http://209.1.112.252/l/wired?http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/13993.html 'CDA II' Passes Senate by Heidi Kriz 4:35pm 24.Jul.98.PDT In a move that critics say seriously threatens the right to free expression on the Web, the US Senate passed legislation Thursday that would restrict access to certain Internet material deemed "harmful to minors." S. 1482, sponsored by Senator Dan Coats (R-Indiana), also known as the "CDA II" bill, "would punish commercial online distributors of material deemed harmful to minors with up to six months in jail and a US$50,000 fine." Meanwhile, S. 1619, a bill by Senator John McCain (R-Arizona), requires that schools and libraries use blocking and filtering software on public-use computers in order to block children's access to "inappropriate" materials. Both bills were passed as a part of the Appropriations Bill on Tuesday, after a unanimous vote by the Senate earlier in the week to add them as amendments to that bill. Barry Steinhardt, president of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that CDA II makes a lot the same mistakes as the original Communications Decency Act, which was defeated last year after a nationwide campaign against it led by civil liberties organizations and free speech advocates. That campaign -- famous for the "Blue Ribbon" image that, starting in 1996, graced thousands of Web sites -- marked the most widespread online political protest in history. "The CDA II bill looks harmless, but it's a Trojan horse," said Steinhardt. "It's meant to apply only to commercial pornographic Web sites, but because of the ambiguous language of the bill, it will end up coincidentally affecting other commercial sites, such as Amazon.com or even our own Web site at [the foundation]," he said. David Crane, press secretary for Senator Coats, disagrees. "The Coats bill is not prohibitive, it does not ban anything," Crane said. "It merely requires that Web sites that contain material deemed 'harmful to minors' use methods that restrict access, such as use of a credit card, adult access code, etc." Ari Schwartz, policy analyst for the Center for Democracy and Technology, said the problem lies in precisely defining what exactly constitutes material "harmful to minors." "There is no useful legal test that exists to define what is 'harmful to minors,' that will not accidentally restrict harmless material in the process," said Schwartz. The McCain bill is also aimed at restricting access to pornography, but is specifically concerned with restricting minors from accessing the Internet at libraries and schools. "At home, parents can be in charge of what their children see or don't see on the Internet," said McCain's press secretary, Pia Pialorsi. "But in public places like a library or school, there have to be other filters in place." But those "other filters" -- the blocking and filtering software currently available -- are crude and overbroad, said Steinhardt. They inadvertently end up blocking access to sites such as the Quaker homepage, or the American Association of University Women, he said. "You can no more create a computer program to block out one community's view of 'indecency' or 'obscenity' than you can devise a filtering program to block out misguided proposals by members of Congress," Steinhardt wrote in an EFF statement. "Both may be desirable, but neither are possible." But Pialorsi said that McCain and supporters of his bill are aware of the technological limitations of existing filtering software, and hope to ameliorate that with the help of staffers at schools and libraries. "We encourage administrators in schools and libraries to take a hands-on approach in this, and want to let them determine which sites are objectionable or not, and how they will block them and which sites they will not block," Pialorsi said. Check on other Web coverage of this story with NewsBot