TARGET: CYBERSPACE
forget it -- the net is doomed
By JAMES R. PETERSEN
From The Playboy Forum (forum@playboy.com)
July 1995
By JAMES R. PETERSEN
From The Playboy Forum (forum@playboy.com)
July 1995
Will they succeed? Probably. The only question is how.
Yes, yes. We are aware of that little obstacle known as the First Amendment. The Internet -- as anyone who received a computer for Christmas has undoubtedly discovered -- is anarchic. There is no act too obscene (or too boring) that a million geeks can't find time to discuss it in chat groups for days. People who have now experienced unbridled First Amendment freedom via cyberspace will resist any efforts to curb its unfettered discourse. Part of their cockiness comes from the technology. As Internet pioneer John Gilmore has said: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
Let's hope that's the case: The cyberprudes come in all shapes and sizes. At the very top, Senator James ("I want to keep the information superhighway from resembling a red-light district") Exon introduced legislation (the Communications Decency Act) to expand FCC regulations covering obscene telephone calls to include all forms of electronic communication. Anyone who "makes, transmits or otherwise makes available any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image or other communication" that is "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy or indecent" using a "telecommunications device" will be subject to a fine of $100,000 or two years in prison.
Most people view censorship as the silencing of one voice at a time. Senator Exon's tactic goes for the middleman. Make carriers responsible for the content of the Net, and providers will monitor every online conversation. Perhaps they will use what is known as George Carlin software--programs that bleep out offensive or potentially sexy words (see Censorship Glossary). Nervous sysops may have to spend their days and nights hunched over the bully button ready to spank anyone who brings offensive language to a chat group. Postal inspectors could find (or plant) provocative images and collect big bucks from bulletin board operators who take the bait or who simply fall asleep instead of policing their corner of cyberspace.
If that law were to go into effect, cyberspace would become about as titillating as the local mall. Hot and heavy e-mail would all but cease. Erotic image banks would be even harder to find. Alt.sex.stories would evoke nostalgia similar to wildly embellished accounts of Woodstock. You could probably still access stock quotes and weather reports from Compuserve, or find kindred spirits to discuss the relative merits of Picard and Kirk, but only if everyone kept their virtual pants zipped up.
The knights of the Internet like to claim that their universe is beyond the reach of prudes. They have convinced themselves that the Net is a realm of fantasy, a universe that exists parallel to the real world rather than within it. Forget it. The Internet is about as private as a postcard.
The technology already does exist to document and disclose your personal obsessions, or your simple curiosities. The same technology can allow anyone to see your address book--with whom you communicate, how often and for how long.
In one sense, the Internet is like the Trojan horse: a neat toy until you look inside. The Harvard Crimson discovered, for instance, that anyone on the Harvard computer network could look at logs of users' actions. In short, they could find out exactly how many images from "Debbie Does a Donkey," "Humanoid Hunks From San Francisco" or "Young Lolitas" you had downloaded. The Crimson reported (without naming names) that 28 students had downloaded some 500 pornographic pictures in one week. Patrick Groeneveld, the sysop who ran the Digital Pictures Archive at the University of Delft in the Netherlands, kept a log of the top 50 consumers of erotica and then publicized the list. It included the addresses of several major corporations (AT&T, Citicorp and Ford, among others). Try explaining your collection of computer cuties to the personnel department.
When the do-gooders arrive in force--and they certainly will--they'll bring some obvious, fairly old-fashioned tools: outrage, parental concern and hypocrisy. They'll target schools and colleges first because that's where the "children" are and because most universities have ties to the government. Sadly, most colleges place reputation above academic freedom. We're not sure what the outcome of the Harvard fiasco will be, but when a techie pointed out to authorities at Carnegie Mellon University what was available on the Net, CMU tried to shut down all sex-related chat groups. Our guess is that prestigious universities such as Harvard and Carnegie Mellon will become the first and most vigilant censors of cyberspace. After all, boys and girls, they own the computers.
