House OKs Wiretapping and New .kids.us domain

proj_2501 writes: "Yahoo! has a story about how the US House of Representatives has overwhelmingly approved two new bills: one for the creation of a federally overseen TLD called .kids.us (participation is voluntary), and the other for more ease of wiretapping to supposedly prevent dangerous meetings between kids and 'child predators'." Remember, an equivalent bill has not yet been introduced in the Senate.

Comments

Jefferson is spinning in his grave

[eyegor]

Why do they persist in eroding my rights in order to keep me "safe"?

Every time they decide we need protecting, they strip away yet another preciously gained right. Once they're gone, good luck getting them back.

I propose a new form of energy. We can harness the power of the founding fathers spinning in their graves. Given what's going on these days, we should be able to replace Three Mile Island. The only problem is that we need Sen. Hollings around to craft more legislation.

Prevention?

[TheNecromancer]

I don't get it: how is this legislation going to prevent children from chatting online with child molestors?

Seems to me that this new .kids.us will just be another dead area on the Internet, and that kids will find it boring (aka - no chatting) and return to the same areas they were surfing before.

Re:Prevention?

[Chasing Amy]

> I don't get it: how is this legislation going to prevent children from chatting online with child molestors?

It's not. It does, however, let the congresspeople say to their sheeple "Look what I'm doing to prevent the big bad Internet from hurting children! No, I don't come to Washington each year just to fondle my interns, use my salary (your tax dollars) to pay for call girls and dinners at Morton's, and erode your freedoms to fit my opinions--I actually pass legislation!"

> Seems to me that this new .kids.us will just be another dead area on the Internet, and that kids will
> find it boring (aka - no chatting) and return to the same areas they were surfing before.

Sure, but I can't say I mind that part. If it passes--well, then they have one less thing to complain about when they try to pass CDA-style laws to restrict my freedoms to read and write what I wish on the net. So, I think the kids.us domain would be great--then whenever the need for a "kid-safe" Net is touted by censors, we could say "Fuck no! There's already a kid-safe internet! Remember that kids.us domain you wanted? You got it, it's the 'kid-safe Internet' you wanted, so shut the Hell up." Or something like that.

See, I see the potential for kids.us to be used *by our side* to defeat the censors' rationales for stepping on our rights. It's an opt-in system--people can get such a domain if they intend to appeal to kids and are willing to abide by whatever content restrictions Congress wants to impose on that subdomain. If you want to *not* abide by such restrictions, just don't get a silly kids.us address, get a .com or .net or .us. Participation is entirely voluntary both for site-ops and for parents. The way I see it, it gives their side very little since kids will always be able to find an "unhindered" Net connection somewhere, and gives our side a lot since it takes away one of the censors' big arguments. I like the potential.

As for the bill making it easier to wiretap people "suspected of engaging in child pornography, of trying to get children to perform sexual acts for money or of traveling to or bringing children for sexual activity"--I object to this because it's *already* embarrassingly easy to get a wiretap warrant, to the point of being a joke. Some judges--and the police and FBI know exactly which ones to go to--will give a wiretap warrant the minute the prosecutor says "child(ren)." No showing of cause needed. So, making it esier is in no way necessaqry, nor welcome. Kids.us isn't much of a threat or violation of my rights. However, a bill letting police excuse an invasion into my privacy by merely saying "we suspcted him of child porn/abuse/talking mean to a child online," without any evidence or cause whatsoever--well, that's a violation. If you want to invade someone's privacy and wiretap all their communications, sorry, but you should have to show cause.

What I really find laughable though is that the people pushing this legislation with the excuse of this girl in Connecticutt who was murdered clearly had it drafted and were just opportunistically, predatorily waiting around for a child to die at the hands of an adult she met online. Talk about being predators--that's what the bill's authors are, using the death of a child for their own gain. Sickening.

Not to mention the fact that this girl who was murdered wasn't the innocent poster-child she's being made out to be. In reality, that particular girl had been meeting and having sex with strange men she met on the Internet for some time, and had been bragging about her sex life to her classmates. It was only a matter of time before she met one who's a killer as well as a child molester. A sad story, indeed, but not one of an innocent child lured by the Big Bad Internet--rather, of a child who'd already been corrupted, probably by past offline abuse or neglect, who turned to the Internet to find adult sexual partners and bragged about it to her classmates. Something was definitely very wrong in her life, but her unfortunate use of chatrooms was a symptom of it, not the cause of it.

