White House swaps stand and decides to invite ACLU after all

[Declan McCullagh]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 1997 15:28:58 -0700 (PDT)
From: Declan McCullagh <declan at well.com>
To: fight-censorship at 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-