There seems to be no end to the self-appointed protectors of the innocent. Look at what happened to Jake Baker. By now you're probably familiar with the story: A University of Michigan alumnus with nothing to do sits in a hotel room in Moscow, cruising the Net. Acting on a tip from the teenage daughter of a friend, he flips through alt.sex.stories, where he finds a bunch of sordid torture fantasies posted by kiasyd@umich.edu (Jake Baker). Thinking that such filth and depravity reflect poorly on his alma mater (whereas his own cruising was for noble reasons having nothing to do with sex or simple curiosity), the man notifies the university. Before you know it, Jake Baker finds himself in jail. Internet junkies say Baker fucked up by using his real name and the name of his school--oh, and by the way, by giving the victim in a story the name of a woman in one of his classes. Baker was an idiot, but what happened to him shows a typical overreaction by the outside world to the not-so-niceties of the Net.
The University of Michigan invoked the equivalent of martial law: It ordered psychiatric interviews for Baker (the shrinks thought he had an active fantasy life but was not a threat), then moved to suspend him. Never mind the First Amendment -- this was a health crisis.
Suspension wasn't enough for the feds. The government sniffed a test case and took action. The cops arrived, looked at Baker's e-mail (with his permission) and arrested him for transmitting "interstate communication containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another." A judge ordered that Baker be held without bond. The prosecution argued that the 20-year-old student be kept in jail "to prevent rape and murder." (He was released after a month in jail.)
Clearly the judge and the feds were overwhelmed by the mystique of the new medium. Robert Ressler, a retired FBI agent who specializes in the habits of serial killers, told the press that while not everyone who has such fantasies is dangerous, "every serial killer starts with fantasizing." That backward logic seems to say that the Net--fed by fantasy--is a breeding ground for killers. So everyone who has ever signed on to alt.sex.stories should be held without bond for what they might do? What's the difference between words on the Internet and words at the neighborhood bookstore?
Jake Baker is author of a grubby little chronicle in which he and a friend hold a woman captive (tying her by her hair to a ceiling fan), then abuse her with clamps, glue, a big spiky hairbrush, a hot curling iron, a spreader bar, a knife and finally fire. He lands in jail.
Bret Easton Ellis comes up with a novel, "American Psycho," in which the protagonist holds a woman captive, sprays her with Mace, decapitates her to have sex with her severed head, nails a dildo to her genitals and drills holes in various parts of her body, all while capturing the events on film. Ellis has a table at Elaine's.
The feds insist Baker's case isn't a First Amendment issue, that he made a direct threat against a specific person. But their logic doesn't hold up: The woman's name appears in something that is clearly a story, written in the present tense and including a disclaimer indicating it is fiction. (Most case law holds that a threat must imply a future action.) Baker never showed the story to the woman or acted in any perverse fashion toward her. As freaky as the fiction was, there didn't seem to be any intent. Just dweeb bravado. Rumor has it that Baker is still a virgin. (That could explain everything.)
The evidence against Baker includes e-mail that he sent to a person in Canada who called himself Arthur Gronda. Baker and Gronda keystroked each other into electronic ecstasy, discussing torture and kidnapping techniques. According to the investigating agent, Baker wrote: "I don't want any blood in my room, though I have come upon an excellent method to abduct a bitch. As I said before, my room is right across from the girls' bathroom. Wait until late at night, grab her when she goes to unlock the door. Knock her unconscious and put her into one of those portable lockers (forget the word for it) or even a duffel bag. Then hurry her out to the car and take her away. What do you think?"
Good question. Most of you probably think that the little creep should be hung upside down by his genitals. But the evidence is far from damning. In the e-mail, Baker never named a target. The woman whose name he appropriated for his macabre alt.sex.stories fantasy did not live in his dorm. And talking about a crime is not a crime. As one lawyer said: "What people see is a frightening use of technology, so they attack the technology itself. If Baker had written this stuff in letters, nobody would be saying, 'Let's open all the U.S. mail.'"
Don't give the government any ideas. Baker faces a five-year prison sentence. If he's convicted, it will, as they say, send a message.
Meanwhile, the knights of the Internet insist their world does not need rules or cybercops. They have their own ways of punishing bad behavior: flaming and scorn. Within days of Baker's arrest, stories began to appear on the Net with characters named Jake Baker. Drag queens in prison rape the fantasy Jake and cut out his tongue. A woman meets the fantasy Jake on the street, tortures and shoots him. The devil asks the fantasy Jake to torture a woman, then masturbate, and when the fantasy Jake is unable to obtain an erection, the devil shoves a curling iron up fantasy Jake's ass.
Fight fire with fire, speech with speech: Can the government come up with
anything better to keep the Net civilized?
