obscene or menacing character’ and is an imprisonable offence with a maximum term of six months. When carefully scrutinised it is clear that the Act itself does not penalise the act of procuring a message to be sent. As usual, there are loopholes abound. When a telecommunication system located outside the jurisdiction is used to send obscene materials into the country, no offence has been committed. The 1984 Act will also not apply to cases where the data is transmitted by using a local area network unless part of the transmission is routed through a public telecommunications system. Even though UK legislation has recently been amended by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (‘CJPOA 1994’), in order to keep up with technological changes, there are still wrinkles in its enforcement with respect to the Internet. United State legislation has gone through many different tests of “obscenity” for reasons too many and varied to be discussed here. The current definition of obscenity is based on several conditions as opposed to a single one. On June 14, 1995, the Senate debated and voted on Title IV of the Telecommunications Competition and Deregulation Act of 1995 (S.652). Also known as the Communications Decency Act of 1995, it proposed to amend Section 223 (47 U.S.C. 223) to read: "Whoever, by means of telecommunications device knowingly makes, creates, or solicits, and initiates the transmission of, any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication which is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent, with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass another person," will be charged with a felony punishable by a fine of up to $100,000 or up to two years in prison, or both.” There are two immediately obvious reasons why the CDA was doomed to fail. Firstly, it may have severely restricted the flow of information and free speech. In its online analysis the “Electroni...
