IP: White House Now Opposing CDA

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

> Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 08:32:38 -0400
> From: Dave Banisar <banisar () epic org>
> Subject: White House Now Opposing CDA
> To: Global Internet Liberty Campaign <gilc-plan () gilc org>
> Reply-To: gilc-plan () gilc org
> Errors-To: list-admin () gilc org
>
>
> New York Times
>
> Page 1, Col 3
>
> June 16, 1997
>
> White House Set to Ease Stance on Decency Act
>
> By JOHN M. BRODER
>
> WASHINGTON -- With a groundbreaking Supreme Court decision
> imminent on a new law restricting children's access to indecent
> material on the Internet, senior Clinton administration officials
> are preparing a policy that undercuts the administration's strong
> support of the law until now.
>
> Administration officials, anticipating that the court will strike
> the law down as an unconstitutional abridgment of free speech,
> have been quietly fashioning a new communications policy that
> leaves most regulation of the sprawling online world to the
> industry itself.
>
> No announcement will be made until the court rules on the
> constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. And
> officials noted that the current draft of a working group's
> report, dated June 4, is not necessarily the last word spelling
> out the new approach. The president makes policy, they said, and
> this matter will not be settled until he approves.
>
> The administration's apparent change of course has startled civil
> libertarians and online business services opposed to the law and
> revived an internal debate over how President Clinton should deal
> with the new law, passed hurriedly last year as part of the
> sweeping Telecommunications Act.
>
> Advisers persuaded Clinton to sign the bill as a gesture to
> families concerned with what their children can see on the
> Internet.
>
> The law makes it a crime punishable by two years in prison and a
> $250,000 fine to transmit indecent material over the Internet in
> a manner available to minors.
>
> In the first tests in court, two federal appeals panels ruled
> unanimously last year that the act violated the free speech
> protections of the First Amendment.
>
> The administration appealed one ruling, arguing forcefully in
> favor of the decency law before the justices in March.
>
> Pleading the government's case in Reno v. American Civil
> Liberties Union, Deputy Solicitor General Seth Waxman called the
> Internet "a revolutionary means for displaying sexually explicit,
> patently offensive material to children in the privacy of their
> own homes."
>
> He said then that the ease of access to online pornography
> "threatens to render irrelevant all prior efforts" to shield
> children from such material.
>
> On the other side, the groups that took the matter to court
> called the law a blatantly unconstitutional assault on free
> speech and argued that its purposes can be accomplished legally
> with new technology and through greater parental supervision.
>
> Despite its vigorous defense of the law just three months ago,
> the administration is now preparing a new policy on Internet
> content that states that obscenity and indecency rules now
> applied to television and radio broadcasts are not appropriate
> for the Internet.
>
> In the draft position paper prepared for an announcement by
> Clinton at an event on July 1 celebrating the growth of commerce
> on the Internet, White House officials call for "industry
> self-regulation," rather than a broad legislative solution to the
> problem of pornography and other content unsuitable for children
> browsing through cyberspace.
>
> The document, prepared by a group led by the senior White House
> adviser Ira Magaziner, states that devices are available today
> that allow parents to limit the material their children can see
> on their home computers.
>
> Magaziner, the architect of the administration's failed health
> care initiative in Clinton's first term, has been working on a
> new policy on global electronic commerce for the past 15 months.
>
> "To the extent, then, that effective filtering technology is
> available, content regulations traditionally imposed on radio and
> television need not be extended to the Internet," the most recent
> draft of the policy says. "In fact, unnecessary regulation or
> censorship could cripple the growth and diversity of the
> Internet."
>
> That language stunned opponents of the decency law, who said that
> it represented an almost complete turnabout from the government's
> position before the Supreme Court in March.
>
> "If that's their new policy, I think they have an obligation to
> announce it to the court before they rule," said Christopher
> Hansen of the ACLU, which led a large coalition of groups opposed
> to the decency act; online service providers like Microsoft,
> Compuserve and Prodigy; users of Internet research services like
> the American Library Association; and trade groups like the
> American Publishers Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
>
> "The government made a pretty strong argument in March, but if
> this is their new position I will be happy to applaud them,"
> Hansen said.
>
> Another lawyer involved in the effort to overturn the decency law
> said that Clinton wanted to sign the bill last summer for
> political reasons when he was running for re-election despite
> widespread qualms about its constitutionality.
>
> David Sobel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center said the
> administration argued on behalf of the act in March and now
> appeared to be walking away from it on the eve of a ruling.
>
> "To come in right after the Supreme Court decides the issue and
> say we didn't really mean what we said up to now -- I can't
> imagine anything that would be seen as more of a waffle than
> that," Sobel said. "It raises waffling to an art form."
>
> The Clinton administration is riven at a very high level over the
> issue. Some officials associated with Magaziner's group believe
> strongly that the Communications Decency Act was a poor piece of
> policy that the president should repudiate. They want Clinton to
> allow the marketplace to find solutions to the problem of
> offensive material on the Internet, stepping in only when there
> are clear violations of current law.
>
> "We all knew at the time it was passed that the Communications
> Decency Act was unconstitutional," said one senior government
> official who opposed the new law on Internet speech. "This was
> purely politics. How could you be against a bill limiting the
> display of pornography to children?"
>
> But other officials defended the administration, saying that the
> new position did not represent a policy reversal.
>
> "This is only prudent planning for what to do if the law is
> struck down," one senior White House official said. The draft
> policy is "consistent with what we've said. We're not changing
> our position."
>
> ----
>
> -------
> David Banisar (Banisar () epic org)                *    202-544-9240 (tel)
> Electronic Privacy Information Center           *    202-547-5482 (fax)
> 666 Pennsylvania Ave, SE, Suite 301             *    HTTP://www.epic.org
> Washington, DC 20003    * PGP Key
> http://www.epic.org/staff/banisar/key.html


--- end forwarded text








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'Indeed, the Government's asserted "failure" of the Internet rests on the
implicit premise that too much speech occurs in that medium, and that
speech there is too available to the participants.  This is exactly the
benefit of Internet communication, however.  The Government, therefore,
implicitly asks this court to limit both the amount of speech on the
Internet and the availability of that speech.  This argument is profoundly
repugnant to First Amendment principles.'
   --Judge Stewart Dalzell, ACLU v. Reno.


      Mike Godwin, EFF Staff Counsel, can be reached at mnemonic () eff org
                   or at his office, 510-548-3290.
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