Sex and Violence in Cyberspace
Edupage (2/12/95), Originally appeared in the New York Times (2/1/95).
A University of Michigan
student is in jail, charged with the federal crime of transporting
threatening material across state lines. He had posted to the Usenet
group alt.sex.stories a short story using the real name of one of his
female classmates and describing the torture of a woman with a hot
curling iron and her mutilation and sodomization while she is gagged to
a chair. The student's arrest has been criticized by such privacy and
civil liberties groups as the ACLU and EPIC, which argue that the
authorities have encroached on the man's freedom of speech. The
executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says: This
young man posted it into a Usenet group that had other similar
postings. They accepted it as a type of writing that was acceptable
under their community standards.
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