---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 15 Jul 1997 15:28:58 -0700 (PDT) From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu Subject: White House swaps stand and decides to invite ACLU after all [Two hours after the ACLU issued this press release and journalists started to call, the White House reversed its stand. Now it says the ACLU is permitted to come to the meeting tomorrow after all. --Declan] *********** White House Excludes ACLU and Others From Summit Meeting on Internet Censorship FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Tuesday, July 15, 1997 Contact: Emily Whitfield, (212) 549-2566 WASHINGTON -- Contrary to earlier Administration statements, the White House has failed to invite the American Civil Liberties Union and other leading civil liberties organizations to its high-level conference on Internet censorship. "With this last-minute shift, the Administration has set an unfortunate beginning to this important process," said Donald Haines, ACLU Legislative Counsel for the Washington National Office. "Just as the ACLU continues to work with members of Congress as they shape national policy regarding the Internet," Haines said, "we were most interested in working with President Clinton and Vice President Gore on finding strategies to empower parents to help their children use the Internet wisely." The conference, set to take place on Wednesday, July 17, includes representatives from Internet giants Microsoft, America Online and Prodigy and executives from filtering software companies, as well as the Internet censorship group Enough is Enough. The American Library Association, a defender of online free speech, was invited, but the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based cyber-liberties group, was excluded along with the ACLU. "The Administration's failure to open this process to all interested parties is short-sighted and could ultimately lead to another expensive legal battle," Haines added. Tomorrow's meeting on Internet censorship comes in the wake of a landmark Supreme Court decision late last month striking down censorship provisions of the Communications Decency Act as unconstitutional. The ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging the CDA on behalf of 20 organizations and individuals, the day after President Clinton signed the law. Several weeks later, a second group of plaintiffs filed another challenge, American Library Association v. Department of Justice. The two challenges were consolidated into ACLU v. Reno by a federal district curt in Philadelphia, which ultimately ruled that the law was unconstitutional. The government appealed that ruling and the case moved up to the Supreme Court. Writing for a nearly unanimous Court in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, Justice John Paul Stevens said that "the interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship." Commenting on the law's purported aim to protect minors from so-called indecency, Justice Stevens noted that "Under the CDA, a parent allowing her 17-year-old to use the family computer to obtain information on the Internet that she, in her parental judgment, deems appropriate, could face a lengthy prison term." "The Court's decision was clearly written to protect individual online users," said the ACLU's Haines. "They, not industry giants, are the people the ACLU represents, and they are the people who are being denied a voice in this meeting." -endit-