MIT 6.805/6.806/STS085: Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier

Week of class on Sept. 19

Odds and ends

• Hal's slides on cryptography.

• Barb's notes on PKI.

• Barb's PKI exercise (Excel spreadsheet).

In class this week

Readings to do before class:

• Skim the following landmark Supreme Court cases in the history of broadcast regulation:

  1. FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978): In this case, the Court upheld the power of the FCC to regulate indecent (as opposed to obscene) speech in broadcast media, thereby codifying into law the principle that material broadcast over radio or TV has narrower Constitutional protections than material written in books or newspapers. The rationale for this rests on the "pervasive presence" of the medium -- that it is difficult to avoid unintentionally running across objectionable broadcasts even in the privacy of one's own home -- and that the medium is "uniquely accessible to children." The question of whether material transmitted via the Internet is more like broadcasts or like books was central to the arguments over the constitutionality of the CDA.

  2. Sable Communications v. FCC, 492 U.S. 115 (1989): The Court ruled here that a 1983 law banning dial-a-porn services was unconstitutional, on the grounds that it was overly broad. The opinion by Justice White lays out the famous "least restrictive means" test.
• Read the Supreme Court's decision in Reno v. ACLU, 521 US 844 (1997), and brief the ruling for this week's rotisserie assignment. You can find some helpful background on Reno and the Communications Decency Act by skimming the class archive on The Internet Censorship Saga: 1994-1997
• In order to get started thinking about your term project, read one of the student papers (any one you like) that was done for this class last spring, which you can find in the class archive for Spring 02. This will give you an idea of the level of ambition you should have for your project.