warn kids about is the classic scenario
described by Detective Bill Dworn, head of the Sexually
Exploited Child Unit of the Los Angeles Police Department:
``The pervert can get on any bulletin board and chat with
kids all night long. He lies about his age and makes friends.
As soon as he can get a telephone number or address, he's
likely to look up the kid and molest him or her.'' In real
life, this hardly ever happens. Most online services have
policies to monitor chat rooms, particularly those designated
as ``kids-only.'' No guarantees, but not many kidnappers.
And if the child is propositioned? ``It happens, but it's
less upsetting if a child is prepared for it,'' says Sherry
Turkle, an MIT professor whose coming book, ``Life on the
Screen,'' includes data about the experiences of nearly 300
kids on the Net. ``Better to warn the child and instruct him
to say, `I'm not interested,' and just leave.''
All the publicity about predators has tarnished the image
of chat rooms. But the talk areas may have value. ``Kids are
finding ways to experiment with self-presentation,'' says
Turkle. She's talked with kids about ``Net sex,'' where kids
dabble in interactive erotica like this:
I'm kissing you.
You fondle my hair.
I fondle your breast.
Sometimes there is conscious gender-swapping. Sometimes
things go farther than the kids intended. Still, Turkle
thinks that there may be benefits in this; after all, no one
gets pregnant in cyberspace. ``Adolescence used to be a
timeout, sexually speaking,'' she says. ``But in the age of
AIDS, sexual experimentation is a deadly game. The Internet
is becoming a way to play with identity, where adolescents
can develop a sense of themselves.''
can new laws successfully address the problem?
The Exon amendment is very broad. It could hamper
communication between adults--the essence of online
activity--and might not even solve the problems that kids
face. ``It would be a mistake to drive us, in a moment of
hysteria, to a solution that is unconstitutional, would
stultify technology, and wouldn't even fulfill its mission,''
argues * * * Berman, director of the Center for Democracy and
Technology.
But Berman and others have a secret weapon: the House of
Representatives. ``There's a generational difference between
the House and Senate,'' says Berman. ``They understand the
technology and they're not afraid of it.'' The only question
was whether this pro-technology impulse, along with a
loathing for government regulation, would lead Speaker Newt
Gingrich and his minions to defy their allies in the
religious right, whose ``Contract With the American Family''
calls for ``protecting children from exposure to pornography
on the Internet.''
The question was answered last Tuesday night when a caller
on a cable-TV talk show asked Gingrich what he thought of
Exon's amendment. ``I think it has no meaning and no real
impact . . .,'' the speaker said. ``It is clearly a violation
of free speech and it's a violation of the rights of adults
to communicate with each other.''
But that was not the worst news for would-be monitors of
cyberspace. Conservative Republican Chris Cox of California
has teamed with liberal Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon to
develop the grandiosely entitled Internet Freedom and Family
Empowerment Act. Basically, the bill would forbid the federal
government from creating any regulatory agency to govern the
Internet, relying instead on a variety of means (not yet
determined) to protect children. Cox hopes that such
legislation will encourage a free-market solution to cybersex
from . . . more new technology.
can high-tech solutions help?
Ultimately, James Exon's greatest contribution to the
protection of children may not be his legislation but the
fear of it has created in Silicon Valley and its virtual
environments. Already parents can buy some sophisticated
software to block children's access to questionable material.
More is on the way; two weeks ago Microsoft, Netscape and the
Progressive Networks joined together to develop new
prophylactic devices. ``The Exon amendment certainly raised
consciousness,'' says Mike Homer of Netscape. ``But we
believe there is a variety of fairly straightforward tools
that would allow us to self-regulate.'' More than 100
companies have called, asking to help. Another, paragraph
complementary, scheme in the works is KidCode, a means by
which the addresses on the World Wide Web will have voluntary
ratings embedded. ``Places that provide erotica on the
Internet are wild about the idea of voluntary ratings,'' says
Nathaniel Borenstein, designer of KidCode. ``They don't want
to sell to kids.''
Meanwhile, one solution has already hit the market:
SurfWatch, created by an eponymous Silicon Valley firm. Its
software works by matching a potential Net destination to a
proprietary list of forbidden sites. In addition, the $50
software package looks for objectionable language. Once
parents or educators install it, they have at least one line
of defense. ``This is the kind of software that can offer the
individual choice as opposed to censorship,'' says SurfWatch
vice president Jay Friendland.
Last week a bogus press release circulated on the Net for a
fictional product called Babe Watch that ``looks exactly like
SurfWatch but instead of blocking access, actually goes out
and locates Web sites with good pictures of babes.''
Undoubtedly a real-life version is in the works. ``If you're
a 16-year-old A-quality hacker, you'll be able to turn us
off,'' says Friendland.
will the problem ever go away?
The bottom line when it comes to kids, sex and the Internet
is that no matter what laws we pass and what high-tech
solutions we devise, the three of them together will never be
less volatile than the first two alone. We can mitigate but
not eliminate the drawbacks of high tech; there's no way to
get its benefits without them.
