Free Speech Victory!

It's good to see that FREE SPEECH still rules! This was a very good decision. Please note that this term "least restrictive means" is appearing more and more in Federal decisions.

It has great significance for those fighting for Freedom of Religion (Religious Freedom Act), because it means the gov't must use the "least restrictive means" of enforcing laws that restrict our freedoms!

So blanket bans like this won't fly because there are always less restrictive means of accomplishing the same goal.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8O18BCO3&show_article=1

PHILADELPHIA (AP) - A federal judge on Thursday dealt another blow to government efforts to control Internet pornography, striking down a 1998 U.S. law that makes it a crime for commercial Web site operators to let children access "harmful" material.


In the ruling, the judge said parents can protect their children through software filters and other less restrictive means that do not limit the rights of others to free speech.

"Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection," wrote Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr., who presided over a four-week trial last fall.

The law would have criminalized Web sites that allow children to access material deemed "harmful to minors" by "contemporary community standards." The sites would have been expected to require a credit card number or other proof of age. Penalties included a $50,000 fine and up to six months in prison.

Sexual health sites, the online magazine Salon.com and other Web sites backed by the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the law. They argued that the Child Online Protection Act was unconstitutionally vague and would have had a chilling effect on speech.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a temporary injunction in 2004 on grounds the law was likely to be struck down and was perhaps outdated.

Technology experts said parents now have more serious concerns than Web sites with pornography. For instance, the threat of online predators has caused worries among parents whose children use social- networking sites such as News Corp.'s MySpace.

The case sparked a legal firestorm last year when Google challenged a Justice Department subpoena seeking information on what people search for online. Government lawyers had asked Google to turn over 1 million random Web addresses and a week's worth of Google search queries.

A judge sharply limited the scope of the subpoena, which Google had fought on trade secret, not privacy, grounds.

To defend the nine-year-old Child Online Protection Act, government lawyers attacked software filters as burdensome and less effective, even though they have previously defended their use in public schools and libraries.

"It is not reasonable for the government to expect all parents to shoulder the burden to cut off every possible source of adult content for their children, rather than the government's addressing the problem at its source," a government attorney, Peter D. Keisler, argued in a post-trial brief.

Critics of the law argued that filters work best because they let parents set limits based on their own values and their child's age.

The law addressed material accessed by children under 17, but applied only to content hosted in the United States.

The Web sites that challenged the law said fear of prosecution might lead them to shut down or move their operations offshore, beyond the reach of the U.S. law. They also said the Justice Department could do more to enforce obscenity laws already on the books.

The 1998 law followed Congress' unsuccessful 1996 effort to ban online pornography. The Supreme Court in 1997 deemed key portions of that law unconstitutional because it was too vague and trampled on adults' rights.

The newer law narrowed the restrictions to commercial Web sites and defined indecency more specifically.

In 2000, Congress passed a law requiring schools and libraries to use software filters if they receive certain federal funds. The high court upheld that law in 2003.

 

This was a law that could've been used to shutdown this website.

Like we're responsible for who comes here and views this...

Besides everything here should be accessible to children except those areas that we've already restricted.

 

Yes, supposedly it would not have applied to websites hosted outside the US, but at times this site has been hosted in the US, and was back in the late 1990s.

 

These are judeo/christian morals that have imbedded themselves into our justice system, despite safeguards. This is because we let the religious fanatics gain too much political influence.

But there is a growing movement away from mixing faith and politics, esp. among christians. The anti-Christian backlash is growing everyday because people are starting to see evangelical religious beliefs & leaders traded peace for war, and have stood by Bush and should sink with him.

Sentient your words ring true.

You make a valid point about representative government limiting democracy, something I think may be the greatest failure of our system. We don't need it anymore as Internet Democracy is coming soon.

But that is a separate issue from free-speech. We are using our free speech right, right here, right now. We haven't been silenced yet. But that may still be coming if we don't continue to speak out as we have been.

There are NO LIMITS to what the people can do if they decide to do it. At some point events may compel many complacent people to action.

I do sense a waking of the collective consciousness these days. And once people wake up they won't go back to sleep.

So long as we continue to disgrace our country with unwinnable, yet profitable wars that are leaving a legacy of hate around the world, people will wake up in ever increasing numbers.

And then America's Collective Karma will come back to haunt all Americans for generations to come (if there are any left...)

 

What most fear addled parents don't realize is that it's not the Internet that is to blame. That's akin to blaming the phone company for kids giving their phone numbers out to strangers.

No the blame rests first with parents who should teach their children about these matters BEFORE they ever get online. Then they have the responsibility to monitor their childrens' Internet activities, and there is plenty of software available for that.

Even then, there are still several steps that would be necessary before ANY CONTACT or ANY CRIME is involved with children.

The kids would have to give out location information. Or they would have to agree to a rendevous. But wait didn't their parents tell them never to trust strangers or meet with them or go in their cars? So there should be another whole layer of security programmed into kids at this point.

Then for a kid to go ALONE to meet a stranger, is another STUPID move on the part of the kid and another failure of parental and school education, not the Internet.

Lastly for the stranger to actually harm the child, the point at which an ACTUAL crime has been committed, the child would have had to agree to a specific set of circumstances before this could occur - Going alone to a meeting, telling no one, then meeting in a place without anyone else around.

Now if that set of circumstances didn't set off alarm bells with parents or children (who are always supposed to tell their parents where they're going right?), then again that failure is so far removed from the Initial Internet contact as to make that online contact the LEAST important factor in the crime.

But you see that wasn't the only intent in the law. The law was written to enable the government even further control over the Internet.

By giving the gov't grounds to shutdown websites based on the "potential" of content to "harm" a child, that precedent could easily be extended to whatever reason they chose to shutdown a website based on some perceived "potential" harm that could come about child or not.

So it could've easily been broadened to shutdown any site that say was against the Iraq war because it might "harm" our soldiers ability to fight or lower their morale, or whatever convenient excuse they could dream up.

Good Riddance to that law!