National Writers Union artical on CMU and censoring [ I find this

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

(c) 1994 National Writers Union.  Posted with permission from the November
1994 issue of the PIC Newsletter, the journal of the Political Issues
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             Carnegie Mellon Censors Cyberspace


 In a chilling assault on free expression and intellectual
freedom, Carnegie-Mellon University on November 8 barred
access to several internet news groups.  News groups are
components of a system called usenet and each news group is
an open forum devoted to some area of common interest.
There are thousands of these groups, and each has a hierar-
chical name indicating discussion topic, subtopic, etc.  For
example, the journalism newsgroup is called alt.journalism.
One of the gay/lesbian groups is called soc.motss.  (Members
of the same sex)  Anyone who has access to a newsgroup may
not only read all postings, but respond to messages and con-
tribute messages on new topics.  A newsgroup, in short, is
an international free market of ideas where everyone has
equal access and no one may censor anyone else.


When people are permitted free speech, it's not surprising
that a favorite topic is sex.  First of all, the sex drive
is universal and so sex is something that we're all
interested in.  Secondly, our society is so sexphobic that
few public forums exist in which it is permissible to dis-
cuss sexuality.  But whenever such a forum comes into being,
those who are uncomfortable with sex do their damnedest to
shut it down.  Sexphobic censorship takes many forms, but
the most active current censors are the theocratic right and
feminists who subscribe to the doctrines of Andrea Dworkin
and Catharine MacKinnon.  These groups sometimes work inde-
pendently and sometimes cooperatively.  (Many religious
people and many feminists, of course, vigorously defend
freedom of expression.)  Other censors act because they
don't want "trouble" Carnegie Mellon, from the fundamental-
ists or from the Dworkinites, because both groups love
controversy.  I suspect that this is what is happening at
Carnegie Mellon.


On November 3, William Arms (Vice President for Computing
Services), issued a memo stating that the following news-
groups would be removed: alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.*,
alt.binaries.pictures.tasteless, alt.sex.*, and
rec.arts.erotica.  (The * means both the group itself and
all of its associated subgroups.)


The Carnegie Mellon administration's decision to ban these
news groups from university computer systems was based on a
study of sexually explicit materials available on the
internet.  However, according to the study's principal
investigator, Martin Rimm, the administration had not even
_read_ the study at the time the decision was made.  What
Mr. Rimm _had_ done was to inform a member of the adminis-
tration that Rimm had found usenet images that had been
declared obscene or were similar to images under indictment
in very conservative parts of the country, such as Utah and
Tennessee.  According to Marvin Sirbu, the advisor on the
project, these included images found obscene by a Memphis
jury in July in the case of the Amateur Action bulletin
board service, located in Milpitas, California.


The Amateur Action (AA) case has been discussed in previ-
ous editions of this newsletter.  AA is an adults-only board
that charges a membership fee.  It's run by a married
couple, Robert and Carleen Thomas.  AA was busted by a fed-
eral undercover agent who joined in Tennessee under an
assumed name and who did things such as attempt to entrap
the Thomases by mailing them unsolicited child pornography.
What the government hopes to accomplish in this case is to
subject all of international cyberspace to the "community
standards" of the most conservative and sexphobic parts of
the US.  The AA conviction was a shameful miscarriage of
justice, but not a surprising one.  Fortunately, it is under
appeal and we can hope that justice will still prevail.  I
find it incredible that Carnegie Mellon would use this par-
ticular case to justify limiting what members of the
Carnegie Mellon community may read.


Arms' memo stated that the new policy would go into effect
on November 8.  Opposition was swift and vocal, both on and
off campus.  The news was quickly spread through cyberspace,
largely thanks to the efforts of free-speech activist Carl
Kadie, a good friend of the National Writers Union.  Letters
of protest were sent to Carnegie Mellon President, Robert
Mehrabian, by myself on behalf of the NWU, by the ACLU, by
Feminists for Free Expression (FFE), and others.  (The FFE
letter was written by NWU activist Rachel Hickerson, who is
now the FFE Executive Director.)  On campus, the decision
was criticized by student-body president Declan McCullagh,
who wrote Mehrabian and was given an appointment to discuss
the matter.  This meeting took place on November 7.  A
strongly worded editorial appeared in the campus newspaper,
_The Tartan_, that same day and concluded with the words:
"The University's censorship is wrong and should not be
tolerated.  Every group and every person on this campus who
believes in the principles of academic freedom should speak
out against the University.  Those who don't may regret it
later when the University decides that something they are
doing or saying is obscene."


At a special meeting of the student senate that evening,
VP William Arms defended the censorship policy by falsely
claiming that Pennsylvania state law prohibits providing
people under 18 with access to erotic materials.  Pennsylva-
nia law limits access to "obscene" materials, and for minors
obscenity is more broadly defined than for adults.  But most
sexually explicit material is not considered legally
"harmful" to minors.  The ACLU letter demolished Arms' argu-
ment that the censorship was made necessary by Pennsylvania
law.  The administration hadn't even bothered to seek a
legal opinion before announcing the new policy.  According
to Erwin Steinberg, university vice provost for education,
"...it didn't take a lawyer to read those pornography and
obscenity laws to know we were really vulnerable."  Sorry
Mr. Steinberg, but you're dead wrong.  Had Carnegie Mellon
obtained sound legal advice it could've saved itself a lot
of embarrassment.


