Censorship: Debate Scenarios/Discussion Questions



By: Matthew Giannini, Alex Kochmar, William Luebke, Cao Nguyen, Rob Orifici, and Scott Preddy



Part I - Censorship in the United States of America


  1. Is the Internet a free forum for discussion, or is it a broadcasting service, and therefore subject to the same restrictions as television, print, or radio?





  2. Read the article at http://www.eff.org/pub/Legal/Cases/Loudoun_library/HTML/19981123_eff_statement.html and consider this debate question:
    Do you agree with the US District Court's ruling, or do you think that libraries should have their Internet access "filtered" to exclude objectionable content?





  3. Is it legal and ethically sound for web sites to host hacking tools and cracks? Should they be censored? Why or why not?





  4. A dean of a local university has decided to block certain newsgroups from the university's news server. Is this a case of censorship? Are the dean's actions constitutional? See http://courses.cs.vt.edu/professionalism/Censorship/Censorship.html for more information.





  5. Since certain types of speech are not protected by the first amendment, does this imply that the first amendment's protection of "freedom of the speech" has been rendered meaningless?