[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 94 (Wednesday, July 15, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8161-S8164]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     INTERNET SCHOOL FILTERING ACT

  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, in today's USA Today there is an article 
which states there is a possibility that on a live site, a web site--
and I emphasize ``possibility''; that is being advertised--that two 18-
year-olds will have sex live on the Internet on August 4.
  It also noted that there is considerable doubt about the validity of 
this web site and, in fact, the entire site may be a hoax. For the sake 
of this Nation, I hope it is nothing but a hoax. If it is, it is 
neither clever nor humorous, and if it is not, then something has to be 
done, I think, to protect our children from witnessing this event.
  Again, I want to emphasize, I hope that this is a hoax and nothing 
more. But what it does is highlight the problem that exists concerning 
the proliferation of pornography on the Internet, some of that 
pornography being child pornography and some of it being the kind of 
obscenity that the U.S. Supreme Court has stated is beyond 
constitutional protections.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the article in this 
morning's USA Today be printed in the Record. It is entitled ``Net to 
break ground in virgin territory; But many suspect site is hoax.''
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                    [From USA Today, July 15, 1998]

 Net To Break Ground in Virgin Territory--But Many Suspect Site Is Hoax

                           (By Karen Thomas)

       Thought a woman giving birth on the Internet was 
     outrageous?
       Now a Web site is saying it will broadcast a couple, 
     purported to be 18-year-old virgins named Mike and Diane, 
     having sex for the first time Aug. 4.
       But many posting messages on the site were skeptical. 
     ``This page is a money-making hoax,'' wrote one visitor. 
     ``Mike and Diane are 36-year-old porn stars.''
       Visitors also noted that the couple, pictured in bathing 
     suits with faces obscured, looked too perfect and well-
     developed to be average 18-year-olds. Other details sounded 
     like a soap opera script: They haven't told their parents 
     their plans; one father is a minister; the teens are both 
     honor students

[[Page S8162]]

     and ``All-American'' kids; they're both active in school and 
     church. Neither was available to talk to reporters Tuesday.
       The idea for the stunt was Diane's, says Oscar Wells, a 
     California Web page designer who says he met Diane in an on-
     line chat room during the Internet birth last month. ``She 
     thought (the birth) was educational but said if they showed 
     someone making love, it would be considered obscene. She made 
     the offhand remark, `If I could, I'd lose my virginity on 
     line to make the point.' I said, `If you're serious, I can 
     facilitate that.' ''
       The ``Our First Time'' site is hosted by Wisconsin-based 
     The Enchanted Web. Owner Craig Brittan says most of his 
     customers are adult Web sites.
       Among those expressing outrage Tuesday was Sen. John 
     McCain, R-Ariz., who called the announcement ``disgraceful . 
     . . garbage.'' He is the sponsor of a bill that would require 
     libraries and schools receiving federal funds to install 
     filtering software on public computers. ``This will provide 
     the impetus to get legislation done.''

  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, we are not talking about censorship here. 
I want to emphasize, I do not support censorship in any form, and we 
are not talking about that. What we are talking about is legislation 
that would require schools and libraries to have some kind of filtering 
device on their computers. Children are not allowed into ``Adult Only'' 
stores that sell and make available adult material. Children are not 
allowed to purchase ``Adult Only'' magazines. And our society has 
decided, in its collective wisdom, that we should let children be 
children as long as possible and not expose them to certain activities 
and events.
  If individual parents want to make such information available to 
children, that is their choice. I do not begrudge them that. But 
children should not be allowed to enter school or a public library and 
gain access to material that their parents would never allow them to 
see and that most in society believe is inappropriate for those who are 
yet to be adults. It is for that reason I urge my colleagues to support 
and pass soon S. 1619, the Internet School Filtering Act. Senator 
Hollings, the ranking member of the committee, along with Senators 
Coats and Murray, has joined me in introducing this legislation. I 
thank them for their support.
  A Government program known as the e-rate provides Federal subsidies 
to schools and libraries so that they can receive discounted Internet 
access. This legislation would require these institutions benefiting 
from this program to restrict children's access to harmful Internet 
content through the use of a filtering device on their computers.
  These institutions would be free to choose from a myriad of filtering 
tools that are now available, and they alone would determine what 
materials are inappropriate for children based on local community 
standards.
  The Commerce Department recently found that more than 100 million 
people are now using the Internet and Internet usage is doubling every 
100 days. We can expect children to comprise a large portion of these 
new users as the e-rate and other Government and private programs help 
make Internet access possible for schools and libraries across the 
country.
  What troubles me is that schools and libraries are availing 
themselves of enormous Government subsidies to make the Internet more 
accessible to children, and at the same time they are attempting to 
undermine our effort to protect our children from harmful on-line 
material.
  From the outset, these groups have opposed the legislation and have 
argued in favor of an ``acceptable use policy.''
  I don't agree that would be an adequate means of protecting children 
from the thousands of pornographic sites available on the World Wide 
Web. I believe implementing a use policy alone would be completely 
ineffective.
  Mr. President, we must act now to require the use of filters. We must 
take immediate steps to prevent the Internet from doing more harm than 
good by bringing such offensive materials into our Nation's schools and 
libraries.
  Again, I submit for the Record material off a web site called ``Our 
First Time,'' which is entitled, ``Tuesday, August 4, 1998, World and 
Internet History Will Be Made,'' and it begins, ``Come and meet Diane 
and Mike, two 18-year-old honor students.''
  I ask unanimous consent that this web site material be printed in the 
Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                             Our First time


