Internet free speech body the Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org) has relaunched the blue ribbon campaign it used to mobilize opposition to the Communications Decency Act in 1995. Participating web sites will display a blue ribbon that links to up-to-date material on the fight for free speech on the net. Leading content providers Feed, Salon, SonicNet and Nerve magazine have already signed up. EFF president Barry Steinhardt explains: It’s partly a wake up call to the internet community. A lot of people think that when we won the CDA case last year we won, period. That’s far from the truth. New threats to internet free speech include a bill presented by Republican Senator Dan Coats and explicitly designed to appease the Supreme Court’s objections to the CDA. Coats claims he is trying to protect innocent children from sexual predators on the internet, but the EFF maintains that the measures described in his bill amount to the imposition of censorship. The Coats Bill is a Trojan Horse, says Steinhardt. It looks benign on the outside but in fact it is an attempt to re-enact the CDA. Nor is Coats alone. Fellow Republican John McCain has put forward a bill which would mandate the use of internet filters in schools. Steinhardt says filters are crude devices, originally intended to empower individuals and now being used as tools of mass censorship. He says that of all the products now available, NetNanny alone discloses the contents of its blacklist. The rest prevent access to relatively innocuous sites, like the safe sex page provided by the Fellowship of University Women, without notifying the user that this is being done. Buyers of these filters might find the software is likely to block out a significant portion of the internet that these buyers would not necessarily find objectionable, he says. The EFF says it supports parents’ right to filter their children’s access to the internet, as long as those parents are adequately informed about the prejudices built into internet filters, and as long as people who are no longer children are not restricted in the material they can access. Steinhardt explains: What we object to is the upstream use of these devices by service providers and government agencies. While that remains a real threat, expect a thousand blue ribbons to bloom.
