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Candidates' Positions On Internet Filtering
VirtualAdept writes: "The candidates' views came out in the debate last night on the issue of Internet content. Essentially it boils down to the fact that Bush favors putting a filter on all computers paid for by public money (libraries, schools, etc) and Gore favors ISPs having a 'parents' protection page every time 95 percent of the pages come up' as well as 'a feature that allows parents to automatically check, with one click, what sites your kids have visited lately.' The relevant quotes are on the third page of the Posts's debate coverage, about 1/4 of the way down on my window. Here is the start of the Washington Posts's debate coverage." Very few issues hit as close to home as this one.
Gore's plan seems to be really horrible... it puts a huge responsibility on ISPs. They have to intercept web requests and insert their own parent-blocking-thing. Most ISPs don't have this infrastructure. They also don't have the infrastructure to keep track of what pages you've visited. And that's a lot of stuff for them to keep track of, not to mention that there are other barriers (encryption).
Bush's idea to put blocks on public computers may be a bad idea, but at worst you won't be able to get to some sites you need to get to at your library. With Gore's plan, suddenly ISPs have a huge responsibility to keep track of everyone's usage, and when they do that they open themselves for (A) lots of lawsuits and (B) now the gov't can subpeona your browsing history from your ISP that they have to keep. There goes all your privacy.
Not only that, we've seen recently that many ISPs back down from big corporate pressure... since your ISP now has a list of everywhere you've visited some corporation can sue your ISP ``unless you tell us everyone who has downloaded an mp3'' or something.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
I think I'm voting for Bush, if only for the lesser of two evils.
I was struck by the comments generated when one Joyce Klinger asked about morality and Hollywood and violence, and children.
He talks about character education in schools, filters in the public libraries(as you alluded to), after school programs etc.
But what 'impressed' me was his voice against censorship. Yes, you can talk to Hollywood and such, and ratings would be helpful, and controls would be helpful, but, he says:
"I'm going to remind mothers and dads: The best weapon is the off-on button, and paying attention to your children and eating dinner with them..."
So, unless you're just reading sound bites or something, Bush qualifies as a candidate.
Gore, on the other hand, wanted ISPs to have "parents' protection page every time 95% of the pages come up. And a feature that allows parents to automatically check, with one click, what sites your kids have visited lately."
Which sounds like a privacy nightmare for kids and families. Who gets access to this information *other* than parents?
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
And by god, if I catch Jenny looking at that birth control website again she's gonna get the beating of her life.....
As this is only my opinion, I'll say what I think.
There needs to be a simplification of roles. Either a child is given privacy and all the responsibilities that come with it, or the parent must be able to check on their child.
We're living in a time where parents can be held responsible for a child's actions, and must pick up the peices when a child makes a mistake. Never mind the fact that the child made the mistake under the protection of privacy, thus the parents had no way of knowing what was going on.
Which is it? Jenny has privacy and freedom to view a site on birth control, screw up usage instructions, and then the parents must take up the bill for her mistake? Or allow the parents to see this behavior and perhaps (assuming rational parents) give her direction to the right decision? Parents giving direction? Well, yes, that is their job after all.
School and library funded computers should be used for research purposes, and using filtering software to do that is a reasonable approach. (Common sense should also come into it -- a student should be able to request the filter be disbaled to reach a site normally blocked if there is a good reason behind it.)
On the other hand, Gore's approach really is creepy -- compel ISP's to provide an ability to track users so that parents can snoop on their kid's activites? It ain't censorship, but it is draconian.
Remember, it's one thing to say that government resources have restrictions, it's quite another for the government to force private industry into doing its will, no matter how good the intention.
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A year ago, I came up with a novel solution, one which I intend to carry over to our new family house. The television will not be hooked up. It will be connected to the VCR and the stereo receiver, so that we can watch movies as we choose them. But that's it. No cable feed, not even an antenna. There's not enough really good television programming to make it worth having that permanent distraction taking up our family room.
So many people think of television as some kind of basic human right that they ignore this possibility. The same goes for internet access. Thousands of Americans don't have any way to access the World Wide Web, and they're not suffering for it. If you don't like what the Internet has to say, don't turn it on. It really is that simple.
