Internet World, July 1996, p.18
http://www.internetworld.com/July96/news.html

CDA Watch: DoJ Proposes Tagging Underage Users
By Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com)

     According to the press release, Nubility Inc. had released
     LolitaWatch, a network utility that detects "nubile young teens"
     online by checking for the federally mandated "age bit" in TCP/IP
     packets. But like the original novel, which parodied an older man's
     lust for a lascivious teen, LolitaWatch is a hoax, designed to
     illustrate the dangers of attaching age information to this
     workhorse Internet protocol.
     
     The proposal for an age bit is a serious one. Advanced during the
     Philadelphia court challenge to the Communications Decency Act
     (CDA), it's part of what American Library Association (ALA) attorney
     Bruce Ennis calls the Department of Justice's (DoJ's) "efforts to
     redefine the way the CDA is written."
     
     Arguing that the CDA is constitutional, the DoJ now claims it will
     interpret "indecency" narrowly and will prosecute only those
     netizens who post pornography, not literature or dirty words. The
     ACLU says that doesn't matter--the CDA is still unconstitutional
     because "only Congress can rewrite a law" and the DoJ could change
     its mind at any time.
     
     The "age bit" is the brainchild of DoJ witness Dan Olsen, the
     director of the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie
     Mellon University. He invented a self-labeling scheme called -L18,
     for "less than 18." Under it, every Internet user would have to mark
     all his Usenet posts, e-mail messages, chat room conversations, or
     Web pages with -L18 if the content might be "inappropriate for
     minors."
     
     The DoJ says using these labels is a defense against conviction
     under the CDA--even though -L18 mail readers and browsers have yet
     to be written. "Tagging by content providers, coupled with evidence
     that the tag would be screened by the marketplace of browsers and
     blocking software" is "substantial evidence" of CDA compliance, said
     Assistant Attorney General John Keeney.
     
     The ACLU blasted this self-rating proposal, pointing out that it
     "contains several flaws that render it useless," and that users
     overseas have no reason to obey a U.S. law. A better proposal,
     argued the ACLU and ALA coalition attorneys, is third-party rating
     systems like SurfWatch or NetNanny that block overseas sites as
     well.
     
     Judge Stewart Dalzell seemed to agree, asking Olsen: "If 40 percent
     [of the Internet is] offshore or created offshore, how in the world
     is anything that's going to happen in the U.S. going to affect
     that?"
     
     The three-judge panel hearing the legal challenge to the CDA should
     issue a decision about the time you read this. Both sides have said
     if they lose they'll appeal directly to the Supreme Court, which is
     expected to hear the case early next year.
     
     If the high court strikes down the CDA, Congress will try again.
     Jack Fields (R-Texas), chair of the House telecommunications
     subcommittee, said in May: "We should be ready with a
     response--[pornography] is a real problem. I have a six-year old and
     I get concerned about that. I want a real solution that works. The
     CDA was driven by emotion and not by real policy."
     
     Forty years ago, media hype gave Lolita a reputation as an obscene
     novel and prompted the French, Argentine, and New Zealand
     governments to censor it. But Vladimir Nabokov's work contained not
     one explicitly sexual passage. Without reading the book, customs
     agents never knew that it was a sad parody of an old man's fantasy
     lust for a young girl.
     
     The Net censors seem to have found in the Internet a modern
     Lolita--which they understand just about as well as the 1950s
     customs agents understood Nabokov.

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