Date: Wed, 7 Feb 1996 08:45:32 -0500 (EST)
From: "Shabbir J. Safdar"
To: vtw-announce@VTW.ORG
Subject: INFO: Internet users painting the net black on Thursday (2/6/96)
Reply-To: vtw-announce@VTW.ORG
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE FEBRUARY 6, 1996
Contact: Steven Cherry
(201) 596-2851
stc@vtw.org
Shabbir Safdar
(718) 596-2851
shabbir@vtw.org
New York, NY
INTERNET DAYS OF PROTEST TO BEGIN WHEN
PRESIDENT SIGNS TELECOMM BILL
INTO LAW
When there's a funeral in New Orleans, they don't just stand around
looking at a casket, there's a marching band, and when they mourn on the
Internet there's lots of noise as well. Virtual noise that is. Inside the
casket lies the First Amendment, and the noise is people turning their
World Wide Web sites black.
The last gasp for the First Amendment will be heard later this week when
President Clinton signs the long-awaited Telecommunications Reform Bill.
Buried just below its surface, like a bomb waiting to explode, lies the
descendant of the Communications Decency Act, legislative language that
will ban "indecency" in cyberspace. George Carlin-style indecency,
broadcast-media style indecency. An FCC-enforced ban on indecency, as if
the government could monitor the millions of Web pages, Usenet postings,
email listservers, and chat messages generated across the Internet each
day. As if American law could restrict what's available on a global
Internet, where pinup photos, cancer support-group advice, and currency
exchanges can move at the same speed and in packets that are essentially
indistinguishable, and servers can move around the globe in a way that
physical goods manufacturers can only look at, black with envy.
Black, as in the traditional color of mourning. The Grim Reaper wears
black. Judges wear black -- black robes symbolize a lack of favor to one
side or the other. The black of the "Day Without Art." The black that
people wear at funerals, to underline the loss of something important to
them.
On the Internet, a network, a networked community, based entirely on
speech, nothing is more important the freedom from censorship enjoyed up
to the moment when President Clinton's pen puts an asterisk next to the
First Amendment, an asterisk that says, "except on-line speech," an
asterisk it will probably take the Supreme Court months, if not years
to erase.
That black can be seen at http://www.surfwatch.com/, a popular site on
the Internet, and an especially ironic one to see it in. Surfwatch is
devoted to perfecting just the kind of parental controls that work far
more effectively than any government regulation could, and which
facilitate free speech instead of criminalizing it.
That black can be seen at sites large and small, commercial and
noncommercial. Christopher L. Barnard, who maintains Illinois Virtual
Tourist, says that his black pages are all ready to be loaded as soon as
he hears the bill is signed.
Turning the pages black, involves changing the backgrounds so that light
text appears on a dark background. It may not be aesthetically desirable,
as some, who are changing their pages anyway, have pointed out. It can
involve proprietary extensions to the formatting language of the Web,
complain others. It's been characterized the "Paint it Black" campaign by
some, and the "Thousand Points of Darkness" by others.
All in all, just the sort of free-wheeling, outspoken, opinionated
activity that has characterized the Internet since its inception over
twenty years ago. "What can we do?" asks Shabbir Safdar, co-founder of
Voter's Telecommunications Watch, one of the many on-line activist
organizations organizing the campaign. "It also can't be seen by
text-only Web browsers, or by people with net-access that doesn't include
the Web. But we couldn't let the day go by unmarked." The campaign asks
Web-based information providers to turn their pages to black for
forty-eight hours after the President signs the telecomm bill into law.
Sometimes it is easy to comply. Josh Quittner of Time-Warner's
Pathfinder, says, "Heck, our pages are black half the time anyway. But
for those two days they'll be black because of the telecomm bill."
Pathfinder is one of the largest and most-used sites on the Internet.
Sheryl Stover, marketing director at Internet On-Ramp, Inc., of Austin,
Texas, said her personal page is already black. But all non-client pages
are being altered from Monday February 5th through the two day period
after Clinton's pen adds a black-ink graffiti scrawl across the Bill of
Rights.
SurfWatch can be contacted at http://www.surfwatch.com/ or 800-458-6600.
Christopher L. Barnard and the Illinois Virtual Tourist can be reached at
312-702-8850, ilinfo-www@cs.uchicago.edu, and
http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/html/external/illinois/index.html.
Pathfinder's Netly News can be found at
http://pathfinder.com/Netly/nnhome.html
Sheryl Stover and the Internet On-Ramp, Inc. are at 509-624-RAMP and
http://www.ior.com/
Voters Telecommunications Watch is a volunteer organization, concentrating
on legislation as it relates to telecommunications and civil liberties.
VTW publishes a weekly BillWatch that tracks relevant legislation as it
progresses through Congress. It publishes periodic Alerts to inform the
about immediate action it can take to protect its on-line civil liberties
and privacy.
More information about VTW can be found on-line at
gopher -p 1/vtw gopher.panix.com
www: http://www.vtw.org
or by writing to vtw@vtw.org. The press can call (718) 596-2851 or
contact:
Shabbir Safdar Steven Cherry
shabbir@vtw.org stc@vtw.org