Now, what should we do about public libraries? In my opinion, nothing. Hatred and racism like The Bell Curve and Mein Kampf are already available in most sizable public libraries for those who want it; literary pornography is easily accessible to anyone who can find the romance section. And if you don't want to deal with kids browsing porn away from their parents, then just position the monitors so that a librarian at their desk can see what's being downloaded.
This is, as far as I know, the single best example of politicans saying what they think people want them to say instead of thinking through a practical solution to things. Mandatory filtering software has already been tried out extensively, and it never works right: it never filters everything, and usually ends up filtering things it shouldn't because of too-narrow criteria. Gore's proposed solution is poorly thought out, but Bush's is just insipid.
... other than the minor technicality that the page you linked to doesn't say anything of the sort, you make a great case.
What Nader is against is giving corporations direct access to the schools as a captive audience to market to. You see, us commie pinko radicals have the crazy notion that schools are for learning more important things than what cola brand to drink and what shoe brand makes you cool. What we're worried about may just be the idea that if an organization starts funding a program, they're going to want to influence its content. I bet you'd scream like a pig stuck with a hot poker if you found out your school was using a lesson plan on agriculture sponsored by PETA, and you wouldn't buy the defense "they're just paying for it, they're not writing it." It hasn't possibly occurred to you that if the lesson plan was sponsored by "Supermarket to the World" ADM, it might have a bias, too?
What Nader's website actually says on that page you linked to is, "It is easy to point the finger at the Marilyn Mansons. But they are merely instruments. Speaker Hastert and Senate majority leader Lott ought to focus on the deeper problems. Behind every Marilyn Manson are corporations and corporate executives who cynically draw their large compensation packages from the fruits of such work." Woo.
Brin makes a good observation in his article (the personality traits that make someone a good gadfly aren't necessarily the ones that you want in a political leader), and the page has a lot of political grandstanding (maybe Nader has some of the qualifications we evidently look for in leaders after all--whoops, I'm being cynical). But pulling a column which is on marketing to children (you know, the page on Nader's site that you found it on puts in a category called "Marketing to Children") and pointing it to say, "Ooh, look, those nasty liberals want to censor everything!" is disingenous at best. Us nasty liberals have our faults, but failing to support free speech and civil liberties is, by and large, not one of them.
You mean taxpayer money. Bush favors the government taking money from high income earners and using that money to police other people's kids.
The most disgusting aspect of this is that the Republicans claim to be for smaller government then propose a big-government "solution" to a problem that does not exist.
It still comes down to a matter of parents deciding to be responsible for their own children. The government has no place here. When asked the question about Internet content filtering, Gore and Bush should have both replied, "It's not the job of the government to decide what people's children should see and should not see. It is the job of the parents."
Which is what the candidate who is getting my vote believes.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Gore invented the History button in browsers!
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The gravitational constant of protein has changed. - Turbine
You left out this part:
"Our society, even 10 or 20 years ago, would not have tolerated such youth-beamed depravity. These are the motivations that relentlessly drive the creation, production, and marketing of ever more Doom, Quake, Basketball Diaries, Marilyn Mansons, Mortal Kombat I and II and III and IV, Jerry
Springers, Howard Sterns, South Parks, and the rest of it.
This poison has got to stop. Enough is enough."
How do you interpret "This poison has got to stop. Enough is enough."?
I interpret it to mean he thinks the things he mentions are poison, and that he wants to stop them.
Before you argue that he doesn't want Congress to legislate them away, consider this, from later in the document:
"There is nothing Congress could do that is more important than making America's children safe again from the interests that would rob them of their childhood."
MAKING them safe. He's quite clear about it.
You picked out the nice safe quote that didn't hurt your case, but conveniently left out the damning revelations. That's why I linked the whole document instead of quoting; my agenda was to let people read it, not just your wishful-thinking interpretation of what you wish he'd said.
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Well, except for abortion, gay rights, military action, gun registration, workers rights, corportate welfare, social saftey net, and a couple dozen other things....
