Seminar on Cybersmut:

It’s not often that former Christian Coalition Executive Director Ralph Reed, American Civil Liberties Union President Nadine Strossen and White House Senior Advisor Ira Magaziner sit down for a chat about the Internet.

But it happened last week in Aspen, Colo., at the fourth annual Cyberspace and the American Dream Conference, sponsored by the Progress and Freedom Foundation, the conservative Washington-based think tank.

Topic No. 1 was the now-defunct Communications Decency Act, Congress’ effort to protect kids from cybersmut. The Supreme Court in June overturned the law--part of the sweeping Telecommunications Act of 1996--on the grounds that it violated free-speech rights on the Internet.

Most of the participants in the keynote panel, titled “The Drive for Decency: Government, Morality, and the Digital Revolution,” agreed that new legislation is not the answer; they instead pinned their hopes on improving filtering software. The software is designed to allow users--such as parents and teachers--to block access to specific Web sites and to sites with off-limits keywords. But the programs usually fail to provide a complete barrier to obscene and indecent material.

Magaziner, who oversaw the Clinton task force that concluded the government should refrain from regulating the Internet, told conference attendees that the Clinton administration is pushing the software industry to develop more effective filtering systems, while Strossen rallied for voluntary ratings rather than mandatory ones.

“Different people are offended by different things,” said the ACLU leader. “Some people may be offended by Planned Parenthood content, while others may be offended by, dare I say, Christian Coalition content.”