The Supreme Court upheld a lower court's ruling on free speech.

April 20, 1999 -- A federal law keeping obscene content out of e-mails does not violate anyone's free-speech rights, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled yesterday. The ruling in ApolloMedia Corp. vs. Reno, 98-933, is the latest in a series of legal decisions to define the limits of free speech online.

Although ApolloMedia's "annoy.com" Web site, which allows users to anonymously communicate their opinions to public officials by using language some might consider indecent, was declared legal by the California Court of Appeals, ApolloMedia appealed the case to the Supreme Court in an effort to define the law more clearly.

Without issuing an opinion on the case, the Supreme Court upheld an appeals court's rejection of a claim that a part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 threatens the free-speech rights of Internet users.

Although it is commonly believed that the entire text of the CDA was struck down by the Supreme Court in June 1997, the court upheld a provision in the law making it a crime to transmit a "communication which is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy or indecent with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten or harass another person." In ApolloMedia's case, a three-judge federal court in California upheld the challenged provision by defining the phrase "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy or indecent" to mean only "obscene." Obscene material is not protected by the First Amendment.

When that court announced its decision last September, ApolloMedia President Clinton Fein told the Associated Press he was pleased that "it is constitutionally protected to send indecent communications with an intent to annoy." However, he and ApolloMedia argued that the wording of the law should not include "indecent" material if the government does not plan to enforce that clause.

Fein also told The Wall Street Journal that the law, originally developed to restrict harassing telephone calls, was inappropriately applied to e-mail, which is less disruptive to the recipient than a ringing telephone. He argues that the lack of case law regarding online communications should not prompt judges to apply laws regulating older technologies to the Internet.

The ruling comes only a few days after an April 15 House Committee on Science hearing on the recent outbreak of the 'Net virus "Melissa." While the hearing was held to investigate security measures that would stop similar future viruses, testimony centered around the tensions between the proposed security measures and the privacy of personal e-mail.

Two popular forms of maintaining privacy in e-mail, encryption and anonymous remailing, make it difficult to investigate potential security hazards or harassment attempts. Encryption encodes e-mail messages so they can only be read by the holder of the code key, while anonymous remailers allow users to e-mail messages to an anonymizing intermediary that forwards the messages on to their recipients.

These methods of securing e-mail limit the efficacy of law enforcement efforts to stop obscene or virus-laden e-mails. This Policy.com Daily Briefing examines tensions between free speech and law-enforcement efforts to stop illegal e-mail.

Protecting Speech	Online Security