BY USING INTERNET, HOUSE OPENED DOOR TO CHARGE OF PUBLISHING SMUT

Issue:  Internet Content

(Maybe now they will grasp the concept) By releasing the unedited Starr 
report on the Internet, the House is guilty of making sexual material 
accessible for minors via the global computer network. "I was incensed that 
the House of Representatives published an unsanitized version of this on 
the Internet," said former Nebraska Senator James Exon, author of the 
Communications Decency Act of 1996. "The House...should be reprimanded or 
censured for" doing it. "This is raunchy pornography that I don't think 
should be freely accessible to our kids. I worry as much about this kind of 
activity by the House...as I do...about what the president has done to the 
nation with his activity." Barry Steinhardt, director of the Electronic 
Frontier Foundation said:" It's more than hypocritical. There's a total 
disconnect here with many members of Congress. In their haste to get out 
this report, they do not see the irony in their equal haste to control 
speech on the Internet. It's predictable and sad...that Congress...would go 
ahead and publish the most popular piece of sexually explicit material ever 
published on the Internet...They themselves have become, in their terms, 
the most successful pornographers on the Internet."


[SOURCE: Chicago Tribune (Sec 1, p.15), AUTHOR: Frank James]

<http://chicagotribune.com/>



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