Computer users and free speech activists have come together in an unprecedented coalition to fight the first of what's certain to be a flood of U.S. laws designed to control access to the freewheeling global computer network known as the Internet.
Their target is Sen. Jim Exon's Communications Decency Act, which would impose $100,000 fines on anyone who uses computers "to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass."Exon, D-Neb., introduced the bill on Feb. 1, saying it was necessary in order to "extend the standards of decency which have protected telephone users to new telecommunications devices." Rep. Timothy Johnson, D-S.D., has sponsored a companion bill in the House.
Congress is taking action amid growing concerns about threatening and sexual content being transmitted over computer networks.
In November, Carnegie Mellon University cut its students off from European and U.S. computer bulletin boards carrying digitally encoded pornographic pictures after a researcher collected 97,000 of the images using the school's computers.
Last month, a University of Michigan student was charged with the interstate transmission of a threat after he posted stories he wrote about raping and murdering a classmate to a widely read newsgroup on the Internet, and then discussed how to carry out such a crime via e-mail.
And in July, Robert and Carleen Thomas of California were convicted of sending obscene pictures over telephone lines to Memphis, Tenn., where authorities down- loaded images from the couple's computer bulletin board. In Memphis, at least, the images were judged to be obscene.
But while Exon wants to keep the Internet from becoming a red light district, many computer users see his proposal as a misguided attempt to control the global network of computer connections, which has grown through the cooperation of users in more than 100 countries and has been controlled primarily by scientists with very little government oversight.
As word of the proposal spreads, just about every watchdog group on the Internet has come together, circulating electronic petitions and urging computer users to lobby Congress against the bill. The lineup includes computer industry groups, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU and People for the American Way.