Bureaucrats in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Finland, Austria, Poland, Japan, and a host of other countries went on the Net to one extent or another.
Even Singapore, hardly famous for civil liberties and freedom of information, took a few steps to open up. I was surprised and pleased to find on a government server a 1993 Wired article with the not-so-flattering title of “The Intelligent Island?” Like many countries, Singapore faced a dilemma. Would the country’s strict culture suffer if the masses were allowed access to the Net? Singapore had flogged an American teenager merely for vandalizing automobiles; imagine if authorities instead had caught him in a sex act with a local. The whip was in character; it was a source of local pride, not shame. And yet if Singapore didn’t truly open itself on the Internet, if it couldn’t provide a hospitable electronic environment to megaconglomerates, the country would fall behind nations with a freer flow of information.
“Most Singaporeans are little rule followers,” a local hacker told Wired. “They are used to being spoon-fed what they are supposed to know by the government.” He predicted that Singapore would turn into a “controlled information center. The government will try to suppress hackers.”[[6.5]] And yet the very distribution of the article—for all to see on a Web server, amid official government documents—told me that the Orwellian scenario was not a full certainty. If Singapore could ease up a little, there might yet be a little hope for the rest of the cosmos.
However, the need for some healthy paranoia remains, even if, yes, Orwell overstated his case. An Internet Central doesn’t exist for bureaucrats to shut down, of course; messages can arrive by way of many paths, and electronic mail if need be can travel over normal voice lines. But martinets of all ilks can’t resist the urge to censor or unplug. A government computer in Canada is rumored to be programmed to reject Anglo-Saxonisms as passwords, and I don’t doubt it. Would that all outrages were so funny.
Claiming software piracy, cops shut down the electronic bulletin boards of scores of Italian progressives. “In some places,” the activist Bernardo Parrella reported, “sleeping people were abruptly woken up facing machine guns.” The boards were part of FidoNet, a worldwide BBS system with electronic mail connections to the Internet. Significantly the police didn’t undertake similar harassment against the high-tech admirers of Hitler and Mussolini. The victims were liberal or left wing. Within a year, the Italian cops were back at it again, seizing computers, disks, books, diaries, and other materials from citizens suspected of anarchistic sympathies. This time the police made no pretense; the raids were clearly political.
Politicians and bureaucrats can be just as prickly about sex as about politics. In Singapore, prudes searched the hard disk of computer systems to see if the good citizens were enjoying the alt.sex newsgroups. And back in the States, Senator J. James Exon of Nebraska concocted a nutty scheme to ban “indecent” material from the public areas of the Net. 1984 once more came to mind. Big Brother loathed sex, as Winston Smith, Orwell’s hero, knew all too well in carrying on an illicit affair with a female bureaucrat.
Jim Exon also hated sex—at least on the Net. I could appreciate his worries; did nine-year-olds really need to gawk at alt.sex.bestiality, or kiddie porn, or the next Brandy’s Babes? Exon, though, again and again, scrambled his facts. He relied partly on a breathless article that the Washington Post had run under the headline “Molesting Children by Computer.” Among other things, writer Sandy Rovner had advised parents to check their kids’ computers for files ending in “.BMP”. None other than the Microsoft Windows software, however, left .BMP files on hard drives—as a way to display images such as the corporate logo. Might Microsoft be a new Sodom?
“Obviously I had not researched the story enough,” Rovner admitted to her great credit. “I am new to the world of cyberspace.... I have a computer coach, but even he is behind on the Internet. Yes, I violated a cardinal rule of journalism—I didn’t know enough about what I was writing about. And I certainly wasn’t thinking censorship. Mea culpa. I am a staunch supporter of the First Amendment, as all journalists are or should be.” And yet Exon cited “Molesting” on the Senate floor to justify his repressive, cyberspace-oriented change in the existing Communications Decency Act. “Argghh,” went Rovner.
Even more significantly, Exon, as noted earlier, failed to grasp the difference between the Internet and television. Children wouldn’t just flick on a computer and see a Madonna look-alike climaxing with a German shepherd. They would have to look for pornography. And the industry was ready to work on software, such as SurfWatch, to help parents keep their kids out of pre-designated areas of the Net.
Nothing would be foolproof or teen-proof, of course. Brilliant technologists had designed the Internet to survive 100-megaton H-bombs. “The Net,” said the hacker John Gilmore in an oft-repeated quote, “interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”