 On Tuesday, August 4, 1998 at 6 p.m. Pacific Time, World and Internet 
                         History WIll Be Made!

       Come and meet Diane and Mike, two 18 year old ``Honor'' 
     students who have recently graduated from high school, and 
     are looking forward to starting college in the fall. They are 
     as close to being ``typical All-American'' kids as you can 
     get. Active in school and church. Well liked by family, 
     friends, and their community--but sexually, they are both 
     virgins. Their lives are going to change in a unique and 
     dramatic way. They are about to leave the safety of youth, 
     accept the challenges of adulthood, and take that frigthening 
     . . . but wonderful, step into adult sexuality. There's one 
     big difference . . . they are going to let the world come 
     along and witness their lives over a 18 day period as this 
     adventure unfolds, when they lose their virginity together. . 
     . .


                        why are they doing this?

       Recently, Diane & Mike witnessed the live birth of a child 
     on the Internet. They then decided to make this point--
       ``The live birth of a child on the Internet was a beautiful 
     event. We want to show that the act of making love, which is 
     the first step that brought that live birth about, is just as 
     beautiful--and nothing to be ashamed of.''
       The ``Our First Time'' website will open on July 18, 1998--
     and will follow the daily adventures of Diane & Mike for 18 
     days, as they meet the challenges of making their ``statement 
     of love'' on August 4.

  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I hope this is a hoax. I hope it is not 
true. If it is true, then I can't tell you how disturbed all of us 
should be and will be, but it is also indicative that if even a hoax 
like this, if it is a hoax, should be proposed, it shows there is a 
significant problem in America today.
  Mr. President, I hope we will do something about it. I thank the 
Chair.
  Mrs. MURRAY addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Santorum). The Senator from Washington.
  Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I come to the floor this morning to join 
my colleague from Arizona, Senator McCain, in urging the Senate to 
adopt S. 1619, the child-safe Internet bill.
  Since I have been here for the last 6 years, I have worked long and 
hard to get computers and technology into our schools. I have sponsored 
legislation to allow surplus Government computers to be put into 
schools. I have worked hard to have the e-rate established so that many 
of our schools can be connected to the Internet. I have been out in 
schools, and I know personally what a great educational tool the 
technology and Internet system is that we have available today.
  I want our students and I want our teachers to have access to this 
information. But Senator McCain is absolutely correct. There is a small 
amount of information on the Internet that should not be there to which 
our young children have unfettered access.
  S. 1619, the child-safe Internet bill, simply requires any school or 
library that uses the e-rate, uses taxpayer money to put technology in, 
be required to have a filtering device so that inappropriate material 
is not seen by young children.
  The filtering device is a local control device. The school district--
the schools--will determine which filtering device and how to use it at 
their own school. The same with the libraries.
  This is an issue on which I have worked long and hard. I care deeply 
about the fact that many of our young children today and, frankly, many 
of our parents want to use the Internet but they don't know how to 
without getting into information or having their children have access 
to information that is simply inappropriate.
  I talked with a seventh grade teacher several weeks ago who turned 
off the Internet in her classroom because she said it is simply 
impossible to watch 30 young students at their computers all of the 
time. She did not want a situation where a child got into a 
pornographic or inappropriate site, went home, complained to their 
parent, have a parent come screaming back to her classroom, and she 
would be responsible for that. She turned off the Internet.
  This is going to cause concern among all of our educational 
facilities across our country if teachers don't have the kind of 
information available without a filtering device.
  The bill is simple. It is common sense. It is the right way to go, 
and I

