WASHINGTON -- A government-commissioned report titled "Youth, Pornography, and the Internet" could have been a near-hysterical condemnation of technology and a cry for intrusive new laws.
Instead, a 14-chapter report published Thursday by the National Research Council takes a sober look at the legal, technological and social means that parents and teachers can use to shield children and teenagers from virtual smut.
The NRC group, comprised mostly of academics, lawyers and researchers, spent most of its time analyzing the situation instead of making recommendations, concluding that "there is no single or simple answer to controlling the access of minors to inappropriate material on the Web."
"In what seems like an easy no-brainer issue -- we don't want our children exposed to pornography -- we found considerable complexity in the sacrifices made to the individual freedoms and rights of our citizens in order to enforce such a policy on the Internet," said Sandra Calvert, the director of the Children's Digital Media Center at Georgetown University and a member of the NRC committee.
Tuesday's report comes a day after Attorney General John Ashcroft held a press conference endorsing a new bill to outlaw "morphed" child pornography. At the same time, a three-judge federal court is weighing a challenge to a library filtering law, and the Supreme Court is considering whether or not to overturn a law restricting "harmful to minors" material on the Web.
"My overall impression is that it was designed to be a scientific and scholarly examination of this issue, and it was intended to avoid the kinds of passions that have surrounded the political debate," says Bob Corn-Revere, a partner at the Hogan and Hartson law firm who represents civil liberties groups and reviewed the report.
If that was the plan, it seems to have worked. The NRC committee deliberately chose a low-key approach, opting not to include printouts of lurid images or even explicit descriptions. A footnote says: "The inclusion of such material would inevitably become the primary focus of this report, rather than any of the committee's analytical work."
"I hope it will push people to talk to their children and discourage them from trying to use silly 'fixes,'" said David Forsyth, an associate professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley.
"There are a variety of ways of protecting children -- social strategies, technological strategies and public policy strategies," said Forsyth, a member of the NRC committee. "None of these approaches can reliably make the problem go away. Each can help prevent problems and alleviate distress after accidental exposure."
In 1998, Congress ordered the NRC to undertake this study, and said that the final report must evaluate "the capabilities of present computer-based control technologies for controlling electronic transmission of pornography images."
The NRC group did not endorse specific legislation, such as the bill proposed this week by Ashcroft. It took a more circumscribed approach, saying that the government's options include such measures as increased enforcement of obscenity laws or restricting "mouse trapping" porn sites that open new windows using Javascript.
It also includes a painstakingly careful definition of terms like "obscenity," "indecency," and "child pornography," that are often used interchangeably by politicians -- but have remarkably different meanings in court.
"I think it handles both the First Amendment issues and the policy issues very well," says Eugene Volokh, who teaches First Amendment law at UCLA and reviewed the report. "I can't think of anything I would have done differently."
One area of disagreement among committee members was what impact sexually explicit material has on minors. Says the report: "This study is not a study on the impact of exposure to such material, nor does it come to a consensus on this question. Committee members had, and continue to have, a variety of different views."
"The committee did not come to consensus on the impact on children of viewing sexually explicit material," says Herb Lin, the study director for the NRC. "That point is discussed extensively, but the fact of the matter is that we did not need to do so in order to do our job."
What remains unclear is the impact Tuesday's report will have in the political debate still swirling around ways to limit sexually explicit material online.
Some government reports in the past have bolstered arguments of anti-porn advocates.
In 1985, President Reagan ordered his Justice Department to create what became known as the Meese Commission. Reagan likened the effort to closing hazardous waste sites, saying in all seriousness that "it was about time we did the same with the worst sources of pornography."
About 160 of 208 commission witnesses were anti-porn, Linda Lovelace of Deep Throat fame showed up to claim she was "a victim of pornography," and some commissioners spent their time quizzing witnesses about their vibrator collections. As recently as 1996, when defending the Communications Decency Act in court, the Justice Department cited the Meese Commission's report.
By contrast, a report released in 2000 by the government's Commission on Child Online Protection has been routinely ignored by both free speech advocates and anti-porn advocates.
Because of the NRC's stature, this report is far more likely to carry weight. A 1996 NRC report on cryptography was frequently cited when Congress was considering whether to increase or reduce regulations on encryption exports.
"The problem in this area is that the typical congressional response has been to shoot first and ask questions later," said Corn-Revere, the civil liberties lawyer. "The studies are now catching up to us and they don't support the level of emergency reactions that we've seen so far. We need to consider the facts first."