The real predators are our Congressmen. To use a child's death for political gain is disgusting, and the congressmen who introduced these bills are as predatory as the child molester who killed her.

Can't find the catch

[Rogerborg]

• [ Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill] said parents need to be aware of what Web sites their children are surfing

To which we all heartily agree, but the article claims:

• Parents could set computer software to limit a child's access to only addresses ending in .kids.us.

Say what? That looks like the existing "put a token filtering system in place, then abrogate your responsibility" method so beloved of AOL and the NetNanny brigade. But did our elected representatives just mandate that and slip through mandatory domain locking in browsers while nobody was looking? Let's check the actual bill, H.R. 3833

• `(11) Written agreements with registrars, which shall require registrars to enter into written agreements with registrants, to prohibit hyperlinks in the new domain that take new domain users outside of the new domain.

Hmm, OK, not too bad. Once you're in, you can't just click out by accident (although of course this will happen, but at least they've thought about it). Is that all?

• (12) Any other action that the NTIA considers necessary to establish, operate, or maintain the new domain in accordance with the purposes of this section.

OK, much as I hate catch-all clauses, this is still limited to "the new domain", not to enforcing functionality in browsers (or telnet, for that matter) to lock off the domain. It looks like any browser locking functionality will be voluntary and third party. I can see AOL and Microsoft scrambling to implement this ASAP, but nobody will have to.

I'm always ready to believe the worst of our legislators when it comes to dealing with technology (their track record isn't great), but I think they've got this one right (even if they are a little vague on how it will actually be administrated). I pronounce this bill sane and measured

Regarding H.R. 1877, it's largely moot. It's a minor modification to existing wiretap law, and law enforcement (or anyone with a suit and a badge and some lawyers) can get a wiretap on you right now for pretty much any reason they like. Personally I think that soliciting children for sex should justify a wiretap, and I'm all in favour of honesty in law enforcement, rather than making them scam a warrant for un-American activities (aka domestic terrorism) or whatever.

Constant vigilance is a good thing, but I don't see anything scary or particularly bad in either of these bills. OK, I find the thought of a .kids.us full of Disney and Barney a little scary, but that's not really the fault of Congress. ;-)

Utter nonsense

[YrWrstNtmr]

The vast majority of websites are kid-friendly, or at least kid-neutral. To confine kids to a kids only domain of approved sites limits their creativity and access immesurably.

Case in point: Last year, my son was 9. Calls me up at work one day, and says "Dad, I have a science project coming up." The little dude had gone online, and researched plans for building a very simple, leafblower powered, one man hovercraft. Some guy in WhoKnowsWhere, Iowa had built one, and put the design online. So my son made some mods, wrote a "how and why", we built it, he won first place. If restricted to 'kids.us', he probably would never have come across this.

Is every website operator supposed to submit their site for inclusion into the kids domain? Not a chance. There is a wealth of kid usable info from various sources such as hobbyists, colleges, clubs, that would not normally think of themselves as 'kid-friendly'. All these would be shut out from kids access.

Instead, they will be tooling around in disney.kids.us, nickjr.kids.us, and toysrus.kids.us. Utterly devoid of anything but another sales opportunity, and some games.

And while we're at it, WTF is with this "kids.us"? Are American children the only ones deserving of 'protection'?

Who will be doing the approving? Are their thoughts about 'kid friendly' the same as mine? Not a chance.

Re:Utter nonsense

[happyclam]

So don't filter your 9-year-old's surfing. Don't restrict your child's access to anything. It's nice that you can trust your 9-year-old so completely. Why would you care if a .kids.us domain is established?

This is a great solution because it does not affect you yet it provides security to the people who want it.

I imagine that if/when I put a computer in my kid's room (not likely), I will have the filter on unless I am actively monitoring the usage somehow. If I'm around, I'll turn the filter off. No big deal.

WTF is with this "kids.us"? Are American children the only ones deserving of 'protection'?

I don't believe the US congress has the authority to create a new TLD without the consent of some other groups in the world... so they did what they could. Created .kids within the TLD that they do have authority over. Nothing's stopping other countries from doing the same.

I simply don't understand how something that is good for many people and bad for none can be so attacked.