[82505] in Cypherpunks
Re: Bomb Making Info to be Illegal
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lee Tien)
Thu Jun 26 12:16:38 1997
In-Reply-To: <v03102803afd74b50dcd5@[10.0.2.15]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 1997 23:20:44 -0700
To: Deborah Stewart <azur@netcom.com>, cypherpunks@algebra.com
From: Lee Tien <tien@well.com>
Reply-To: Lee Tien <tien@well.com>
Free speech meant little for more than a hundred years of American
history.
What we think of as the First Amendment slowly came into being starting
in the early 1900s.
E.g., Justice Brandeis' great quotes in Whitney v. California were from
his dissenting opinion; when movies first came before the Supreme Court
in Mutual Film, they were *not* protected by the First Amendment and
that wasn't overruled until 1952!
Lee
PS: "obscenity" and "child pornography" are not protected speech, but
"pornography" is not a legal category. "Indecency" is a category, and
it is protected speech -- the problem is that the government has a
compelling interest in controlling minors' access to indecent material.
At 3:34 PM -0700 6/25/97, Deborah Stewart wrote:
[snip]
>
>What's not clear to me, and I wish someone would explain, is how the
SC
>managed to find pornography not similarly protected speech. Arms and
>munitions can be as arousing for some (e.g., Dr. Strangelove) as sex
is for
>others.
>
>
>--Steve
