VICE RAID ON THE NET

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

ON SATURDAY NIGHTS, BRANDY'S Babes, "the World's First Cyber Brothel," cruise the Internet. According to their literature--which is pretty hard to miss if you're online--the Babes hang out in a public "chat" zone and, if you're lucky, will accompany you to a private place where you can swap dirty messages. And while they're online, you can tap into another computer and view their fescennine photos, which are supposedly updated every six minutes. Tricia, one of the Babes, promises more nymphotech is on the way, involving a video camera hooked up to the net--and a telephone and a Babe, which are not. "We are going to try new things related to computers and sex," Tricia wrote. "Brandy's girls just want to have fun."

But what's fun for Brandy's girls may soon be fodder for cyber vice squads. Late last week, as part of an omnibus bill that would overhaul telecommunications policy for the first time in more than 60 years, the Senate Commerce Committee proposed a ban on pornography in cyberspace. The plan, known as the Communications Decency Act of 1995, would make it a crime, punishable by up to $100,000 and two years in jail, to transmit "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy or indecent" images, E-mail, text files and any other form of communication online.

Bye-bye Brandy, babe. Hello law-and-order on the electronic frontier. "In its simplest form, we are taking the antismut and antipornography laws that have long been in place with the telephone and the mails, and applying them to the information superhighway," says Senator Jim Exon, the Nebraska Democrat who sponsored the decency act. "I want to make the information superhighway as safe as possible for kids."

Even staunch defenders of free speech admit that cyberspace has red-light districts unsuitable for young Elroy Jetson. And there's no bouncer to keep out minors. Sexual content is scattered throughout Usenet, the collection of more than 5,000 special-interest public forums on the Internet, and accessible as well to users of large commercial providers such as America Online. One of the best-read sections of Usenet is alt.sex, a newsgroup so popular it has spawned more than 60 offshoots, from alt.sex.bestiality.barney to alt.sex.woody-allen. Half a dozen other Usenet groups also store free, X-rated images that users can download and view on their computers. On the multimedia portion of the Internet known as the Web, Penthouse and others serve up free, frontally nude cyber-pinups. Those sites are frequently jammed beyond capacity. (Last year a Carnegie Mellon graduate student surveying sex on the Internet determined that 450,620 pornographic images and text files had been downloaded 6,432,297 times in six months. And that's just in America.)

Needless to say, the Exon amendment has inflamed many of those downloaders, as well as civil libertarians, who say it's not only unconstitutional, but it's also ridiculous. Enforcing a local smut ordinance on the unbounded Internet, they say, is akin to ordering dandelions to quit floating their spore. How do you control a decentralized network of more than 50,000 interconnected networks? How do you censor information when it flows down infinite paths among 30 million computers? The Exon amendment's solution, which absolves online providers from having to police their networks, is to bring the Internet and the rest of the online world under closer federal jurisdiction. "This is grounded in a vast ignorance of Internet communications," says Mike Godwin, counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Washington.

Godwin and other lawyers say the Exon amendment wobbles because it stands on a 1988 "dial-a-porn" law that banned "obscene and indecent" phone services. That law, which was also enacted by Congress to protect children, was partly struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court as being overly broad. It strayed beyond the well-defined notion of obscenity into the netherland of indecency. Obscenity involves "sexually graphic material that is grossly offensive to contemporary community standards and has no significant scientific, literary or artistic value," explains Laurence Tribe, the Harvard University Law School professor who helped upend the dial-a-porn case. But what does indecency mean? Not to mention lewd and filthy? The Exon amendment could suffer the same fate.

"There is a legitimate interest to make it possible for parents to control the upbringing of their children and not have it all screwed up by invaders from cyberspace," Tribe says. But that interest might be better served by online service providers offering parents ways to screen information at home rather than by having the government ban it outright.

Exon stresses that his amendment is but a small part of the telecommunications bill, which would deregulate the nation's local and long-distance telephone and cable companies. Should the bill get through Congress this year-and many observers believe it stands a good chance--it is expected to accelerate the construction of high-speed, broad-band networks that will reach into every home. Even Brandy's.

--With reporting by Suneel Ratan/Washington

With reporting by Suneel Ratan/Washington