Thank you for visiting "The Navigator – Live." Today's chat ended at 3 p.m. EST.

Today my guest was Mike Godwin, counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a well-known activist for free speech and civil rights in cyberspace. He is also the author of the book "Cyber Rights : Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age." Godwin has been at the forefront of virtually every major controversy involving the Internet. He was, for example, a major player in disproving Time magazine's infamous "Cyberporn" issue, which relied on a questionable and inaccurate study. Godwin was also involved in the cyberspace libel issues raised by the work of Net gossip Matt Drudge and journalist Brock Meeks. He is an expert on the controversial social and legal issues engendered by the explosive growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web.

"The Navigator – Live" appears each Thursday from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern time. It's a live, moderated discussion offering washingtonpost.com users the chance to talk directly to intriguing and sometimes unusual guests who are shaping the digital world. "The Navigator" appears in The Washington Post print edition every Thursday. You can read past columns by following this link.

Linton Weeks: Hello everybody and welcome to another chilling, spilling, thrilling episode of Navigator--Live. Today my guest is...nowhere to be found. So until Mike Godwin shows up, I'm going to throw open the lines and ask you to send me questions about the Internet, suggestions for cool Web sites and any other-Net-related thoughts you might have. I realize this is risky. I'm just a mild-mannered reporter, but the folks at Washingtonpost.com want to give it a whirl. So fire away. And if we're really lucky, Mike Godwin of Electronic Frontier Foundation will show up.

Linton Weeks: Mike, what exactly is the Electronic Frontier Foundation?

Mike Godwin: We're a public-interest civil-liberties group that is dedicated to free-speech and privacy issues in cyberspace. We've been around since 1990, when we were started by Lotus founder Mitch Kapor and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow.

Linton Weeks: I realize this is weird. Mike Godwin's name is on the Submit Question form, but if you do have any questions, send them on.

Linton Weeks: When was it founded and who were some of its early leaders?

Mike Godwin: EFF was founded in 1990 by Mitchell Kapor and John Perry Barlow, with startup support also coming from Steve Wozniak, formerly of Apple, and John Gilmore, formerly of Sun.

Linton Weeks: How did you get involved with EFF?

Mike Godwin: I was hired by EFF after doing a lot of public-interest education and activism in my spare time as a law student. Mitchell Kapor and others saw my writing on Usenet and decided that I might be worth hiring as EFF's in-house counsel and first employee.

Linton Weeks: Welcome, Mike. Better late than never.

Linton Weeks: In plain English, could you explain the U.S. government's date encryption standard? Why is EFF so opposed to the DES? What difference does it make to everyday, run-of-the-mill Internet users?

Mike Godwin: I'm not sure I can explain the data encryption standard in plain English, but I can say what it does, which is twofold. First, it sets a government standard for interoperable data encryption, which in itself no one objects to. Second, it represents the government's attempt to suppress stronger and more powerful encryption, which bothers privacy activists quite a bit. The reason the government wants to suppress stronger encryption is that it wants to ensure that everyone remains wiretappable -- we think this is not a valid government policy.

Linton Weeks: You are against public libraries using filtering technology. Do you think it's okay for young people to download pornography? Does EFF expect librarians to monitor such activity?

Mike Godwin: I think this question is a little misconceived -- what we're against is public libraries' acting, in effect, as censors for adult library users, whether they're using filters or using other means. I think that filtering some terminals for children is fine, if a library feels a need to do that, so long as libraries are not in the censorship business generally. I also believe that asking questions like "do you think it's okay for young people to download pornography"? are inherently misleading, because they imply that EFF believes it should be setting policy for what young people should be reading. We think it's best for parents to do that.

Bethesda, Maryland: Do you believe in holding ISPs accountable for the actions of their clients?

Mike Godwin: I think it's vitally important that ISPs not routinely be held responsible for the actions and speech of subscribers. There are longstanding common-law and criminal-law principles that limit liability in such cases, and these principles have also found expression in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which limits liability for carriers for stuff they didn't originate. Any other approach is going to put ISPs in the position of editing the rest of us, and that would undermine the entire social value of the Internet.

Bethesda, MD: Does the rapid commercialization of the Web make the EFF's job harder or easier?

Mike Godwin: I think the rapid development of commercial offerings on the Web is generally a good thing -- it subsidizes expansion of the infrastructure for the rest of us. Hasn't hurt EFF's work in any direct way, although the sudden growth of the Net has caused a panic among policymakers.

Atlanta, Georgia: Sorry about Mike. He'll probably show up breathless any minute.

Has anybody been trying to link spam with free speech? And, why is porn spam so darn hard to block out?

Mike Godwin: Sorry if I'm late -- I got e-mail yesterday saying I was supposed to be here at 2 pm eastern time.

