Telecom/1996-04-telecom-walnutcreek.iso/legal-fcc/internet.protest.followup

Internet Message Format | 1995-12-13 | 22KB

From [e-mail]  Thu Dec 14 14:54:06 1995
Return-Path: <[e-mail]>
Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.7.1/NSCS-1.0S)
    id OAA15760; Thu, 14 Dec 1995 14:54:06 -0500 (EST)
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 1995 14:54:06 -0500 (EST)
From: [e-mail] (Patrick A. Townson)
Message-Id: <[e-mail]>
To: ptownson
Subject: Reactions and Rebuttal to Internet Day of Protest


As expected, the announced "Day of Protest" on the Internet brought a
very large number of phone calls, faxes and email messages into the
offices of our representatives in Congress. The protest actually
continues, as netters are encouraged to continue contacting the
representatives to voice their opinion all the rest of this week.

In this special mailing to the TELECOM Digest subscribers, there are
three items:

    A report on the status of the Day of Protest as of Wednesday;

    A challenge presented to lawmakers by an electronic publisher
    which was passed along to us by Gordon Jacobson;

    A rebuttal by Eric Florack saying in essence, 'the protestors
    do not speak for a lot of us here'.

 Date: Thu, 14 Dec 1995 03:06:36 -0500
 From: Monty Solomon <[e-mail]>
 Subject: ALERT: The Net rocks the capitol;still time to call

 Begin forwarded message:

 Date: Wed, 13 Dec 1995 23:33:11 -0500 (EST)
 From: "Shabbir J. Safdar" <[e-mail]>
 Subject:  ALERT: The Net rocks the capitol;still time to call

     CAMPAIGN TO STOP THE NET CENSORSHIP LEGISLATION IN CONGRESS

     THE NET ROCKS AMERICA'S CAPITOL - NEARLY 20,000 PARTICIPANTS
            THURSDAY DECEMBER 14, 1995

        SENATE CONFEREES COULD STILL VOTE THIS WEEK
    RALLIES HAPPENING IN AUSTIN, NEW YORK, SF, & SEATTLE

      PLEASE WIDELY REDISTRIBUTE THIS DOCUMENT WITH THIS BANNER INTACT
                REDISTRIBUTE ONLY UNTIL December 25, 1995

RECAP: INTERNET DAY OF PROTEST:  TUESDAY DECEMBER 12, 1995

The net came into its own as a political force on Tuesday.  The
press release has more details.  If you haven't taken a moment to
call, fax, or email, do so now.  We're still keeping track and only
need a few more to break 20,000.

VTW had someone onhand in DC monitoring the response at the Congressional
offices.  The feedback was amazing; Congress got the message.  We need to
sustain that by continuing to tell them we're not happy with the options
being offered to us at this time.

Directions for calling Congress can still be found at http://www.vtw.org/
and the many other sites listed at the end of this message.  Take a moment
to call!  Don't forget to mail us a note at [e-mail] to let us
know you took part in the Day Of Protest (and Day 2, and Day 3, and Day 4).


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                             December 13, 1995

                                            Contact:  Steven Cherry
                                                     [phone]
                                                        [e-mail]
                                                     Shabbir Safdar
                                                     [phone]
                                                    [e-mail]

New York, NY

Are 20,000 phone calls a lot? 30,000? 50,000? They are if you're one
of a handful of Congressional staffers trying to field them. Tuesday,
December 12th was the Internet's Day of Protest. A variety of
net-activists and telecommunications-related services exhorted the
on-line community to call a selected group of Senators and
Representatives to declare their opposition to the threat of Internet
censorship. And call they did.

As the Senate members of the Telecommunications Reform conference
committee contemplated portions of legislation that would censor
"indecent" material on-line, their staffers were being overwhelmed with
phone calls. Senator Inouye's office said they were "getting lots and lots
of calls and faxes." Senator Lott's said they were "flooded with calls."

At Senator Stevens' office there were so many calls they couldn't keep
a complete tally.

At Senator Exon's office, the fax machine was "backed up."  And at one
point, activists couldn't even get through to Senator Gorton's office to
ask. Exon is the Senator whose Communications Decency Act started the
nearly year-long struggle between those who would create special
regulations to restrict speech on-line (even, in certain instances,
private email between two individuals) to a greater extent than even
traditional broadcast media; regulations that, according to the ACLU and
many other civil liberties groups, will certainly be proven to be
unconstitutional if passed into law.

"We've never seen anything like it," said Stanton McCandish of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The EFF is one member of the on-line
coalition that has been fighting an array of censorship legislation since
this spring, when Senator Exon introduced his Communications Decency Act.

