CENSORSHIP ON THE WEB

You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant, Arlo Guthrie used to
sing, and the same is true, in spades, of the Internet. News, celebrity Web
sites, chess games, how-to advice, pornography, chat rooms on any subject
under the sun--you name it, and it's all available to anyone with a computer
and modem. The vast variety of material is the beauty of the World Wide Web,
but to some people, it's also the flaw.

Two of those people are Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Orrin Hatch
(R-Utah), who make the common mistake of treating new forms of information
dispersal as intolerably dangerous merely because they are new. They have
introduced a bill called the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act that
prohibits some Web sites (as well as other publishers) from offering certain
types of information about drugs and drug paraphernalia. The restrictions
probably violate the 1st Amendment; they certainly endanger free expression.

The bill makes it a crime to post information that serves to "directly or
indirectly advertise for sale" drugs or drug paraphernalia. Violators can go
to federal prison for 10 years. One problem is that the ban is so broadly
written as to discourage any material about these subjects. Another is that
even a Web site that provides a link to another site with questionable
material may be prosecuted.

Feinstein and Hatch also propose to outlaw providing information about the
manufacture of controlled substances with the intent of facilitating a
federal crime. But intent, here again, is in the eye of the beholder. A Web
site operator may only want to illuminate a subject for her readers--but a
jury may not see it that way. Rather than risk a prison term, a lot of
publishers will err on the side of silence.

Oddly, the ban wouldn't apply to online behemoths like Amazon.com, which are
free to sell books about how to produce illegal drugs--because their vast
array of titles makes it plain that their only "intent" is to give customers
what they want. The most likely victims of the bill would be Web sites that
specialize in drug information. "Our entire Web site might have to come
down," says a spokesman for the pro-marijuana High Times.

We don't combat racism or extremist political ideologies by banning books
but by enforcing laws against violence. Likewise, if people are selling and
using illegal drugs, the appropriate response is to arrest and prosecute
them, not limit the information available to the public at large. Anyone who
thinks we should combat drugs by curbing free speech must be smoking
something.