Early Internet Censorship

Definition: Two-way computer communications methods of indeterminate size and boundaries

Significance: The Internet has provided new opportunities for freedom of speech; its advocates have argued that the same principles that apply to print or broadcast media should apply to other electronic communications

The Internet is a collection of free-standing computer networks, not a physical entity. In the 1960s, the US Department of Defense began the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which is credited with creating a way to interconnect various computer sites through what is known as “packet switching.” This is approximately the same as dropping a message in an envelope (or a packet), addressing the packet, and dropping it in the mail, with a computer acting as the postal service. This original “ARPAnet” connected four university campuses: Stanford University, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah at Salt Lake City.

Following the 1972 International Conference on Computer Communications, a new agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), began a program called the Internetting Project to study how to link packet-switching networks together. In 1974, the Internet Protocol (IP) and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) were released and would continue to serve the Internet community into the 1990s. Researchers also created a multitasking operating system (UNIX) that understood networking. The wide distribution of minicomputers running the UNIX operating system created a large network of computers running over the public telephone systems—the epitome of a decentralized, ungoverned network.

Toward the end of the 1970s, computer networks were popping up everywhere. In the mid 1980s, service providers linked to the Internet such as Prodigy, America Online, and Compuserve began to emerge. In 1993, US president Bill Clinton charged US vice president Al Gore, Jr., with running the newly created US Advisory Council on the National Information Infrastructure (NII), which was created to integrate hardware, software, and skills in order to make it convenient for people to use computers to acquire large amounts of information.

Concerns over Government Intrusion

Most Internet users have had little privacy, since most e-mail is in plain text and can be read by nearly anybody along the route. There are a number of techniques available to encode messages and data for secure delivery; however, some Internet users fear that the government will require that the NII use a method called two-key encryption, in which one key would be a public number that could be known to anyone and the other key would be a private number known only to the user. A message could be sent in the public key number but could only be decoded in the private key number. Users fear that the government would issue both keys, keeping key numbers on file in order to have the ability to decrypt any data.

While some users fear government interference, there are others who would welcome the intervention and who have argued that major communications bills should be adopted. One way to access the Internet is through what is known as a local bulletin board system (BBS), which can be run by anyone. Most BBSs provide facilities for chatting among users, and most offer computer files that can be accessed by users. In addition to its many socially acceptable uses, however, this technology offers a new way of distributing pornography, communicating threats, or defaming people. Many parents, schools, and industries have refused to defend the status quo on the Internet, arguing that it provides too-easy access to pornography and obscenity. Internet connections are achieved either through telephone or cable-television services, both of which regulate free expression.

Decisions Concerning Obscenity and Protection

Constitutional questions of First Amendment free-speech and free-expression rights have been addressed by the Supreme Court in cases such as Roth v. United States (1957), Alberts v. California (1957), Manual Enterprises v. Day (1962), and Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964); in most of these and other such cases, the Court has recognized few restrictions on rights to expression. The Court has, however, continued to recognize the need for legislative flexibility in regulating expression in cases such as Ginsberg v. New York (1968), New York v. Ferber (1982), and Sable Communications v. Federal Communications Commission (1989).

A May, 1995, article in the New York Times reported the arrest of a man on charges of possessing child pornography that prosecutors said he obtained from the Internet. In July, 1995, Time magazine issued the results of a report on Internet pornography by a Carnegie Mellon University research team; the report stated 83.5 percent of the images stores on certain Internet facilities were pornographic. The article stated that the images included nude photography of children as well as numerous images of bondage, sadomasochism, urination, defecation, and sex acts with animals. In a June, 1995, article, The New York Times reported that a University of Michigan student had been arrested for publishing a violent fantasy about another student on a computer bulletin board, leading to summary suspension from the university and criminal charges of transmitting threats across state lines; however, the criminal charges were eventually dismissed.

In response to the charges against the University of Michigan student, a November 3, 1995, article in The Chronicle of Higher Education stated that “Electronic communication does seem to inspire excess, hyperbole, and incivility among users to a degree seldom found in print,” evoking a degree of fear caused by the anonymity of the sender. The article noted, however, that Internet threats may be less likely to create the incendiary conditions that in real life would permit the arrest of a person for hurling slurs and insults; moreover, the article noted that the recipient of a digital message is less likely to be a “captive audience” unable to escape verbal assaults.

Defenders of efforts to regulate electronic communication often claim that anticensorship activists often miss a critical point: The First Amendment guarantees only that federal and state governments will not interfere with freedom of speech. Such observers note that if a private provider of online or network services wants to interfere with a user’s public message, there is no law preventing it from doing so; according to this line of argument, freedom of the press means freedom of the owner of the press.

The rapid evolution of the Internet and other computer networks makes it inevitable that such issues will continue to be debated. Freedom of speech may take on a whole new meaning in the computer network environment; precedent-setting cases no doubt rest on the horizon. Courts and legislatures may apply standard First Amendment principles just as to a work in print, or they may create a whole new set of principles. Regardless, the final level of control will lie with the sender and the receiver.

In 2001, the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) and the Neighborhood Internet Protection Act (NCIPA) became law. Both acts require libraries and schools (kindergarten through twelfth grade) nationwide to use Internet filters in order to protect children from potentially harmful content such as pornography. All federal funding is withheld from any institution that refused to comply. Free-speech advocates have argued that the filters placed on school and library computers also block other, nonviolent material such as humor sites, poetry sites, and sites concerned with personal hygiene and health. The acts were challenged in the US Supreme Court in 2003 but were upheld.

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the US government blocked online access to several government agencies by the general public, especially information related to state security.

Bibliography

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Manjoo, Farhad. "Clearing Out the App Store: Government Censorship Made Easier." The New York Times, 18 Jan. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/technology/clearing-out-the-app-stores-government-censorship-made-easier.html?‗r=0. Accessed 20 Jan. 2017.

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