"We may have almost overwhelmed our provider," said Shabbir Safdar, head
of Voter's Telecommunications Watch (VTW). VTW is the organization that
organized the on-line coalition. Their on-line connectivity is provided by
Panix.com, a New York-area Internet service provider. "Panix has been
doing some maintenance work today, so it's hard to tell," Safdar
continued. "But we think it's actually made a dent in their connection
to the rest of the Net."

How many calls were actually made? No one can tell. For Leslie Miller, a
reporter for {USA Today}, it took much of the afternoon to get some counts
from Congressional staffers, and she couldn't get any report from the
Senate's Sergeant-At-Arms, the office nominally responsible for the
Senate's telephone system. VTW may be the only organization that can
really make an educated guess.

"In our Alerts we ask that people drop us an email note after they call,"
explained VTW board member Steven Cherry. "The message count peaked in the
late afternoon at over 70 per minute. Many of those were from people who
called several offices. By 7:30 P.M. (EST) we had gotten 14,000 messages.
By Wednesday morning the count was over 18,000. And of course there are
the people who called but didn't send us email. So all told, our very
rough guess is there were well over 50,000 phone calls and faxes made on
the one day."

"The Net is coming of age, politically," said Jerry Berman, Director of
the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), another member of the
on-line coalition. Safdar, of VTW, concurred, saying, "I think Washington
got the message today that there's a new grass-roots interest group
around, and we're going to be a big part of the 1996 elections." (VTW's
initial election activities can be found at http://www.vtw.org/pledge.)

In addition to the Day of Protest, rallies are scheduled on Thursday,
December 14th, in San Francisco and Seattle, and a protest will be held
that day at 2:00 in New York City.

The New York rally will be at the Cyber-Cafe, 273A Lafayette St from 2-3pm
on Thursday, Dec 14th.  Contact Steven Cherry or Shabbir J. Safdar for
details.

The Austin rally is planned for Tue. Dec 19th.  No more information is
available at this time.

Information about the San Francisco rally can be obtained from
http://www.hotwired.com/staff/digaman/.

Information about the Seattle rally can be obtained from
http://www.wnia.org/WNIA/hap/rally.html.

Voters Telecommunications Watch is a volunteer organization, concentrating
on legislation as it relates to telecommunications and civil liberties.

VTW publishes a weekly BillWatch that tracks relevant legislation as it
progresses through Congress. It publishes periodic Alerts to inform the
about immediate action it can take to protect its on-line civil liberties
and privacy.

More information about VTW can be found on-line at

  gopher -p 1/vtw gopher.panix.com
  www: http://www.vtw.org

or by writing to [e-mail]. The press can call [phone] or
contact:

   Shabbir Safdar         Steven Cherry
   [e-mail]        [e-mail]

WHERE CAN I LEARN MORE?

At this moment, there are several organizations with WWW sites that now
have, or will have, information about the net censorship legislation and
the National Day Of Protest:

American Civil Liberties Union (ftp://ftp.aclu.org/aclu/)
Center for Democracy and Technology (http://www.cdt.org/)
Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org/)
Electronic Privacy Information Center (http://www.epic.org/)
Wired Magazine (http://www.hotwired.com/special/indecent/)
Voters Telecommunications Watch (http://www.vtw.org/ or finger [e-mail])

        End Alert

           -----------------------------------

Date: Thu, 14 Dec 1995 09:55:39 -0500
From: [e-mail] (Gordon Jacobson)
Subject: Triple-Barreled Challenge To Online Censors


Onliners pose triple-barreled challenge to proposed muzzle bill
Urge Congressional reversal, Presidential veto and Internet mutiny

LOS ANGELES, Calif., December 8 -- The editor of the nation's first
all-digital daily newspaper threatened on Thursday to deliberately
defy the language of a U.S. House cyberporn proposal if it becomes
law, calling the measure a clear violation of the First Amendment.

And the president of the company which links that digital daily to the
Internet said the measure, if enacted by Congress and signed by
President Clinton, would threaten the future of the Internet as the
emerging global information marketplace.

"The survival of free speech on the Internet is more important than
even the survival of this newspaper, and we will risk its very
existence to fight for a principle in which we fully believe," said
Joe Shea, Editor-in-Chief of The American Reporter, a 10-month-old
daily which is published only on the Internet and its World Wide Web.

The paper will publish an "indecent" article to be written by Texas
criminal court judge Stephen Russell in order to violate the proposed law,
and then go into court to defend its right to do so under the First
Amendment, Shea said.

Newshare Corp., which has hosted The American Reporter at its web site
since shortly after the daily's inception on April 10, said as the
cyberpaper's common carrier, it would not block Shea's efforts but would
not endorse them either.

"We are akin to the voice carriers," said Bill Densmore, president of
Newshare, the Internet's first news brokerage. "If we can be held liable
for the publication of protected speech, then how long will it be before
AT&T, Sprint and MCI are paying fines for what people say on the phone?"