It's a trade-off that Patricia Shao understands. About six
weeks ago, her 13-year-old daughter, visiting a friend, was
in an online-service chat room when they were propositioned
to have ``cybersex.'' Shao was shocked, and even more so when
her daughter casually told her, ``This is what happens when
we're online.'' ``They thought it was just a crackpot,'' says
Shao, a Bethesda, Md., marketing executive. Instead of
pulling the cyberplug, however, Shao took pains to educate
herself about online sex. She even engaged in some political
activism, signing on with a pro-Exon anti-pornography group.
And ultimately, Shao's family purchased its own America
Online subscription after her daughter's close encounter with
a pixilated stranger.
If there were more built-in programs like SurfWatch
available to her, Shao ways, she'd probably use them. But in
the meantime she is making do with the more old-fashioned
method of talking to her kids--and trusting them. ``I've
warned my children about the obscene material out there, and
I trust them not to access it.'' As careful parents will do,
she monitors the family online activity somewhat, by tracking
the hours they are logged on. But as with other passages--
going out alone, driving a car--ultimately, you have to let
kids grow up. Even if some of the growing up happens online.
Mr. EXON. The story Newsweek tells is not dissimilar. Alarming facts
have been brought out into the open even further with the publication
in these two national magazines. The Newsweek article is entitled ``Sex
Online: What Parents Should Know.''
I very much appreciate having the time to take a look at the
legislation the Senator from Iowa has introduced. I do not know how it
is significantly different from the measure that was introduced by
Senator Coats and myself, known as the Decency Act, and approved on the
Senate floor by a vote of 86 to 14, if I remember it correctly.
I simply say, this is an ongoing battle. If we have not done anything
else, I hope all will recognize today at least Americans know that
there is a real, real problem, primarily with regard to our children,
our innocent children--at least as we like to think of them.
It seems to me all of the profit-making motives are now sizing the
Internet to make money on, and I applaud the efforts of the Senator
from Iowa and the legislation that he just indicated he intended to
introduce with regard to crime taking over a more important part of the
Internet. That happens wherever there is an exciting new development.
Once again, I emphasize this Senator has followed with keen interest
the development of the Internet. It so happens this Senator probably is
one of the few Members of this body who was on the original Internet.
The original Internet, the only thing like it, was the amateur radio
network that I became involved as a very young lad, 16 or 17 years old,
growing up in Lake Andes, SD, and I communicated, dit-dit da-dit, with
people all over the United States. Of course you had to have a license
to be an amateur radio operator; you had to pass certain tests. I guess
no one ever thought about that first Internet being used for the
purposes that this Internet is being used.
Nevertheless, as the senior member of the Armed Services Committee I
was very much involved in the Internet development. Some people wonder
where
[[Page S9023]]
did the Internet come from? It came from and was borne by taxpayers'
dollars, out of the national defense budget. It spread far beyond that
at this time, and I certainly say and emphasize once again, I am a
strong supporter of the Internet, the information superhighway. But for
a long, long time, beginning seriously a little over a year ago, I
began to develop legislation that would hopefully make the information
superhighway a safer highway for kids and families to travel. The
legislation that was passed by the Senate on a 86 to 14 vote within the
last week or so was a follow-on to a proposal that I addressed and
attached to the telecommunications bill out of the Commerce Committee
last year.
The concept of all of these has been to make a constructive
suggestion, recognizing constitutional rights. Like that portion
referred to by the Senator from Iowa, the measure crafted by myself and
Senator Coats and our staffs, with the help of an awful lot of people,
does provide protection, constitutional guarantees oftentimes supported
by the courts in a whole series of areas including the laws that we
have always had regarding obscenity on the telephone lines and also
laws similarly against transportation of pornographic and obscene
materials through the U.S. mail. Further, our law incorporates the
protections under the first amendment that have been argued out and
thoroughly discussed and held by the courts under the Dial-a-Porn
statutes, which is another form of pornography.
It is safe to say, the issue has been engaged. I think that is for
the good. Once again, I cannot speak for my cosponsor, Senator Coats,
or any cosponsor of the measure that passed the Senate, but this
Senator simply says I am willing to listen to any improvements or
changes that should be made in this bill. But I certainly am not going
to stand by and see it watered down to the place where it is totally
meaningless.
Therefore, I say I think we have accomplished a great deal by
clearly, for the first time, illuminating and bringing this to the
attention of parents of the United States of America. And parents still
are required, I suggest, to play a key role in how we develop this and
how it is administered. But the parents, I think, cannot do it alone.
Therefore, I hope we can continue to work together in a constructive
fashion and not listen to the voices that simply say, ``I want what I
want when I want it on the Internet and I don't care what ill effect
that might have on kids.''
We have to continue to work together. I hope there is a way to solve
this problem for the good of all.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.
The Senator from New Mexico is advised we have 1 more minute
remaining in morning business.
Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent I be allowed to
speak in morning business for up to 10 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
____________________