In July 1995 the censorship debate was still at full blast. Just as Jim Exon had relied on the misleading _Post_ story, so did his side brandish a sensationalistic _Time_ magazine cover. A shocked, wide-eyed child gaped at “CYBERPORN,” as the headline described it “EXCLUSIVE: A new study shows how pervasive and wild it really is. Can we protect our kids—and free speech?” Out of character, Philip Elmer-DeWitt, one of the most Net-aware of all the reporters in the mass media, had relied on a flawed paper out of Carnegie Mellon University. The student perpetrator of the study, one Martin Rimm, had overgeneralized, and two professors at Vanderbilt disemboweled him with a 9,000-word rebuttal on the World Wide Web. If nothing else, the Rimm study had blurred the distinction between bulletin board systems and the Internet itself and also confused Usenet with the Net as a whole. Carnegie Mellon investigated whether Rimm had violated people’s privacy. Most deliciously of all, however, from a Net perspective, he had written something else—a self-published novel with such picturesque terms as “rectum rocket.” Would that Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken had been around to chronicle the circus. Over on the House side, Speaker Newt Gingrich sensibly let his libertarian side prevail and opposed Exon. I wasn’t surprised. How could Gingrich play nanny while railing in general against regulation and bureaucracy, especially when he himself had set up shop as a novelist? My fellow liberals, though, were amazed. It was as if they were watching the T-Rex in _Jurassic Park_ gobble up a velociraptor that was about to enjoy a human snack. Maybe the Exon-style proposals by now will have suffered the fate of the smaller dinosaur, but similar lunacy is bound to break out anew.[6.7] Among some on Capitol Hill, the urge to censor is as powerful as the passion for reserved parking places.[6.8] If the censors do win, their narrow-mindedness may backfire in ways beyond the ones I’ve already described—and these risks will only grow in the future, as the Net becomes still more international. Puritanical countries such as Singapore might arbitrarily jail visiting Americans who, from the States, had made Internet postings deemed offensive by the standards of local dictators.[6.9] The possibilities are endless. A U.S. novelist passing through a Mideastern country could become the next Rushdie if the local ayatollahs deemed his online work offensive. Clinton’s Feds hardly helped when they went jurisdiction shopping and prosecuted the owners of a California BBS for sex-related material that violated community standards in _Tennessee_. Applied internationally, the local-standards principle could send an American to a sword-wielding executioner someday. The Bill of Rights, alas, is just a U.S. phenomenon. Exon You!