Internet Censorship Essay, Research Paper

Welcome You ve got mail. These are the words that so many people around the world have become accustom to day in and day out. In seconds you can be transported into a world filled with billions of sites with information. Sites that help people with every thing you can think of, from sites to help you find where to buy hard cover books for less than paperback prices, to where to where to find a good dentist. Over 800 million people worldwide own a computer and over 400 million people use the Internet. 100 million of these people use the Internet for at least an hour a day. Every day more and more people connect to the Internet in search for an endless array of information.

So many people depend on the Internet not only for recreational reasons but also for economical reasons. Many people can stay home and do there work right over the Internet. You can get mail, check your stocks on Wall Street, and even go to school over the Internet. Needless to say, whether we like it or not, the Internet is rapidly becoming a way of life in the world as we know it today. But with all good the advances of the Internet has done for the society there is much controversy over what information, so to speak, that people should be allowed to access.

If you go to a common search engine and search for the words children s toys you will be bombarded with sites directing you under age pornographic kiddy porn sites, or the word black and get a barrage of racist skinhead and Ku Klux Klan influenced sites. These are some of the reasons that US government officials want to put a mandatory censorship on Internet sights. A law that Internet freedom of speech groups say is unconstitutional.

This is the argument that Internet groups have been thrown back and fourth since the beginning. Officials say that unconventional content will alter the minds of the people. But an Internet freedom of speech group argues that free speech lies at the heart of any defense of democratic rights. The belief that restricting what people express will somehow restrict what people do is sadly mistaken.

There are other Internet Freedom Fighters that the call for a medium in Internet censorship. Calling for the freedom of speech, but also with some sort of a moral responsibility in exercising this right. They fear that the rights are being abused.

In the year of 1997 the issue of Internet censorship was tried in the in the halls of the Supreme Court Justice. Attorney General Reno made a proposal to pass a Communications Decency Act. A proposal that would make it mandatory for people who want to access pornographic sites to give up privacy by showing proof of there age with certain designated forms of identification. A verified credit card or an age identification number, and also law that would it make it just to criminally charge a person knowingly sending or displaying to a person under 18 any message or image that is obscene or patently offensive. In an effort to protect the fragile mind of a child .

Even though I do not think it is right to display offensive media to minors or even display them at all, but it is totally unconstitutional. It directly contradicts the 1st Amendment and the 5th Amendment. It is the basic human right to free speech that people can express what ever they want. The Internet is just a new form of communication. If that law were to be passed that would mean that you would have to censor it in all forms of communication. Anyone who has ever told a dirty joke of the phone or any person who has ever written an explicit love story that was a best seller would also have to be punished according to the law. The law is unjust and would open a floodgate of unfair censorship. It would mean those articles about sexual transmitted disease or sexual anatomy that is made to educate under age children would be illegal. These would be illegal since there are no exceptions to any law.

A freedom of speech on the Internet group also thought that the law would be unconstitutional. They call themselves American Civil Liberties Union\’s. They challenged the laws against Reno stating that The law is putting an unconstitutional mussel on the free people of the U.S. In the case of Reno v. ACLU the supreme court also had the views of the constitution in mind when they tried the case themselves. The Court ruled that the CDA places an \”unacceptably heavy burden on protected speech, which threatens to torch a large segment of the Internet community.\”

In closing there is nothing that is a total Godsend. The Internet brings us good things and bad. But the answer to them is not a censorship that violates human rights. Because we all know two wrongs don t make a right.