CULTURE: Censoring Cyberspace

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At the core of the CMU dispute is a question that goes beyond the campus and could touch every media and entertainment company that wants to do business on the info highway: to what extent can the operators of interactive media be held responsible for the material that moves through their systems? Are they common carriers, like the phone companies, which must ignore the content of the messages? Are they like TV stations, whose broadcasts are monitored by the government for fairness and suitability? Or are they like bookstores, which the courts have ruled can't be expected to review the content of every title on their shelves? And what happens when that content hops over borders and lands in a different city -- or country -- whose laws and community standards may differ?

The last issue came to a head most dramatically last July, after a U.S. postal inspector, posing as a customer in Tennessee, downloaded X-rated pictures from an adult computer bulletin board in California. Though the images might have been acceptable by California standards, they were judged obscene in the Bible Belt, and the owners of the bulletin board were convicted of transporting obscene material across state lines. Their appeal may be headed for the Supreme Court.

There's more to free speech than sexy words and pictures, of course. Publishers who venture onto international networks like the Internet are particularly concerned about libel and slander. The rules of libel in England, for example, are considerably more restrictive than those in the U.S.; what might be considered a fair crack at a public figure in New York City could be actionable in London. Conversely, the muzzles that are slapped on reporters covering trials in Commonwealth countries can't be placed so easily on writers living abroad, as Canadian officials learned to their dismay last year when foreign press reports of a particularly sensitive homicide case in Ontario began drifting back into Canada through the Internet.

All sorts of subversive materials have found their way onto the computer networks, from secret spy codes to instructions for making long-range rocket bombs. As if to provoke the authorities, some college students have posted collections of electronic pamphlets that include Suicide Methods, an instruction manual for self-destruction, and The School Stopper's Textbook, which tells students how to blow up toilets, short-circuit electrical wiring and "break into your school at night and burn it down."

High schools pose a special problem for administrators, who want to give students the benefits of computer networking without exposing minors to everything that washes up online. Many lower schools have adopted the CMU approach, cutting off access to the electronic discussion groups where the most offensive material is carried.

At CMU, the administration determined that its problem was centered in a collection of discussion groups, called Usenet newsgroups, with awkward but functional titles like alt.sex, rec.arts.erotica and alt.binaries.pictures.erotica. The "binary" groups are the most controversial, for they contain codes that savvy computer users can translate into pictures and movie clips. The university's initial decision was to pull the plug on all the major "sex" newsgroups and their subsidiary sections -- more than 80 categories altogether.