Now, before I begin, I'd like to make perfectly clear the fact that I DO NOT speak for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. These are all my opinions. :)

So, you have concerns about pornography on the net.

This is a huge, complex topic and I don't know exactly where to begin. I'll just try to jot down some of my thoughts in random order and you can unscrable them in the reading.

We live in a Democracy!

Now, living in a Democracy is not living in a Utopia. Democracy includes some bad aspects as well as some good ones. For example, it may be a real drag to allow the KKK to hold a demonstartion on my street. Their speech is utterly offensive to me and my sense of rationality. Howver, I'd rather put up with it than live in a...Dictatorship or...Monarchy...or Fascist state.

It may very well be a drag, but we cannot, in a Democracy, allow the governmnet to prohibit the free expression of JERKS or things we don't like.

Implicit in the concept of Freedom, is the concept of responsibility. The minute we hand over to the governmnet, the right to interpret what we can or cannot listen to, see, taste, smell, or feel is the minute we take our first step away from Freedom.

It is not the place of governmnt to censor. When we ask the governmnet to censor, it is only out of our laziness and irresposibility. The governmnet is not our baby sitter. It has more important things to do, things which aren't getting done because it has taken on too many tasks.

Hate speech and obscene speech are countered best with MORE speech, not less speech.

So, they say, what about children?

For one, who decided that pornography was bad for children in the first. Probably a bunch of idiotic Puritans. I believe that it is not the image that is bad, but the interpretation. Sex and the human body is a natural source of interest for children. They WILL explore...whether it be on the playground, in their father's dresser drawer, or on the Internet. And there is NOTHING wrong with such exploration. And there is nothing that will truly stop such exploration.

What is dammaging, is the act of information suppression. We put walls around sex, we lock doors, we hide the truth from our children. In doing so, we mystify, curiosityofy it. We make it a challenge, a sport, a mystery, a lie!

Parents shoud teach their children about the real world instead of lying to them about it.

What they see on the Internet is nothing better or worse than what they see on the playground.

Democracy extends to families as well as societies.

So, what if that argument is not enough?

Here is my answer. In taking on responsibility in a democratic society, parents should learn how to use their computers. It is irresponsible to give the excuse that "my children can use the thing and I can't therefore I can't control them". That is no excuse to hand your freedom over to the hands of the governmet. LEARN IT, LIVE IT, if you care about your children!

Things parents might do if they decide to censor information to their children: They should by a mail filter like mailproc which can be set to filter out any words that parents do not wish their children to be faced with. If a mail has fuck in it, the mail will not make it to the childs monitor.

They should put password protection on newsgroups which they don't want their kids to get into.

Rather than spending a bunch of money lobbying governmnet to become a dictator state, they should raise a fund to pay for some computer programmers to write some kick ass code for more efficient filtering of info.

And they should talk to their kids, be a part of the learning, discuss the dangers of a free society and prepare them.

Beyond all this, even if we decided to let the governmnet censor things, it would not be possible. The Internet is a world phenomenon. Trying to censor such a complex entity, is impossible. No enforcement can control, no standard of obsenity can blanket all the diverse communities. Law without force of enforcement is a dead law!

Anonymity is native to cyberspace, and taking away the right of anonymity because of smut is like outlawing public phione booths because someone might make an obsene phone call from one. International size, anonymioty and diverse community standards prohibit the US government from controlling anything.

Rather than trying to ressurect what is dead and gone, we should develop new methosds of creating a viral and positive community.

"If a Nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be...if we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed." - Thomas Jefferson

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin, _Historical_Review_of_Pennsylvania_, 1759.

"The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely this is to burn the house to roast the pig...The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children." - US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter Butler v. Michigan, 352 U.S. 380, 383 (1957)