Leonard Pitts provided a poignant illustration of how computer smut reaches out to snatch innocent young people like his 10-year-old daughter and how nearly impossible it is to monitor and control. Many of us who have browsed the World Wide Web have had experiences similar to what Pitts saw happening to his daughter.
A seemingly harmless Web site is rigged to hijack the browser to a not-so-harmless Web site. If you try to escape you find that you’re not only stuck, but that you are shuttled to site after site of objectionable material.
As Pitts states so well, the notion that if you don’t like it, turn it off, doesn’t apply to the Internet, “where you don’t even have to go looking for smut because smut finds you.”
And Net-blocking software is far from foolproof and probably always will be.
Even the most ardent civil libertarians put the protection of children ahead of free speech rights. It’s simply wrong to passively accept the idea that the Web pornographers have the right to invade our privacy and ignore its corruptive effects on our children. Indifference to this will only embolden them. The vociferous guardians of Internet rights may shriek in alarm when they read this, but we need to find ways to regulate the Internet to protect our kids.