The spam/free-speech issue is a tough one -- it's hard to craft anti-spam regulation that doesn't infringe on freedom of speech guarantees, so our main concern is that such regulation be carefully crafted. That said, I'm all for anti-spam efforts.

Linton Weeks: We're just glad you're here, Mike. Thanks.

Linton Weeks: Where does EFF draw the line? Are there activities on the Internet that you will not support and defend?

Mike Godwin: "Where does EFF draw the line?" is a pretty broad question, given the range of human activities that have found their way onto the Internet. In general, we think that activities that are criminal offline should be criminal online, and that the protections that apply offline should also apply online. We're not going to defend someone who engages in blackmail just because he uses e-mail to do it, for example.

washington dc: what do you think the internet will look like 5 yrs from now? 10 yrs?

Mike Godwin: Well, this is one of the hardest questions I can imagine -- no one in 1992 quite imagined the Internet looking the way it does now.

But I think we're going to see much faster access speeds, mainly thinks to the growth of cable-based Internet connections, and that there will be more live-video applications as a result of high-speed connections. More than this I cannot predict.

Washington DC: Is there such a thing as true anonymity on the Internet?

Mike Godwin: Sure there is, but you have to use anonymous remailing servers and other tools to achieve it in any true sense.

Linton Weeks: The EFF supports a person's rights to post incendiary sites such as the Nuremberg Files, a Web site that targets abortion clinics. You told the Washington Post that in this country "there is a right to express hateful, even frightening thoughts." Are there sites you would not defend?

Mike Godwin: The sites I would not defend are the ones that are actively breaking the law (e.g., through the distribution of child pornography or the commercial distribution of unlicensed copies of software). But the right to say hateful things is and ought to be protected by the First Amendment -- remember, the government doesn't ever try to ban nice speech.

Washington: do you think the use of the web has maxxed out in this country? if so, what does that mean? if not, what does it mean?

Mike Godwin:
The use of the Web has not maxed (maxxed?) out -- it's continuing to grow, and that's because the graphic user interfaces that most people use for the Web's front ends are so easily grasped by inexperienced users. What we'll see, of course, is more and more people trying to figure out how to leverage the Web into commercial applications, with too few people trying to figure out how to leverage the Internet as a whole into new applications. That's a shame but it can't be helped.

Linton Weeks: Whew! We're a little more than half-way through the hour. I'll take a sip of Dr Pepper and you keep those questions rolling in.

boston ma: What is your organization's position on restricting the access of children to adult material? Surely you don't object to that?

Mike Godwin: I think if parents want to restrict children's access to adult material, that's fine. I think libraries that want to do this have to do it in a way that doesn't infringe on either adults' rights or minors' rights (where relevant) -- blanket filtering policies are not the right approach.

Bethesda, MD: Parents are too busy. We need help from teachers and librarians. There is just so much junk on the Internet and good, well-intentioned children are bombarded by adult content on the Internet. Should't some computers, complete with filters, be set aside in libraries for kids under 16?

Mike Godwin: I have no problem with setting aside some filtered computers for children.

Atlanta, GA: Didn't mean offense earlier, Mike. I'm a Texan alum..

Does the EFF mainly react to current Internet events or is it doing long-term planning on certain issues--5 years down the line?

Mike Godwin:
Atlanta, if you're a Texan alum, drop me some e-mail at mnemonic@well.com.

EFF is often forced to be reactive by the press of events and issues, but we do try to be forward-looking. Our work on sysop liability and on censorship issues prefigured the whole CDA fight, and we were able to leverage our preparedness in a way that trounced the opposition. We can't assume that we'll always have that kind of advantage, but we did have it then.

Linton Weeks: When Barry Steinhardt, president of EFF, said in the Washington Post that decency bills, such as the Child Online Protection Act, are Trojan horses. What did he mean? Were you surprised that the Motion Picture Association of America supported COPA?

Mike Godwin: I'm not sure I want to try to parse Barry too closely, since I haven't discussed that remark with him (and he's now the former EFF president -- we have a new boss, Tara Lemmey). But I think what he might have been getting at is that the political motives behind some of this legislation are suspect. I've spoken about this in other engagements and in my book, but, basically, what's at stake is that social conservatives want to validate some general governmental authority to censor content in all media, and they're using social nervousness about the Internet to do it.

I'm not terribly surprised about MPAA's taking a goofy stance on COPA. The MPAA is primarily a political organization designed to take the heat off content producers -- they're willing to embrace any scheme that makes them look like they're concerned about children, etc., so long as they can avoid having to go to court over First Amendment issues. I find their approach deeply unprincipled.

Washington DC: Which congresspeople do you consider to be friends of EFF and which are its enemies?

Mike Godwin: I don't really tend to divide up Congress into a friends and enemies, but there are some people who've done a great job on some of our issues, most notably Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont. Russ Feingold's pretty good as well.

