WIRED's Press Release Regarding the Ban - 3/23/94 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Taara Eden Hoffman 544 Second Street Director of Publicity San Francisco, CA 94107 USA +1 (415) 904 0666 taara@wired.com Cyberspace Cannot Be Censored ***************************** WIRED Responds to Canadian Ban of Its April Issue Wednesday, March 23, 1994, San Francisco WIRED's April issue has been banned in Canada. WIRED's offense? Publication of a story called "Paul and Karla Hit the Net," a 400-word article about how Canadians are getting around a Canadian court decision to ban media coverage of details in the Teale-Homolka murder case. This article does not reveal details of the case. Instead, the article WIRED's Press Release Regarding the Ban - 3/23/94 (23/24) explains why the media ban has proven unenforceable and reports how information on the case is readily available to Canadians. According to a survey conducted by the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, 26 percent of those polled said they knew prohibited details of the trial, because they are continuously leaked by Canadian court witnesses, police, and others to the international media. Once this information is published, it pours back into Canada via fax, videocassettes, magazines and photocopies of articles, e-mail, Internet newsgroups, and other online services. In the United States, People magazine, and the TV show, A Current Affair as well as the New York Times and other publications and shows have covered the story and the ban. As WIRED's story and the action of Canada's Attorney General make clear, the ban is not only a waste of time and money,but has actually had the opposite effect of what was intended. Rumors and sensationalized accounts of the case abound, and the Teale-Homolka trial is one of the hottest topics of discussion among Canadians. "Banning of publications is behavior we normally associate with Third World dictatorships," said WIRED publisher Louis Rossetto. "This an ominous indication that the violation of human rights is becoming Canadian policy." WIRED's Press Release Regarding the Ban - 3/23/94 (24/47) According to Rossetto, the Canadian Government's recent seizure of gay and lesbian periodicals under the guise of controlling "pornography" and its behavior in the Teale-Homolka case have made Canada a leading violator of free speech rights, and have set a scary precedent for other nations that would like to control what its citizens read and think. "Information wants to be free," said Jane Metcalfe, WIRED's president. "At the end of the 20th century, attempts to ban stories like this one are condemned to be futile. That WIRED's criticism of the ban has itself been banned is supremely ironic and utterly chilling." Since WIRED supports free speech, WIRED is making the text of its "banned" story with details on how readers can get more information on the case available on the Internet. Canadians and people around the world can discover exactly what the Canadian government is trying to keep hidden. The banned article text can be obtained via the following WIRED Online services: o WIRED Infobot e-mail server send e-mail to infobot@wired.com, containing the words "get homolka/banned.text" on a single WIRED's Press Release Regarding the Ban - 3/23/94 (24/69) line inside the message body o WIRED Gopher gopher to gopher.wired.com select "Teale-Homolka " o WIRED on World Wide Web http://www.wired.com select "Teale-Homolka " The complete text of WIRED 2.04 will be available from the Infobot, Gopher, and World Wide Web on April 19.