Unmuzzling the Internet

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

   The New York Times, January 2, 1996, p. A15.


   Unmuzzling the Internet [OpEd]

      How to evade the censors and make a statement, too.

   By Jaron Lanier (Visiting scholar at the Columbia
   University department of computer science.)


   If President Clinton signs the telecommunications bill
   drastically restricting private as well as public speech on
   the Internet, he can expect a rollicking cat-and-mouse
   game.

   It can be comical when politicians try to control something
   they do not understand. Such is the case with the bill's
   censorship provision, which not only outlaws the
   transmission of material over the Internet that would be
   allowed in most newspapers, but also makes owners of
   computers on a network liable for the speech of others. (As
   Compuserve demonstrated last week when, to satisfy a German
   court, it blocked American subscribers' access to sexually
   explicit material, regulation of the Internet can threaten
   both commercial and constitutional freedoms.)

   The other day, I came up with a way to easily evade the
   proposed American restrictions. My simple idea would be to
   create a computer program, dubbed "Unmuzzle," which would
   deposit incomprehensible fragments of any forbidden
   material in different foreign computers (though maybe not
   Germany's). The contraband communication would only be
   reassembled into a coherent whole when downloaded in the
   home of the user back in the United States, where it would
   become protected speech, as in any other medium.

   I had no intention of actually building "Unmuzzle," but I
   mentioned the notion in E-mail to a friend, and within days
   I was hearing from people I didn't know who were busy
   creating the program with the idea of distributing it
   freely. Fine with me. Such a program would make an mportant
   statement.

   Speaking as someone who has been involved with computers
   for most of my life (I coined the phrase "virtual reality"
   in the early 1980's and created much of the technology for
   it), I find that many Internet users have been reacting to
   attacks on freedom in cyberspace by slumping into a
   separatist, angry mood. They feel that they are being
   denied the rights that others enjoy.

   On the Internet, separatism is expressed by encryption: an
   encrypted message can be read only by the party it is
   intended for. Therefore, in the spirit of the First
   Amendment, I suggest Unmuzzle as an alternative method: it
   may break up images or text into a hundred pieces, but they
   are still accessible to the public.

   The idea of censoring the Internet should be unthinkable,
   especially in the United States. Aside from the question of
   free speech, there's the economic imperative as well. The
   Internet is not a plaything: it is the infrastructure of
   our information technology industry.

   The young have the most to lose from the new restrictions,
   in spite of the fact that such limits are purportedly meant
   to protect them. Schools and libraries will find it
   extremely difficult to offer vital Internet services in the
   face of a mine field of criminal liabilities.

   It is members of Congress and the President who need to
   show some maturity, by rejecting free-speech restrictions
   in the telecommunications bill.

   [End]