From: "Declan B. McCullagh" <declan+@CMU.EDU>
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 1996 15:30:48 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: More on LolitaWatch
Message-ID: <IlisQxa00YUy8aEFgk@andrew.cmu.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


http://www.internetworld.com/iw-online/July96/news.html
                  
     CDA Watch: DoJ Proposes Tagging Underage Users
       
     According to the press release, Nubility Inc. had released
     LolitaWatch, a network utility that detects "nubile young teens"
     online by checking for the federally mandated "age bit" in TCP/IP
     packets. But like the original novel, which parodied an older man's
     lust for a lascivious teen, LolitaWatch is a hoax, designed to
     illustrate the dangers of attaching age information to this
     workhorse Internet protocol.

     The proposal for an age bit is a serious one. Advanced during the
     Philadelphia court challenge to the Communications Decency Act
     (CDA), it's part of what American Library Association (ALA) attorney
     Bruce Ennis calls the Department of Justice's (DoJ's) "efforts to
     redefine the way the CDA is written."

[...]

     If the high court strikes down the CDA, Congress will try again. 
     Jack Fields (R-Texas), chair of the House telecommunications       
     subcommittee, said in May: "We should be ready with a         
     response--[pornography] is a real problem. I have a six-year old and
     I get concerned about that. I want a real solution that works. The
     CDA was driven by emotion and not by real policy."
     
     Forty years ago, media hype gave Lolita a reputation as an obscene
     novel and prompted the French, Argentine, and New Zealand           
     governments to censor it. But Vladimir Nabokov's work contained not
     one explicitly sexual passage. Without reading the book, customs
     agents never knew that it was a sad parody of an old man's fantasy
     lust for a young girl.

     The Net censors seem to have found in the Internet a modern      
     Lolita--which they understand just about as well as the 1950s   
     customs agents understood Nabokov.

     --Declan McCullagh