News on Congressional Debate on Exon

attila attila at primenet.com
Wed Dec 6 12:30:13 PST 1995



    well, there goes the neighborhood.

    guess I better clean up my www front page which meets the Exon rules on 
indeceny, pisses on ITAR, and is probably seditious as well. might as 
well get a start on it before the eager beavers hemorrhage!

    the House contingent were all of the Exon persuasion to begin with and
subject to threats by the Christian Right. The real test is whether the
full House will sign on --a real test on Newt's professed 'Freedom of the
Net' policy!  If Newt keeps his resolve, can he again raise the 424-4
margin he had for the Wyden amendment?  Tune in for the exciting 
fireworks next week or so for House action....  yeah, right!

    and as a last resort, Clinto has vowed to veto the bill for two 
reasons: the open season privileges for big business to consolidate all 
telecommonications into a few empires, and the lack of regulation to 
control same.  Maybe now that Hillary is not out front, maybe Bill will 
find his balls, or maybe he will waffle again....

-------

On Wed, 6 Dec 1995, Timothy C. May wrote:

> 
> I just heard (12:15 EST) that the House has adopted language similar to the
> original Exon-Coates language in the Senate (as opposed to the White
> language, which was less restrictive in that it dealt with material that
> was "harmful" to children, interpreted to mean child porn).
> 
> It looks like Internet Service Providers will soon be held liable for
> "indecent material" passed by their systems. I would expect most ISPs will
> drop the alt.binaries.* newsgroups as a first step, and maybe other groups
> as well.
> 
> (Controlling Web page accesses is a much tougher problem, of course. so I
> wouldn't expect much action on this at first.)
> 
> By the way, I recently discovered a new twist on "age credentials": the use
> of credit cards to prove age. One image site is asking for a "valid credit
> card number" to be given...not to use for charges, but just to do a quick
> verification (they claim a few minutes or less) that the card is valid and
> in the name of the person accessing their site.
> 
> Some obvious security issue. An interesting twist, though.
> 
> If the Exon Bill really does go into effect, and age limits on access are
> imposed, I'll be looking for what we've always joked about: the
> "Information Superhighway Driver's License."
> 
> --Tim May
> 
> Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government.
> ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
> Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
> tcmay at got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
> Corralitos, CA              | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
> Higher Power: 2^756839      | black markets, collapse of governments.
> "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."
> 
> 






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