Pushing Back on Labeling  August 4, 2006 Filed under Free
Expression On Thursday we sent a pair of letters to the Hill
opposing legislation that would force Web site operators to tag
a broad range of legal, socially valuable material with a
government-approved warning label identifying the material as
"sexually explicit." The move is the latest congressional effort
to place unconstitutional controls on Internet content. CDT sent
one letter to the Commerce Committee, which included the
labeling provision in a major telecom bill, and another to the
appropriations committee, urging lawmakers to remove the measure
from the massive Science-Commerce-Justice-State appropriations
package, to which it was recently appended. What's particularly
troubling is that lawmakers have added the labeling mandate to
two unrelated bills without any hearings or debate. Worse still,
the committees that included the labeling language do not have
any jurisdiction over the issue. The labeling mandate is in fact
a criminal law that aut