on of privacy, real or imagined, is what drives the censorial impulse. Censorship has been practiced in both the narrower and the broader senses as long as there have been organized cultures. Those societies which have been most confident of their principles and loyalty of their members have allowed the greatest freedom from censorship, for they have been the least fearful of the consequences of dissent. In societies whose values have not been fully accepted by their people or whose leadership rests on shaky foundations, is where the heaviest hand of censorship has fallen. With the advent of technology and the expansion of resources via the interent and related mediums censorship as well as pornography has found new means of expression and a new problem for society to deal with. The Internet provides three major services to its users: E-mail, Usenet News and the World Wide Web (WWW). E-mail is the transfer of information from one user to another in an essentially private communication that has much in common with standard postal services. Pornographic material in this medium is limited to the transfer of picture files and text files and is extremely hard to regulate without gross intrusions into individuals privacy. This service has existed as long as the Internet in its current form. Usenet News is the discussion forum of the Internet, consisting of around ten thousand different 'Newsgroups' dedicated to topics ranging from Adoption to Zoophilia, with circulation in the late 1980s was estimated at 22,000,000 people worldwide. In the late 1990s it is likely to have grown to over 100,000,000, with the quantity of information posted more than doubling each year since 1993. The Internet user can post articles to any newsgroup they choose, in by doing so distribute text, graphics, videoclips, advertisements, or inevitably, pornography. The World Wide Web is the resource most people refer to as "The Internet". It is a method by which Internet users publish generally public information on Internet-connected computers. With around 31.4 million readers and 1.6 million sites in January 1997, the World Wide Web is easily the largest worldwide mass communications medium. With the medium comes the potential for the distribution and advertisement of pornographic materials. This creates a debate over what is censorship and what is really too explicit to be shown to the masses in any public medium. "The Net is the ultimate intellectual jumble. Brainy discussions of physics coexist with sophomoric essays, where sites that present satellite weather images are only a few clicks away from pornographic pictures" (Brody 11). Even the freest of nations find some forms of censorship necessary. Many politicians have made the analogy between a child going to an adult book store and the Internet. According to this analogy, a student can be thrown out of the store by the store manager. Unfortunately, on the Internet, there is no way to effectively supervise children's activities and as Edwin Diamond pointed out, ÒThere are more children are on the Internet than adults.Ó Pornography, or obscenity (which is the legal term), is any material, pictures, films, printed matter, or devices dealing with sexual poses or acts considered indecent by the public. Traditionally, the distribution and sale of pornography has been illegal in most countries. Only in Denmark have all restrictions on pornography been withdrawn (since 1969). Censorship of pornography exists in movies, books, and even in stores that make their profit from selling such materials. These stores are limited to their small parameters of what they can and ca

Some topics in this essay:
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