Who's rotten? Senators Grassley and Hatch are guaranteed to propose awful legislation, and Henry Hyde was responsible for the deeply repressive form the CDA took.

Washington, DC: Do you have children who frequent chat rooms or use the Internet? At what age do you think kids should be given access to the complete Internet?

Mike Godwin: I have a little girl who will be six in April -- she's not in chat rooms yet, but I imagine she'll be online more in a couple of years.

It's hard to generalize for all children, and EFF doesn't purport to be a parenting-policy organization, but I personally think children should be given complete access to the Internet as soon as they're old enough to ask for complete access to it. (If they're not old enough to ask for complete access to it, then presumably they don't know miss what they're not seeing.)

Linton Weeks: Let's go another 12 minutes or so, okay?

Mike Godwin: 12 minutes is fine.

Linton Weeks: How has the WELL changed over the years that you have been a member?

Mike Godwin: The WELL has grown immensely in terms of the number and variety of people it has online, although by online-conferencing standards it's still a rather small system (under 15,000, I think). People are always saying that in the old days the WELL was wonderful in this or that way, but now it's changed -- but I'm sceptical. It's a little like the people who complain about their neighborhood changing -- there may be some truth to it, but it's only human to romanticize the good old days. I think the WELL, with which I've had a nine-year-relationship that has had its ups and downs, is pretty healthy as online communities go, and deep in a way that few other online communities are.

Linton Weeks: What is a network?

Mike Godwin: "What is a network?" Well, I think they used to be responsible for most of the TV programming, right?

Oh, a *computer* network. Hardware and software that allow computers to communicate with each other, usually as peers. Networks turn computers into communication machines.

Linton Weeks: Is the EFF concerned about the right to access, that is, making sure that all Americans can get online?

Mike Godwin: I think EFF believes that access is generally a good thing, but we also believe that the market is moving in directions that are likely to put more and more Americans online in the long run -- not too much we can do to affect that process, which fortunately is going in the right direction, in general.

Atlanta, GA: What sort of resources does the EFF use to create policy opinions? How much legal precendence can you use with new Internet technology and the sometimes thorny issues it creates?

Mike Godwin: Well, I'm one of the resources that EFF uses -- we use the minds of knowledgeable people, mostly. And when we're not knowledgeable enough, we go out and teach ourselves what we need to know.

Legal precedents don't have to be technology-dependent, which is why they are sometimes awfully useful. A case involving a BBS from the 1980s may be a valid precedent applying to AOL in the 1990s. And things like the First Amendment always apply, even though the definition of "speech" and "press" may change and grow.

Linton Weeks: What is EFF's stance on MP3 technology and amateur trafficking in downloadable music?

Mike Godwin: EFF has taken no stance on MP3, but we generally oppose any attempt to suppress new technologies based on the fears of copyright-holders. MP3 is going to be immensely useful to us all, even if we're not all engaged in copyright-infringing music trading -- let's not let the copyright industry drive a process that may limit what we can do as individuals.

That said, willful copyright infringement is a bad thing, and EFF doesn't support it.

Linton Weeks: I meant the Network Question in a cosmic sense. As opposed to a hierarchy.

Mike Godwin: Someone must have told you I'm a cosmic guy.

Okay, in the cosmic sense a network is Athenian democracy (but without a disenfranchised slave caste) embodied in wires.

Atlanta, GA: If libraries don't carry porn materials in their collections, why should they not be allowed to filter out that same material from their computers as well?

Mike Godwin: One might just as easily ask -- if libraries aren't running 900-number sex services, why do they allow people to use the pay phones at the library to call such services?

Let's be real for a minute -- whom do you know who thinks "Gee, I want to get some porn and enjoy it -- let's go to the *library*"? This whole porn-in-library issue strikes me personally as one of those things that censors obsess about, but that only rarely have practical impact. (I'm not saying that porn consumption in libraries never happens -- I'm just saying it doesn't happen often enough for it to deserve the kind of attention it gets from porn-obsessed policymakers.)

Linton Weeks: What other issues concern the Electronic Frontier Foundation these days?

Mike Godwin: Apart from free-speech issues and encryption issues, we're concerned about CALEA, the government's attempt to make the entire phone and computer network wiretap-friendly, and we're also concerned about personal privacy as it may be affected by the unbounded trade in personal data.

Linton Weeks: The EFF urges Internet users to join online campaigns. What campaigns is EFF involved in?

Mike Godwin: Rather than try to recite all the campaigns we've been a part of, let me steer readers here to our Web site --

http://www.eff.org

Linton Weeks: Well, we're out of time. Several questions we didn't get to, and for that I'm sorry. Thanks so much to Mike, to Washingtonpost.com and to all of you who had great questions. Next week my guest will be Rodney Jordan, co-founder of MelaNet, a Web site with an African-American point of view. Until then...

   |       |   

Back to the top