Niether of their positions is terribly radical and I can't think of anything either could say about the internet as a whole that would be more important to me than their positions on other core issues.
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
'a feature that allows parents to automatically check, with one click, what sites your kids have visited lately.'
It's sad that in an age when children are more mobile than ever before, the candidates are concerned only with online monitoring. With today's technology, tamper-proof GPS transponders could be affixed to every child, providing one-click access to their whereabouts online and off. As the costs of digital camera and wireless technology fall so rapidly, soon we could add one-click access to images of everything our children look at, like the pornography and bomb-making instructions being pushed at public libraries. Coupled with pulse rate monitors or alpha brainwave emission detectors, parents could be alerted to aberrant thoughts even before they manifest themselves as actions, and with two-way wireless technology, one-click corrective "pulses" could be delivered in nearly real-time.
Candidates should look forward to addressing tomorrow's problems with tomorrow's technology, rather than patching yesterday's problems with yesterday's technology.
How about a features that allows parents to read their kids' email with one click? With Carnivore it shouldn't be too hard to intercept email from flagged accounts (let the parents register em) and forward it to a cache ready for a parent's perusal. After all, if they're under 18 they don't deserve privacy, do they?
And by god, if I catch Jenny looking at that birth control website again she's gonna get the beating of her life.....
</sarcasm>
Bush and Gore are quite right. These things are obviously harmful to children, and we need to take whatever means necessary to keep them away from the Internet. But that's not the entire story. Let's look at what else all of this does:
bad patents: stifle innovation
porn sites: throttle our children's morality
"created the Internet" quote: drives me up the wall
Napster: hurts artists
"volunteer source" and "free support": undercuts high-quality commercial software
Slashdot: spawns trolls
Look at this list - a veritable smorgasbord of undesirable influences and destructive tendencies, ready to crash our economy and subvert our morals. I think it's perfectly obvious that the Internet isn't something we want around at all, and I demand that our next president take full responsibility for thoroughly dismantling it in a timely manner.
Thank you.
Bruce
Bruce
You are the real Bruce Perens.
The Libertarian party's position:
"Stop Internet Censorship
Politicians are trying to take away your right to read what you want, and to say what you want. "
Harry Browne's specific position:
"You have the right to speak and write freely -- on paper, on the airwaves, on the Internet --even if the government thinks it has a "compelling interest" in shutting you up."
As for Ralph Nader, he even wants to censor non-pornographic web sites; he doesn't want children to be able to access marketting information. He is one of those people we all berate here who think Doom causes violence.
And he doesn't want to stop at censoring it; he actually wants to outlaw it.
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I wouldn't want my kids going down to the library to research something on the Internet and, knowing how searches bring up nonsense 98% of the time, pulling up some elephant sex porn site or something equally as disturbing.
First, perhaps you should accompany your kids to the library, or only allow them to go to a library where they won't be exposed to something that you don't want them to see. That would be taking responsibility for your childrens' welfare rather than trying to make someone else do it. Second, I think that children are much more damaged by seeing violence than they are seeing sex. We Americans are *very* hung up on sex as if it were something dirty. South Americans and Europeans are much more open about sexuality and (rightfully) think that Americans are weirdos. For bizarre reasons Americans still see "gangsta rap" as more palatable than pornography.
Then they'll come home and ask you about it, then what are you going to say?
I'd probably say, "Some people like having sex with elephants." I know several people who grew up having their parents be very frank with them about sex, even when their kids were two and three. They live perfectly healthy lives and in no way ever felt bad by what their parents told them.
It wasn't able to block everything, but it got most of the more raunchy images.
God forbid that kids see people engaged in sex. Violent sex is another matter (becuase the violence is bad!), but healthy and positive sex is a good thing.
I find it odd that people think children are sexless creatures. Do they realize how many kids are sexually active at 13 and suffer no psychological damage from it? I'm not talking about pedophilia (which is vile and deserves harsh punishment). I'm talking about kids looking at pornography, masturbating, and having sex with their peers. I'm sure there are quite of few of us here who have had many such experiences.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.