The New York Times, January 2, 1996, p. A15. Unmuzzling the Internet [OpEd] How to evade the censors and make a statement, too. By Jaron Lanier (Visiting scholar at the Columbia University department of computer science.) If President Clinton signs the telecommunications bill drastically restricting private as well as public speech on the Internet, he can expect a rollicking cat-and-mouse game. It can be comical when politicians try to control something they do not understand. Such is the case with the bill's censorship provision, which not only outlaws the transmission of material over the Internet that would be allowed in most newspapers, but also makes owners of computers on a network liable for the speech of others. (As Compuserve demonstrated last week when, to satisfy a German court, it blocked American subscribers' access to sexually explicit material, regulation of the Internet can threaten both commercial and constitutional freedoms.) The other day, I came up with a way to easily evade the proposed American restrictions. My simple idea would be to create a computer program, dubbed "Unmuzzle," which would deposit incomprehensible fragments of any forbidden material in different foreign computers (though maybe not Germany's). The contraband communication would only be reassembled into a coherent whole when downloaded in the home of the user back in the United States, where it would become protected speech, as in any other medium. I had no intention of actually building "Unmuzzle," but I mentioned the notion in E-mail to a friend, and within days I was hearing from people I didn't know who were busy creating the program with the idea of distributing it freely. Fine with me. Such a program would make an mportant statement. Speaking as someone who has been involved with computers for most of my life (I coined the phrase "virtual reality" in the early 1980's and created much of the technology for it), I find that many Internet users have been reacting to attacks on freedom in cyberspace by slumping into a separatist, angry mood. They feel that they are being denied the rights that others enjoy. On the Internet, separatism is expressed by encryption: an encrypted message can be read only by the party it is intended for. Therefore, in the spirit of the First Amendment, I suggest Unmuzzle as an alternative method: it may break up images or text into a hundred pieces, but they are still accessible to the public. The idea of censoring the Internet should be unthinkable, especially in the United States. Aside from the question of free speech, there's the economic imperative as well. The Internet is not a plaything: it is the infrastructure of our information technology industry. The young have the most to lose from the new restrictions, in spite of the fact that such limits are purportedly meant to protect them. Schools and libraries will find it extremely difficult to offer vital Internet services in the face of a mine field of criminal liabilities. It is members of Congress and the President who need to show some maturity, by rejecting free-speech restrictions in the telecommunications bill. [End]