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A L S O__T O D A Y
The Richard Stallman saga, redux T A B L E__T A L K What buzzwords do you love to hate? Vent about "technobabble" and "marketspeak" in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Let's Get This Straight Death and the hard drive Inside the new high-tech lock-downs Internet U. The 21st Challenge No. 13: Status gadgets - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
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Ken Starr, Web porn purveyor
BY SCOTT ROSENBERG | Congressional Republicans are rushing to release the Starr report on the Internet. Nothing must delay a prompt delivery of "the facts" to the American people! And the people, at least that subset of the people who are on the Net, are already hammering the four announced locations where the report will be posted (the Library of Congress, the House Judiciary Committee, House Information Resources and the Government Printing Office). But it's highly unlikely that "the facts" are what all those surfers are after. Your usual 500 pages of legalese would not attract the tidal wave of traffic that congressional webmasters are frantically preparing to deal with. No, it's the "graphic descriptions of sexual encounters," as the New York Times' leaked front-page story Friday described them, that have generated so much interest. As the New York Post put it, the report features "a sizzling description of a sex-with-cigar interlude between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky," a "kinky encounter" that is "among the many XXX-rated details in the Sexgate prober's report." I wouldn't blame the public for itching to read this stuff; that's just irrepressible human nature. But there is some ghastly cosmic joke in the spectacle of Congress' conservative Republicans rushing to become purveyors of Net porn, all the while intoning that they are performing their constitutional duties. After all, it's less than three years since these same legislators overwhelmingly passed the notorious Communications Decency Act -- whose ban on distributing "indecent" and "offensive" material online in forms accessible to minors might well have covered the Starr report. Under the terms of the CDA, the congressional release of the Starr report could well have been viewed as a criminal act. (Though the CDA was struck down in 1997, Congress is, ironically, holding hearings today on new versions of the law.) But thanks to the efforts of all the defenders of cyber-liberties who fought the CDA to the Supreme Court and saved us from its unconstitutionalities, there is nothing standing between the Starr report's gory details and us. (Some users of Web-filtering products in homes or businesses may find the report blocked as pornography -- and some purveyors of those products are getting some free publicity as a result.) In today's accelerated news cycle, there's no way anyone could ultimately prevent a document like the Starr report from making its way online. But that shouldn't blind us to what's going on today: The rush to make sure that the American (and world) public have immediate and total access to every word of Starr's report on the Net -- before Clinton himself has a chance to respond and before lawmakers have an opportunity to digest the charges -- is a gross act of partisan politics, sanctimoniously swaddled in freedom-of-information rhetoric. Clinton's enemies know very well that their best hope of lowering his poll numbers is to turn him into a figure of ridicule -- and the Internet is an extraordinarily efficient machine for accomplishing that goal. Here's what's likely to happen when the report becomes available: As Congress posts the report to its Web sites, news organizations will pick it up and redistribute it. Many newspapers have announced their intent to rush special-section editions containing either the full report or excerpts as fast as they can. But long before the presses roll, individuals on the Net will have scoured the report for the salacious sections, cut and pasted them into e-mails and bulletin-board postings and distributed them to millions of recipients -- annotated with sarcastic and obscene commentary. This morning's Wall Street Journal offered a guide to "Surfing the Starr Report" that coyly advised, "Once you manage to call up the report you'll see ... page after page of dry, lawyerly prose. Your browser can help." Use the "find" function, the Journal suggested. It didn't need to say what words to search for -- can you spell "cigar"? Publicly, the congressional technical staff is putting on a brave face about the logistical nightmare of serving the Starr report to millions of Net users. Ray Strong, the assistant to the House clerk who is helping coordinate the Web effort, says he's not worried that the government's servers might not be able to handle the traffic load. "We're putting it on four different servers for the public and a number of internal servers for congressional staff people. We're hoping to level off the load and spread it around so no one system is overburdened." The Starr file will be made available in both Web-page (HTML) and Adobe Acrobat (PDF) formats, and Strong predicted it would take the clerk's office special team of 10 technical staffers two hours to post the information once it got the go-ahead from the legislators. Maybe the House servers will hold up under the load; maybe they'll freeze up the moment the report goes live. But while news coverage focuses on the "can government computers stand the strain?" angle, reporters are forgetting that within a matter of hours, if not minutes, the Starr report's "juicy" parts -- the "good stuff" -- will turn into the fastest-moving electronic chain-letter in history. The servers won't need to perform -- human nature will do the job for them. And as each Clinton-Lewinsky encounter wends its way through the electronic grapevine, bereft of legal context and amplified by partisan hoots and jeers, the last thing on anyone's mind will be fairness, due process and the fundamental gravity of the impeachment process that congressional leaders so dutifully cite. In short, hustling Starr's report onto the Net is the quickest way to ensure that people ignore the legal complexities of the Starr report and focus on the dirt. Given his own actions, there's no way President Clinton could possibly avoid becoming the butt of a million dirty jokes anyway. But the Republicans' "hang him on the Net" strategy is surely a cold, calculated effort to jump-start that process.
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Additional reporting for this column was contributed by Marcia Stepanek. |