Also, according to the minutes, Arms made the incredible
assertion that "while the First Amendment to the Constitu-
tion guarantees free speech, the state laws of Pennsylvania
take precedence."  Dr. Arms is a native of Great Britain who
emigrated here as an adult.  Thus his error may be
understandable.  But if state law superseded the US Con-
stitution, then the US Constitution would be utterly without
force or meaning.


The student senate passed a resolution condemning the
administration's actions and calling for a committee of stu-
dents, faculty, and staff to review the matter.  A Freedom
in Cyberspace rally was held on November 9, and the speakers
included Mike Godwin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
and Carnegie Mellon Alumnus Peter Berger, a lawyer for Tel-
erama Internet.  As of this writing, Carnegie Mellon is in
the process of forming the University President's Online
Policy Standing Committee, which will be chaired by Vice-
Provost Steinberg and which will include members of the Fac-
ulty Senate, the chair of the Staff Council, student-body
president McCullagh, the head of the Graduates Students
Organization and others.  Carnegie Mellon is also permitting
continued access to groups that are primarily textual and is
banning erotic groups that contain graphics.  This, of
course, is still censorship.  The First Amendment protects
images as well as words.  On November 10, the Carnegie Mel-
lon Faculty Senate passed a resolution calling for a rein-
statement of the prior no-censorship policy while the Stand-
ing Committee is doing its work.


We must follow the situation at Carnegie Mellon very
closely and hope that this committee decides that only a
strict no-censorship policy is acceptable.  If they do not
and the ban on newsgroups remains in force, then we must be
prepared to support forcefully a legal challenge to their
policy.  Banning pictorial but not textual groups is _not_
an acceptable compromise.  (If you were to object to my
breaking both your legs, would you consider it an acceptable
compromise if I agreed to breaking only one?)  As Peter
Berger said at the rally: "There are some simple truths in
this world.  You can't be just a little bit dead.  You can't
be just a little bit pregnant.  And you can't just throw
away a little bit of your academic integrity and expect the
world to respect you for it."


Much is at stake here.  Cyberspace offers the promise of
the first universally accessible free market of ideas in
world history.  Such a free intellectual marketplace could
enable democracy truly to flourish, both here in America and
throughout the world.  As Mike Godwin said in his rally
speech, : "...this new medium is ultimately going to become
the most important medium for citizens of the United States,
and of the world.  It is a medium far different from the
telephone, which is only a one-to-one medium, ill-suited for
reaching large numbers of people.  It is a medium far dif-
ferent from the newspaper or TV station, which are one-to-
many media, ill-suited for feedback from the audience.  For
the first time in history, we have a many-to-many medium, in
which you don't have to be rich to have access, and in which
you don't have to win the approval of an editor or publisher
to speak your mind.  Usenet and the Internet, as part of
this new medium, hold the promise of guaranteeing, for the
first time in history, that the First Amendment's protection
of freedom of the press means as much to each individual as
it does to Time Warner, or to Gannett, or to the _New York
Times_."


On the other hand, those who currently possess an unfair
share of wealth and who wield the accompanying unfair share
of political power--such as Time-Warner, Gannett, and the
_New York Times_--are threatened by any free market of
ideas.  Media owners wish to bring cyberspace under tight
state-corporate control so that they may further profit.  To
do so, they must convince the public that free speech in
cyberspace is dangerous.  Thus the major media and law-
enforcement officials are cooperating in a campaign to demo-
nize cyberspace in order to justify its eventual corporate
colonization.  Now, I fear, our universities will join them
in this anti-democratic campaign.


If Carnegie Mellon pursues its ill-considered plan of
cyber-censorship, other colleges and universities will fol-
low suit, using the Carnegie Mellon precedent as justifica-
tion.  This will help assure that the evolving National
Information Infrastructure will be much less free than the
internet.  Rather than a free marketplace of ideas, it will
resemble the commercial broadcast media, where the many are
encouraged to buy products they don't need and are fed care-
fully censored "information" by the privileged few.
Carnegie Mellon may win its place in history as the institu-
tion that midwifed this transition by striking the critical
blow that killed free speech in cyberspace.


According to our constitution, "the National Writers Union
is committed to freedom of expression in all media,
including print, film, and electronic media of any sort."
We take this commitment very seriously.  In January of this
year, our National Executive Board unanimously adopted a
resolution that included the following sentence: "We urge
our members to join us in opposing _all_ anti-pornography
and other pro-censorship legislation at the Federal, state,
and local levels."  What is happening at Carnegie Mellon, as
well as the prosecution of the Pink Pyramid Bookstore in
Cincinnati [see related article] illustrates that laws
against obscenity and pornography are very dangerous.  These
laws do no good whatsoever and they endow both the state and
private institutions with powers incompatible with a free
and democratic society.


                                --Bob Chatelle, Boston Local