http://www.internetworld.com/iw-online/July96/news.html CDA Watch: DoJ Proposes Tagging Underage Users According to the press release, Nubility Inc. had released LolitaWatch, a network utility that detects "nubile young teens" online by checking for the federally mandated "age bit" in TCP/IP packets. But like the original novel, which parodied an older man's lust for a lascivious teen, LolitaWatch is a hoax, designed to illustrate the dangers of attaching age information to this workhorse Internet protocol. The proposal for an age bit is a serious one. Advanced during the Philadelphia court challenge to the Communications Decency Act (CDA), it's part of what American Library Association (ALA) attorney Bruce Ennis calls the Department of Justice's (DoJ's) "efforts to redefine the way the CDA is written." [...] If the high court strikes down the CDA, Congress will try again. Jack Fields (R-Texas), chair of the House telecommunications subcommittee, said in May: "We should be ready with a response--[pornography] is a real problem. I have a six-year old and I get concerned about that. I want a real solution that works. The CDA was driven by emotion and not by real policy." Forty years ago, media hype gave Lolita a reputation as an obscene novel and prompted the French, Argentine, and New Zealand governments to censor it. But Vladimir Nabokov's work contained not one explicitly sexual passage. Without reading the book, customs agents never knew that it was a sad parody of an old man's fantasy lust for a young girl. The Net censors seem to have found in the Internet a modern Lolita--which they understand just about as well as the 1950s customs agents understood Nabokov. --Declan McCullagh