Thought police to the rescue

Ashcroft introduces new, draconian online censorship plan

By Annalee Newitz

Although the Supreme Court has ruled against enforcing two broad Internet-censorship legislation packages over the past several weeks, Attorney General John Ashcroft and his acolytes are already preparing new legislation that, if passed, would make it a criminal offense to distribute adult materials in which the people depicted appear "virtually indistinguishable from" children. The new legislation, dubbed the Child Obscenity and Pornography Prevention Act of 2002 (COPPA), is a modified version of the 1996 Child Pornography Prevention Act (CPPA), which was ruled unconstitutionally vague by the Supreme Court in April.

The new COPPA package is part of Ashcroft's latest attack on First Amendment rights online. Like the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA) and the CPPA before it, COPPA uses the alleged welfare of children as an excuse to censor adult content. Like the defeated CPPA, COPPA is not about protecting the lives of children who might be harmed in the making of pornography. Instead it aims to stamp out images or pictures that depict people who merely look like minors. In this way COPPA is essentially intended to weed out thought crimes rather than real crimes against children. For the Ashcroft anti-pornsters, hope springs eternal that one day all naughty images will be censored. As COPPA was launched, Rep. Mark Foley (R-Florida) said, "I hope this legislation meets the standard set by the Supreme Court."

The scary thing is, it just might. Despite its pro-free speech ruling on the CPPA, on May 13 the court refused to rule on COPA, a sweeping legislation package that would make it a federal crime to display content that is "harmful to minors" on the Internet "for commercial purposes." Instead the Supreme Court sent the case back to a lower court to be decided. In the meantime, much to the relief of First Amendment activists, the Supreme Court has placed a ban on enforcing COPA, which would criminalize not only adult sites but also breast cancer sites, health education sites, and even a gay newspaper.