FURIOUS nads! by The One True b!X

As something of an experiment, I’m going to be digging into the archives now and again to offer up some portion of my past about which many people don’t know, or which I simply happen, for whatever reason, to find worth a moment here.

This time around, we’re going back to 1995, when I was embroiled in the fight against the Communications Decency Act, a bill pitched by the late Senator James Exon which was the first full-frontal assault by the U.S. Congress against First Amendment rights on the Internet.

What follows is the text of the opening to an article from Rolling Stone, published in its October 5, 1995, edition.

Slowdog’s hanging out upstairs at the @ Cafe in New York’s East Village, sipping cup after cup of coffee and tap-tap-tapping into the Internet on one of the computer terminals that looms over every table like a television set. Slowdog is 25 years old, with black pants, black t-shirt, black baseball cap, black sneakers, long black eyelashes, and a face that sees very little sun.

Born Christopher Frankonis, Slowdog used to work at the New York Public Library and log on, stop at the @ Cafe and log on, traipse back to his basement flat in Brooklyn, NY, and log on, surfing the Internet that runs like a vast river through wired America.

No real point, no particular politics, just another college dropout hooked on the Net. A kid from upstate New York with a mouse and a quick wit.

Then came Sen. James Exon, D. Neb, and his Communications Decency Act. Exon introduced a bill this March that proposes to tame the Internet. This senator wanted to pasteurize Slowdog’s wild river of words and symbols, criminalize the transmission of lewd and lascivious language, make the world safe for June Cleaver.

An activist was born.

“Instead of understanding a new medium, they want to extend an old law from television,” Slowdog says. “It’s going to chill speech, make users liable for content. I knew I had to go beyond my insular little world on the Net. Here is my shot.”

Slowdog and a half-dozen young activists worked with the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C., and started a computer petition. They hoped for 10,000 signatures in three days. Two and a half months later the tally stood at 121,284, with support ranging from the libertarian Cato Institute to First Amendment absolutists. “Man, we were getting 1,000 signatures an hour,” Slowdog says.

In late April a messenger walked into the office of Sen. Larry Pressler, R.S.D, whose committee was holding hearings on the bill, with a 1,000-sheet printout containing the names of the petition’s signers. “To a politician, that’s like carrying a political loaded gun,” one staffer recalls. The petition came on top of the e-mail messages and faxes that Pressler’s office had been getting for weeks.

Slowdog takes a hit of his latte and smiles. “I don’t know that I was ever political before,” he says. “But this was so severe and showed so little of understanding of something new. All of a sudden I had to put up or shut up.”