On Thu, 18 Apr 1996, Alan Bostick wrote:
Don't forget: There are lots of colleges and universities on the net, and most of these universities have undergraduates, and a significant fraction of these undergraduates are minors. The potential user base is going to be mixed and must be presumed to be so. (That, I'm told, is the chief justification of the Carnegie-Mellon ban on the alt.sex.* Usenet newsgroups.) *Lots* of systems are affected by this problem.
This is an excellent point, and one worth repeating. The Chronicle of Higher Education has been quite diligent in covering the CDA hearings in Philadelphia since their readership is concerned about this issue. As for CMU's justification for censoring USENET newsgroups, the legal justification for protecting minors is non-existent -- the administration's reasons are financial and PR. Check out this February 1996 thread on the fight-censorship list: http://fight-censorship.dementia.org/fight-censorship/dl?thread=CMU+basks+in+favorable+publicity+from+Rimm+study,+Usenet+censorship&after=1323 The attached excerpt from a Carnegie Mellon University PR newsletter shows how top administrators are basking in the publicity sparked by the Rimm study and CMU's CompuServe-esque censorship of sexual discussion groups in November 1994. The Warner Hall bureaucrats are smug in claiming they were justified in "limiting the access of pornography on our campus computers." Of course, that's not to say that CMU administrators aren't prudes as well. For more info: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~declan/rimm/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kcf/censor/ http://joc.mit.edu/cmu.html -Declan // declan@eff.org // I do not represent the EFF // declan@well.com //