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Politech is the oldest Internet resource devoted to politics and technology. Launched in 1994 by Declan McCullagh, the mailing list has chronicled the growing intersection of culture, technology, politics, and law. Since 2000, so has the Politech web site.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,42523,00.html Library Smut Snit Heats Up by Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com) 2:00 a.m. Mar. 21, 2001 PST WASHINGTON -- It was reunion time Tuesday on Capitol Hill, as conservatives rallied to decry Internet "bestiality," a jab at overly permissive liberals, and remind everyone that library filtering is not only a good idea but also a very good law. A clutch of conservative groups, joined by Republican legislators and a blocking-software trade group, sounded precisely the same themes at a press conference that they gave back in 1995: Internet porn is endangering our youth, and the federal government has to do something about it. Not shirking from salaciousness, anti-porn activists suggested that the Internet was little more than a place to find pictures of women having sex with dogs. "I believe that a student should be able to search the Internet for information on wolves for a school report without being exposed to a picture of a woman having sex with a wolf," said Donna Rice-Hughes, a spokeswoman for FamilyClick.com who's well known in political circles. Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America was more graphic: "Pornography is getting more hard-core, including torture and mutilation of women, bestiality and child pornography." They and their allies had showed up to defend the Children's Internet Protection Act, a federal law linking blocking software to public funding of Internet access, which library groups on Tuesday sued to overturn on First Amendment grounds. The earnest exhortations and denunciations of anything more prurient than, say, WB's 7th Heaven were remarkable not for their vehemence but for their precedents: The same groups employed the same Fido-does-Debbie arguments when unsuccessfully defending the Communications Decency Act and the Child Online Protection Act. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if it remains intact. To subscribe, visit http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------