Both Shea and Densmore urged a reversal vote in the joint House-Senate
conference or during expected subsequent votes in the House and Senate.
Densmore and Shea said they would communicate their position to the
Majority and Minority Leaders of both houses.

Failing that, Densmore and Shea urged the president to veto the entire
telecommunications bill.

"The effects of this bill would be sufficiently destructive to merit
sending lawmakers back until they come up with a solution that doesn't
kill the Internet for publishers by making it the most heavily regulated
medium in the United States," Shea and Densmore said in a joint statement.
"The best Internet censor is a loving and attentive parent."

In the event the bill is enacted, the American Reporter's Joe Shea
pledged, "I will post material that courts have considered "indecent."
Last summer, at the time of the passage of the Exon Amendment in the
Senate Joe Shea promised to challenge the law if enacted, and received
considerable support.

Since that time, Judge Stephen Russell of Texas agreed to write the
"indecent" article Shea had vowed to publish if the bill becomes law, and
Randall Boe, an attorney with the large Washington, D.C. law firm Arent
Fox, Kintner, Plotkin & Kahn, a distinguished First Amendment proponent
that litigated the "Seven Dirty Words" case, agreed to represent The
American Reporter in an action that would be pursued all the way to the
U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary, to overturn it. Now, Shea has dusted off
the plan to attack the current proposed wording of the law. For Shea's
editorial on the subject, see <http://www.newshare.com/Reporter/archives>.


To enable a joint initial challenge to the law, Shea has already contacted
other editors and publishers, and he volunteered the American Reporter's
Web site as a place to announce links to other sites that publicly repost
his or similar material. (This site is hosted by Newshare, which, said
Densmore, "will act as The American Reporter's First Amendment printing
press.") In doing so under the new law, the publishers could be subject to
$100,000 fines and two-year prison sentences.

Newshare published in June a policy on parental control over online
materials (found at <http://www.newshare.com/News/parent.html> in which it
declared that publishers should ask users whether they wish objectionable
material blocked, and content providers the should decide what to flag as
offensive .

"A publisher who fails to label such material should be punished by the
public through the marketplace, not by Big Brother in Washington," said
Densmore. "The Internet is not a form of broadcasting, where the
government may justify censorship, as it does on the airwaves, in the name
of protecting the public. Congress' deliberations reflect a fundamental
misunderstanding of the future of the Internet as a source of personalized
information and commerce."

In condemning the House Conference Committee's narrow vote to censor
constitutionally protected speech online, Densmore and Shea noted the
last-minute substitution of the vague and overly broad "indecency"
criterion supported by the Christian Coalition instead of the original
"harmful to minors" standard contained in the previous proposal.

Densmore's letter to Rep. Rick White on the impact of the law on
publishing businesses online can be found at
<http://www.newshare.com/News/parent1.html>.

Williamstown, Massachusetts-based Newshare Corporation, Internet's first
news brokerage, enables the by-subscription and charge-per-page delivery
(via billable hypertext links) of news and time-sensitive information by
publishers, broadcasters and entrepreneurs to users of the World Wide Web.
In the coming months, Newshare will release the Clickshare(sm) System that
tracks movements and settles charges for digital transactions -- down to
as little as 10 cents per query -- as users jump among multiple unrelated
Web sites. For more, go to <http://www.newshare.com> or
<http://www.clickshare.com/clickshare>.

Los Angeles, California-based The American Reporter is a five-day-per week
electronic "newshare" owned by the writers whose work it features. It was
founded to give journalists around the world an opportunity to have a
financial stake in their own work. Each story carried by The American
Reporter earns equity for the correspondent in future profits from
advertising and subscriptions, and revenue when their stories sell to
other newspapers. For more go to <http://www.newshare.com/Reporter/>.

The text you are reading will soon be available at
<http://www.newshare.com/News/parent2.html>

For the latest on the bill, send email to <[e-mail]> or go to
one of these web sites:

<http://www.cdt.org/cda.html> Center for Democracy and Technology (public
interest group)

<http://www.vtw.org/> Voters Telecommunications Watch (public interest group)

<http://bell.com/> Alliance for Competitive Telecommunications (regional
phone companies' update page)

> Contact:
> Joe Shea, The American Reporter, <[e-mail]>
> Felix Kramer, Newshare Corp., [e-mail], 212/866-4864
> Bill Densmore, Newshare Corp., [e-mail], 413/458-8001


              -------------------------------

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But not everyone agrees ... I received
a half-dozen or so replies to the special mailing announcing the Day
of Protest from users who feel the legislators *are correct* in their
efforts to regulate the net. There are many users who feel the Day
of Protest is 'just one more tactic by left-wingers to get back in
control in Washington', as one reader phrased it in a letter to me.

