Virtual Déjà Vu: n. 1. The feeling that you've closed that popup before. 2. The feeling that you've seen that internet censorship bill before."

I first started getting really interested in the Internet five years ago and I've always had an interest in things of a political nature. I went online just in time to watch the mess caused by the passage of a bill intended to prevent minors from accessing pornography. In 1996, the Communications Decency Act was passed by both houses of congress and signed by President Clinton. As a Democrat, that has remained my single biggest complaint about his administration, even more so than his personal indiscretions. The bill he signed would have severely restricted free speech on the Internet and done almost nothing to protect the children it was supposedly written for.

One of the beauties of the American constitution is that it is the most perfectly written “BS” job ever done; far outperforming anything written by the typical high school student. The basic idea, however, is still the same. The founders of this great country had no idea what the future would hold, and therefore could not possibly be anything other than vague and general in the set of laws that would determine the course of their nation’s future. Although this has proved to be the strong point of the American government, this time it was the cause of a great failure. The Communications Decency Act, part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, was originally a bipartisan effort to protect children from the many indecent and obscene things that our society has created and wound up being the worst and most widely opposed blunder the federal government has created since the Vietnam War. In short, it is simply too vague. The bill itself never defines indecent and offensive and does not propose a solution to the technological problem of how to censor the Internet without banning censored material completely and thus has opened itself to lawsuits of massive proportions. Eighteen different companies and civil rights groups including the ACLU have banded together to challenge the Act on the grounds that it is so vague as to violate the First Amendment right to freedom of speech.