Making Political Hay Out Of Porn On The Net
 
 The debate over pornography on the Internet continues to rage. Will the
 final remedy be legislative?
 
 By Graeme Browning, National Journal
 
      Two of the most recent incarnations of the NetPorn debate combine
 three thorny topics: religion, sex and politics. The most volatile
 incident occurred on Oct. 18 when Mike Godwin, general counsel of the
 Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a leading cyberspace advocacy group,
 published a memo on the Internet charging that Cathleen A.Cleaver,
 director of legal studies for the conservative Family Research Council,
 Bruce A. Taylor, president and chief counsel of the Fairfax (Va.)-based
 National Law Center for Children and Families, and other activists linked
 to the Religious Right helped create a study that purported to show an
 explosion of X- rated images on the Internet. 
      This summer, Sens. J.J. Exon, D-Neb., and Dan Coats, R- Ind., cited
 the study by Carnegie-Mellon University graduate student Martin Rimm when
 they introduced legislation that would impose strict new government
 controls on the growing web of computer networks. The Senate passed the
 measure in June. 
      Godwin wrote in EFFector, the EFF's on-line newsletter, that "it is
 now apparent that Rimm had the assistance of antiporn activists,"
 including Taylor; Cleaver, a lawyer who formerly worked for the children
 and families law center; John McMickle, another former law center employee
 who is now a staff member on the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee
 on Administrative Oversight and the Courts; and H. Deen Kaplan, who was a
 staff member of the Georgetown Law Journal when it published Rimm's study. 
      "Thus, at the same time Rimm, himself no fundamentalist, was using
 the anti-porn activists to contrive a place for himself on the national
 stage, the antiporn groups were using Rimm to manufacture evidence that
 `cyberporn' was out of control and needed to be regulated," Godwin wrote. 
      Rimm's study became national news when Time magazine made it a cover
 story later in June, complete with the title "Cyberporn" imprinted over a
 picture of a child staring in horror at a computer screen. 
      "The notion that any of the senators are in the driver's seat on this
 legislation is just false," Godwin added in an interview. "They have been
 the conduit for policy driven by Religious Right activists driven partly
 by fear of computing and partly by fear of sex on the Net." 
      But Rimm strongly disagrees with Godwin's analysis. "I never had any
 contact with Ralph Reed, or any Congressperson or staffer, or any person
 who identified himself as part of the `Religious Right' prior to
 publication of the study," Rimm responded in an electronic mail message.
 "It just happened this way; I don't mean to malign anyone, and I have
 nothing to hide." 
      Antiporn activists also disagree with Godwin, however, arguing that
 the Internet must be controlled because the erotic images available via
 the electronic networks are no longer merely pictures from girlie
 magazines. Instead, the images include "women with horses and ponies, a
 woman with her private parts nailed to a table, Daddy raping a little
 girl, that kind of rough stuff," Taylor said in an interview. "What
 Congress is concerned about is that any kid with a modem and a mouse can
 click and call up all this hard-core pornography." 
      Cleaver noted that Godwin had written the legal brief that the EFF
 filed last year on behalf of Robert Thomas, who was prosecuted and
 convicted under federal obscenity laws for making pictures of sexual
 torture and mutilation available on the Internet. 
      "The best way to know what motivates Mike Godwin and the EFF is to
 look at who they attack and look at who they defend," Cleaver said in an
 interview. "They attack people who advocate restrictions on pornography. I
 think that answers the question about why Mike Godwin's trying to make a
 big deal out of a study which shows that there's sexually violent
 material, that it's available on the Internet and that it's popular." 
      The Exon-Coats bill would prohibit "lewd or indecent" material on the
 Internet and impose criminal penalties on network providers whose systems
 carry such material. In August, however, the House--at the urging of
 Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.--passed an amendment to the
 telecommunications reform bill that merely encourages industry to provide
 parents with tools to restrict their children's access to the Internet. A
 House-Senate conference committee is scheduled to meet shortly to
 reconcile the two amendments. 
      Gingrich also came under fire on a national radio talk show on Oct.
 13 for opposing the Exon-Coats measure in the House. "Newt Gingrich does
 not support any legal constriction or restraint on what is shown through
 the Internet or on computers," James C. Dobson, president of Focus on the
 Family, a conservative organization active in social and religious issues,
 said on the radio program. (For more on Dobson, see this issue, p. 2641.)
      Meanwhile, the Guardian Angels have joined the fray. The New York
 City- based volunteer crime-fighting organization recently established a
 home page called "CyberAngels" on the World Wide Web, the graphics-based
 section of the Internet. The site is devoted to providing Net-based
 volunteers with the information they need to monitor such crimes as the
 transmission of hate messages, child pornography and pirated software on
 the electronic networks and to report those crimes to appropriate
 authorities. 
      So far, the site has drawn 200 volunteers, and "we are anticipating a
 membership of thousands!" Colin (Gabriel) Hatcher wrote in response to an
 an electronic inquiry about the project. The group hasn't yet contacted a
 member of Congress, he added. "Our priority right now is getting the
 project up and running and getting more volunteers involved."