The New York Times, July 28, 1995, p. A26. [Editorial] Senator Grassley's Surf Police An academic study suggesting that the Internet is awash in bestiality, pedophilia and other kinky sex turns out to have been seriously flawed. Politicians like Senator Charles Grassley who waved the study around as an argument for intrusive regulation have stopped doing so. But Mr. Grassley and his allies have not backed off from their drive to draft unnecessary legislative restrictions on computer communications. Earlier this summer, Senator James Exon attached an amendment to the Senate version of a telecommunications bill that would impose Federal penalties on those who made available material deemed unsuitable for children. The unreliable study that did much to spur this bad legislating was conducted by Marty Rimm, then an undergraduate at Carnegie-Mellon University. It was reprinted in the Georgetown Law Journal and served as the basis for a credulous Time magazine article early this month. Mr. Rimm's academic supervisors have since made clear that the study had serious defects. The likelihood that children will be accidentally deluged with sexually charged computer graphics is much smaller than Mr. Rimm and his promoters suggested. Furthermore, to the extent that any problem exists, the best response is not through heavyhanded, constitutionally dubious legislation but parental education and discretionary user controls. Mr. Rimm's study looked at the computer habits of adults. He focused not on generally accessible areas of the Internet but on separate, commercial adult bulletin board services that require special procedures to find and use. This, critics note, is like visiting an adult bookstore and using the percentage of gamey titles to generalize about the contents of all bookstores. He also looked, less carefully, at specialized areas of the Internet that would be hard to stumble upon by accident. By Mr. Rimm's own calculations, less than 1 percent of all material on the Internet itself is raunchy, although this tiny percentage is unusually popular among the adults he surveyed. Another Carnegie-Mellon study, focusing on families with high school children, suggests that sexually explicit material is much less popular among these users. To be sure, sexually explicit material that would be offensive to some users can be found on the Internet. It is within the reach of computer-literate children using the networks without parental supervision. But the problem is being exaggerated to create a pretext for restricting the material available to adult users of computers. Some members of Congress, out of political greed or ignorance, want to censor what can be put on the Net and prosecute those who post legal but raunchy material. The approaches being advocated by Mr. Exon and Mr. Grassley are unwarranted and unconstitutional. They are also impractical. Material posted to the Internet in foreign countries, beyond the reach of American law, is as available to users as domestically posted material. Items can also be posted through anonymous mailers that make it impossible to identify the original source. Censorship would also have the unwelcome effect of restricting adults to reading and viewing material deemed suitable for children, and would stunt the future of the networks as a medium for artistic expression. Parents who want to restrict what their children are able to call up on their computers can avail themselves of software now available on the market that can block out unwanted material. Filtering out such material at the user end is a more practical, and far less objectionable, approach than limiting a nation of computer users to baby talk. Such devices are not foolproof, of course. The surest defense is for parents to try to teach their children the kind of healthy values that would make them uninterested in, or immune to, sexually exploitative material. [End]