Kenneth Starr's report has exposed more than President Clinton's sexual preferences, or Monica Lewinsky's taste in underwear. It has also exposed the hypocrisy of certain legislators who would regulate Internet content, says one observer of the digital community.
"A number of the very same politicians who are behind bills that would restrict access to the Internet in the name of pornography voted to place the Starr document -- the contents of which fulfill these politicians' own definition of pornography -- on the Internet, with no restrictions," said Stanton McCandlish, program director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"It's hard for a lot of legislators to grasp what the legislation they sign off on can do -- and not do," McCandlish said. The EFF is set to release a critical statement later Tuesday that analyzes the issues raised by the publication of Starr's report on the Internet.
One politician singled out by McCandlish was Representative Ernest Istook (R-Oklahoma), the author of a measure that would require public schools and libraries to use filtering software in order to receive federal funding for computers. Istook voted last week to put the Starr report on the Internet.
Istook�s filtering legislation was approved by a House subcommittee in June and is awaiting a vote by the full House. If it passes, the filtering software that Istook proposes would make access to the Starr report impossible in public schools and libraries, McCandlish pointed out.
Istook denied that there was any hypocrisy in his vote to post the salacious details on the Internet.
"The biggest problem with Internet porn is not text... but graphic images which lure and titillate," Istook told Wired News on Tuesday. "There are no pictures in the Starr report. There is also a huge difference between material which is designed to entice, and material which serves an undeniable public necessity."
But according to researchers at EFF, this "publicly necessary material," is already being indiscriminately blocked at various sites around the country, with popular filtering software such as Surf Watch.
Istook claims his proposed legislation would solve this problem in the future by providing an adult to help access non-obscene Web sites inadvertently blocked by the software filter.
An official for the San Francisco Public Library dismissed Istook's proposed solution as impractical.
"The use of the Internet is so great in our libraries, that to ask staff members to monitor every single Internet transaction seems like a highly implausible suggestion," said Marcia Schneider, chief of community relations.
Schneider said that San Francisco's public libraries currently employ no filtering software and have no plans to do so. "We tend to always be on the side of free speech," she said.
To the EFF, there is no "safe" way to censor certain documents on the Internet.
"Do we really want a 17-year-old high school student to not be able to choose to have access to one of the most important and newsworthy documents of our times?" asked McCandlish. "A document that may lead to the impeachment of our president?
"If the price is to make it harder for older minors to get to [important documents], that is too high a price."
One of the unexpected byproducts of posting Starr's report the Net is the calling into question of the government�s entire media-censorship apparatus, including indecency and obscenity law, McCandlish said.
"Congress has really shot itself in the foot with this one," he said. "It's a case study in why regulating the Internet is so problematic, and why filtering software is bad.
"The result of this kind of legislation will be the dumbing down of America."
