New York Times

Editorial page, Friday July 28 1995  (via http://nytimesfax.com/)


Senator Grassley's Surf Police 

An academic study suggesting that the Internet is awash in bestiality,
pedophilia and other kinky sex turns out to have been seriously flawed.
Politicians like Senator Charles Grassley who waved the study around as
an argument for intrusive regulations have stopped doing so.  But Mr
Grassley and his allies have not backed off from their drive to draft
unnecessary legislative restrictions on computer communications.

Earlier this summer, Senator James Exon attached an amendment to the
Senate version of a telecommunications bill that would impose Federal
penalties on those who made available material deemed unsuitable for
children. 

The unreliable study that did much to spur this bad legislating was
conducted by Marty Rimm, then an undergraduate at Carnegie-Mellon
University.  Mr Rimm's academic supervisors have since made clear that
the study had serious defects.  The likelihood that children will be
accidentally deluged with sexually charged computer graphics is much
smaller than Mr Rimm and his promoters suggested.

By Mr Rimm's own calculations, less than 1 percent of all material on
the Internet itself is raunchy, although this tiny percentage is
unsurprisingly popular among the adults he surveyed.  To be sure,
sexually explicit material that would be offensive to some users can be
found on the Internet.  Bit the problem is being exaggerated to create a
pretest for restricting the material available to adult users of
computers.

Some members of Congress, out of political greed or ignorance, want to
censor what can be put on the Net and prosecute those who post legal but
raunchy material.  The approaches being advocated by Mr Exon and Mr
Grassley are unwarranted and unconstitutional.