[[Page S8163]]

urge all of our colleagues to push to have this bill come to the floor 
and to pass it. It is the right way to go.
  I did oppose the CDA Act from several years ago. I knew it was 
unconstitutional. I knew it would be thrown out. We cannot afford to go 
through that kind of debate again. This is a problem that needs to be 
answered today, and the child-safe Internet bill does it in a 
commonsense, safe way. Most parents would not send a child to a 
playground in their local community unsupervised. We cannot allow our 
young children to be in the Internet unsupervised. The child-safe 
Internet bill is the right way to go. It is a local control way to make 
our technology work for all students, and I urge all of my colleagues 
to be supportive of this approach. I urge our leadership to bring it to 
the floor as soon as possible.

  Thank you, and I yield the floor.
  Mr. LIEBERMAN addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
  Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Chair.
  Mr. President, I am proud to stand and join my colleagues from 
Arizona and Washington in voicing concerns about the spread of 
pornography on the Internet and the general direction in which the 
information superhighway is moving.
  Like my colleagues, I am very troubled by the story that USA Today 
carried this morning about a particular web site--
www.ourfirsttime.com_that is promising to broadcast a video feed of 
two 18-year-old high school graduates having sexual intercourse for the 
first time as it happens next month.
  As Senator McCain indicated, it may be that this site is a hoax, but 
it makes a statement about the Internet and the values in cyberspace 
which is all too real, because it shows that there are practically no 
stop signs on the information superhighway.
  The important point here is that two teenagers could quite easily 
decide to do this and invite every wired American child effectively to 
a live sex show, regardless of their age, which tells us that there are 
no recognizable boundaries in cyberspace, no common standards of 
decency or taste, or any shared sense of accountability. Anyone can do 
just about anything, and they often do.
  This is no revelation to experienced ``netizens'' who are well aware 
of the wide array of sites concerning bomb-making, bestiality, and many 
other expressions of antisocial behavior and deviancy. They know that 
the net, while offering incredible riches of information, education, 
and communication, has also managed to catch just about every form of 
depravity and antisocial behavior and put it on display for all the 
world and our children to see.
  Yet, for many nonwired Americans, the extremes of online perversity 
may be news, and these citizens, particularly the parents, have every 
right to be fearful about what is lurking around the net's next corner.
  What they will find, I am afraid, is not just more and more 
pornography for kids to latch on to, but less and less moral certainty, 
fewer bright lines of right and wrong, the kind that are critical to 
living in a free, decent, civil society. One of those bright lines we 
never used to question was our responsibility as adults to protect our 
children from harm, both physical and moral, which meant shielding them 
from violence and carefully setting sexual boundaries for them as they 
grow.
  In recent years, our commitment to this common value seems to have 
weakened, giving rise to a popular culture that is replete with gunplay 
and foreplay, with violence and public displays and comments on all 
forms of sexual behavior, and it teaches children the worst kind of 
lessons about what is acceptable. Today, unfortunately, this 
extraordinary development in our lives, the Internet, which has so 
enriched our lives in so many ways, has also become the highest tech 
distillation of this anything-goes mentality.
  Senator McCain and Senator Murray have been forceful advocates for 
drawing basic lines of online decency and setting basic standards of 
online behavior. I applaud their leadership on this front. In 
particular, I appreciate their efforts to promote responsible use of 
the Internet at schools and libraries. I hope we have a chance to 
consider their legislation on the floor soon.
  Mr. President, in the best of all worlds, which is to say what we 
hope this online world might be, the responsibility for drawing lines 
and setting standards really should fall to the leaders of the Internet 
community.
  I have said over and over again in my comments about television and 
video games and records, for instance, that I am extremely reluctant to 
resort to governmental restrictions on speech or any forms of 
expression and much prefer self-regulation. Also, given the 
sophistication of the net's underlying technology, I doubt that a 
legally mandated solution to the pornography problem will be as 
effective as we would want it to be in reaching our common goal of 
protecting children.
  It was for these reasons that I voted against the Communications 
Decency Act, and it was for those reasons that I recently began working 
with Representative Rick White of Washington State to push the Internet 
community to get moving on this issue. Nine days ago, we sent a letter 
to the major participants in last December's Online Summit expressing 
our concern about the industry's lack of action and calling on them to 
collaborate on a comprehensive plan to help parents keep their kids 
safe online. We made it clear that we did not want to pursue 
legislation but that we, along with a host of other Members of Congress 
from both parties, would have no choice but to vote for Government 
standards if the industry did not respond with an effective solution.
  So, in sum, Mr. President, we are still waiting for a response to our 
letter. My hope is that the news about the ``our first time,'' and the 
forcefulness of the statements we are making today, will help to focus 
the Internet community's attention on the seriousness of this problem 
and prod them to produce some tangible results. In the meantime, I hope 
our comments will raise the awareness of America's parents about the 
threat that the Internet can pose to children and encourage them to pay 
closer attention to their children's online activities.
  I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.
  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I believe there is no further business 
before the Senate. I move we----
  Mr. COATS addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Indiana.
  Mr. COATS. Mr. President, I just want to join my colleagues here in 
urging our leaders and urging the Senate to move forward on legislation 
that has been debated and discussed and passed by the Senate that needs 
to be revisited. The Supreme Court struck down language I offered more 
than a year ago that was passed by this body by a 84-16 margin, passed 
by the House of Representatives, and signed by the President of the 
United States.
  That legislation attempts to address the commercial purveyors of 
pornography over the Internet--as invasive a practice as anything that 
we have seen. It makes the corner pornography shop pale in comparison 
in terms of access to some of the rawest, most explicit material that 
is available today, and it makes it available to children through the 
click of a mouse--in their room, in their home room, in their library, 
wherever a computer terminal is placed. It is easy access.
  In fact, it is an invasive practice that even the most innocent of 
typed-in requests can bring a flood of material that should never be 
accessible to children. It is even questionable whether it should be 
accessible to adults. The first amendment puts some pretty severe 
restrictions on us in terms of what we can do.
  We carefully drafted and designed our Internet pornography bill to 
address first amendment concerns. For some reason, the Court chose to 
distinguish the Internet from other forms of communication, and the 
very standard which the Court approved for telephone dial-a-porn 
messages was rejected for computer messages, saying that the Internet 
is a completely different mode of communication, not as invasive as the 
telephone.
  I think the Court is behind the times in terms of understanding how 
the computer works. I understand that. I am of the generation that is 
not quite sure even how to turn the thing on. For the younger 
generation, it is as easy and accessible and as comfortable for them to 
operate as for those of us who learned to drive a car when we were