I have chosen a letter sent to me by Eric Florack to represent this
point of view, that indeed, the net needs a lot of cleaning up, and
that Congress may be the agency to make it happen.  Read on ...   PAT]

                      -------------

Date: Thu, 14 Dec 1995 06:01:22 PST
From: [e-mail] (Florack,Eric)
Subject: Re: Congress: Indecency and the Internet


WRT your forwarded alert on the congress's actions WRT porn on the
internet:

Rest assured, the Congress, and not the liberal Democrat groups, have
my support on the matter.  I'm no newcomer to the internet, or to
online services. I've been a SysOp for nearly 15 years, too. It is my
considered opinion, that given the situation, their actions, and this
bill are justified, Constitutional, and timely.

Anyone following the usenet groups will tell you, that the vast
majority of the graphics traffic there is of a pornographic nature.
Personally, I have no constitutionally based objection to the content,
where adults are concerned, although I am concerned about the
measurement of society. I do have MASSIVE problems with the  free
access that under-age kids have to such material.

I'm fully aware of, and have experience with, the various 'net guards
out there. I do not consider these to be sufficient to the task.
Fully half of them don't understand how newsgroups work, (understanding
only the web!) and therefore I do not consider them to be even a good
stop-gap measure. Consider: Do you know of any kids who can't blow
their parent's ability to operate a computer out of the water? Do you
really think it's possible that such cracker-box technologies can't be
defeated by today's 12-year-olds? I don't.

Until such time as some method can be had, that will determine the
user's age and only allow access appropriate to that age, I consider
this action the only means available for keeping such material out of
the hands of kids.

To those who suggest that the is censorship of the net, I suggest we
already have that; we always have. (Can you say Kiddie Porn?) What
we're discussing here is not if there should be net censorship or not,
or if not, but what will be censored.

The group's charges of the 'religious right running the country' are
patent nonsense.  This is nothing more than an attempt of the left to
get itself back into power. It's amazing the lengths to which
desperate people will go.

And oh, BTW; If you think this group of theirs, this coalition of
leftists, is large and powerful, consider: How many of these members
of one group, show up on the membership lists of ALL the groups?

/E


[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I found it interesting that the reports
claim perhaps twenty thousand people had participated by sending email
or other communications to Washington, DC on Tuesday alone; I would
imagine by now that number might easily have doubled so that perhaps
fifty thousand have communicated with Washington by the time this
special mailing goes out to subscribers on Thursday afternoon. Now
if those figures are true, or reasonably accurate, ** where did all
the other netters go? **.  How many sites are there on the entire
net these days?  What small fraction of one person per site made
themselves known or heard? I don't think anyone can dispute there
are at least a couple million people in the USA alone actively
involved in using the net on a day by day basis; allowing that many
do not read Usenet on a regular basis, why were so many others
totally silent on this?

Is it because, as Eric states in his message, this is just a
'desperate attempt by the left to get back on control' in Congress,
and that the most vocal opponents on this issue represent just a
small minority of the net community in total?

                ----------------------------

Maybe what is needed at this point is for the 'rest of the net', i.e.
the ones who have remained silent through this controversy to now
begin speaking up and letting Congress know where they stand.

If that is how you feel, then a short email to Senator Exxon and
the others might be a very good idea. To make sure that your letter
does not get lost in the flood of email they are receiving, try to
make it stand out from the rest.

Try a very short message (you know that a lot of what they are
getting from the 'anti-censorship' side is voluminous, thousands
and thousands of bytes, quoting the Constitution and everything
else under the sun) to make your point.

How about if everyone who basically agrees with the intentions
of the Congress on this sends a message with the subject line:

     Subject: Push Ahead! We Agree With You!

and this short message:

     "We know you are buried in email from opponents of your
     plans to clean up the Internet. This short note is to let
     you know that not all netters are united on this. Many of
     us feel you are right to be concerned. Please work on the
     problem of indecent material on the Internet."

The above is just an example. Say whatever you want, but keep it
**very short** and to the point. I suggest the use of a standardized
subject line on all messages *in agreement* with the actions in
Congress. Something like "You are Correct"  or "We Agree With You"
to make certain they see it is different than what they have been
receiving. Essentially, make the subject line say it all. If nothing
else, they will appreciate something very short and to the point.

Now of course, the above is contingent on whether you do agree with
them or not, or if you feel the concern shown by many on the net
this week is correct. In either event, my feeling is the future of
the net as we know it is going to be formed in the next few days,
so it would be well to express yourself one way or the other.

I am not going to reprint all the names you can/should write to.
You can get them from the special edition sent out earlier this
week if interested. A copy is in the Archives as well.

Interesting times ahead!


PAT