NYT on SuperGrassley

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

   The New York Times, July 28, 1995, p. A26.


   [Editorial] Senator Grassley's Surf Police


   An academic study suggesting that the Internet is awash in
   bestiality, pedophilia and other kinky sex turns out to
   have been seriously flawed. Politicians like Senator
   Charles Grassley who waved the study around as an argument
   for intrusive regulation have stopped doing so. But Mr.
   Grassley and his allies have not backed off from their
   drive to draft unnecessary legislative restrictions on
   computer communications. Earlier this summer, Senator James
   Exon attached an amendment to the Senate version of a
   telecommunications bill that would impose Federal penalties
   on those who made available material deemed unsuitable for
   children.

   The unreliable study that did much to spur this bad
   legislating was conducted by Marty Rimm, then an
   undergraduate at Carnegie-Mellon University. It was
   reprinted in the Georgetown Law Journal and served as the
   basis for a credulous Time magazine article early this
   month. Mr. Rimm's academic supervisors have since made
   clear that the study had serious defects. The likelihood
   that children will be accidentally deluged with sexually
   charged computer graphics is much smaller than Mr. Rimm and
   his promoters suggested.

   Furthermore, to the extent that any problem exists, the
   best response is not through heavyhanded, constitutionally
   dubious legislation but parental education and
   discretionary user controls.

   Mr. Rimm's study looked at the computer habits of adults.
   He focused not on generally accessible areas of the
   Internet but on separate, commercial adult bulletin board
   services that require special procedures to find and use.
   This, critics note, is like visiting an adult bookstore and
   using the percentage of gamey titles to generalize about
   the contents of all bookstores. He also looked, less
   carefully, at specialized areas of the Internet that would
   be hard to stumble upon by accident.

   By Mr. Rimm's own calculations, less than 1 percent of all
   material on the Internet itself is raunchy, although this
   tiny percentage is unusually popular among the adults he
   surveyed. Another Carnegie-Mellon study, focusing on
   families with high school children, suggests that sexually
   explicit material is much less popular among these users.

   To be sure, sexually explicit material that would be
   offensive to some users can be found on the Internet. It is
   within the reach of computer-literate children using the
   networks without parental supervision.

   But the problem is being exaggerated to create a pretext
   for restricting the material available to adult users of
   computers. Some members of Congress, out of political greed
   or ignorance, want to censor what can be put on the Net and
   prosecute those who post legal but raunchy material. The
   approaches being advocated by Mr. Exon and Mr. Grassley are
   unwarranted and unconstitutional.

   They are also impractical. Material posted to the Internet
   in foreign countries, beyond the reach of American law, is
   as available to users as domestically posted material.
   Items can also be posted through anonymous mailers that
   make it impossible to identify the original source.
   Censorship would also have the unwelcome effect of
   restricting adults to reading and viewing material deemed
   suitable for children, and would stunt the future of the
   networks as a medium for artistic expression.

   Parents who want to restrict what their children are able
   to call up on their computers can avail themselves of
   software now available on the market that can block out
   unwanted material. Filtering out such material at the user
   end is a more practical, and far less objectionable,
   approach than limiting a nation of computer users to baby
   talk.

   Such devices are not foolproof, of course. The surest
   defense is for parents to try to teach their children the
   kind of healthy values that would make them uninterested
   in, or immune to, sexually exploitative material.

   [End]