Sounds good but I had to laugh when I heard it... is he at odds with other members of the administration, or is this rhetoric?
CAMBRIDGE, Mass (Reuter) - Vice President Al Gore said Friday society should not resort to ``unwarranted censorship'' on the Internet as an overreaction to protect children from objectionable material in cyperspace. In a commencement address at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gore said government had to assist parents in protecting their children from exposure to such material. ``But let me also state my clear and unequivocal view that a fear of chaos cannot justify unwarranted censorship of free speech, whether that speech occurs in newspapers, on the broadcast airwaves -- or over the Internet.'' ``Our best reaction to the speech we loathe is to speak out, to reject, to respond, even with emotion and fervor, but to censor -- no. That has not been our way for 200 years, and it must not become our way now,'' he said. In February, President Clinton signed the Communications Decency Act, which bans making indecent material available to minors over computer networks. The American Civil Liberties Union and the American Library Association have filed suit in a Philadelphia court challenging the law as unconstitutional, saying it would stifle a broad range of speech. In his address at the MIT, Gore stressed the gulf separating society and science, a theme students had suggested in e-mail messages to the vice president. He said new technologies initially break down stable patterns and ``then new ones emerge at a higher degree of complexity. ``Societies are vulnerable to misinterpreting the first stage as a descent into chaos and then overreacting with the imposition of a rigid, stagnating order,'' Gore told the 2,000 graduates in an outdoor ceremony.
_______________________ Regards, Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present. - Albert Camus Joseph Reagle http://farnsworth.mit.edu/~reagle/home.html reagle@mit.edu E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65 BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E