[[Page S8164]]

young or the technology that we adapted to in our generation.
  Nevertheless, the Court has ruled. We took that ruling. We modified 
the language to comply with the Court's restrictions. I have been 
attempting to bring this bill to the floor for several months. We have 
been blocked in doing so, not because it does not enjoy a majority of 
the vote but because the computer industry and the Internet industry do 
not want any restraint whatsoever.
  We are trying to protect the innocence of children. We are trying to 
give parents a tool by which they can protect their children. We are 
trying to put penalties in place which will allow us to enforce 
restrictions against commercial purveyors of pornography that is 
harmful to minors. We have revised the standard to comply with the 
Supreme Court dictates, and we trust that this new legislation will 
pass Court muster. But in order to do so, it has to pass this body 
first. I think we are at the point of resolving the holds and the 
differences of opinion on how to proceed with this legislation.
  Senator McCain has legislation which provides access to software 
packages that are a help, but an imperfect help, in terms of dealing 
with the problem. I have legislation which I guess would be described 
as a stick to go along with the McCain carrot, the hammer to lay down 
the enforcement and put the penalties in place, put the restrictions in 
place. I think the two are very necessary for us to try to get a handle 
on this problem. It will not fully solve the problem.
  The first line of defense has to be the family. It has to be the 
parents, has to be their oversight of what their children have access 
to--not only in the home but in the school, in the library. It is 
disappointing that schools and libraries--in particular, library 
associations--have opposed what we are trying to do. We think we have a 
consensus now on how to move forward. I am pleased that we are closing 
in on that and urge our colleagues to support the efforts that will 
take place shortly.
  Thank you, Mr. President.

                          ____________________