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California Cybercafe Regulation Decision Released
The Importance of writes "The California Court of Appeals decided an important cybercafe regulation case last week. Read the decision [PDF]. The court decided that cybercafes are deserving of First Amendment protection. and that the zoning regulations used to regulate them in the City of Garden Grove were unconstitutional. However, in a terrible privacy decision, the court said video monitoring of the computers and patrons was a-ok. Read more on the decision here and here."
I agree with both sides of the decision. Governments should not be allowed to ban them from communities through zoning, and these places should be allowed to monitor what their customers are up to in their cafe. From a libertarian perspective, it's a double-win, even if it's only a mixed blessing in the eyes of the tinfoil hat crowd.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I know of a system currently in development where the users' keystrokes are monitored and checked against a black list. If a word typed matches one in the black list, the computer/desk at which this "alarm" occured is actively and automatically monitored by the CCTV system.
Well public cyber damn dont do that for many years know but everyone knows that privacy on those computers... well... right? ahha But since somemany things the gov is watching so well just one more. If it is to ban some script kiddies etc.. dont know but "they are spying everywhere"
It's not something we abuse, it's a tool for us to maintain our business. Signs are posted, informing customers that we can monitor what they are doing, and we also inform first time customers of our policy. So if Mr. A hears and sees all of these warnings, and proceeds to view transgender pornography, I would say at that point it's no longer a privacy issue--if he had wanted to keep his preferences private, he would not have chosen a public venue to satisfy them. Especially considering the warnings he's been given!
I do understand that there is potential for abuse when monitoring customers, and therefore an invasion of privacy. However, with my job and business at stake, I can only applaud this decision.
They certainly can. That is if you consider shooting the patrons a crime.
There have been several instances of violence at Cyber Cafe's, mainly from playing on-line shooting games.
One instance that happened here at a local cafe:
Cafe A is at one physical address, Cafe B at another.
Player at A frags player at B.
Player B gets P.O.'d and sees who owns the IP address of the other player.
Player B then looks up who owns the domain, and finds Cafe A's address.
Player B drives to Cafe A and asks manager where player "A" is.
Player B lies in wait in the parking lot and frags Player A (for real) when he leaves.
--
The Constitution and laws of the United States forbid all interference with the religious or political concerns of other nations.
U.S. President Millard Fillmore to the Emperor of Japan, 1852
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
So to everyone who's saying "so what? my shop, my rules" : NO. Your shop, Government rules. This is a literal Big Brother situation.
If this is such a bad decision (video monitoring), then I suppose we should get rid of cameras in banks, gas stations, ATMs, daycare centers, and stores too, right? This isn't an issue of privacy here. If the cameras were in the bedroom, bathroom, dressing room, or hotel room, that would be different. See where I'm going with this?
SmashTech - No smashing of tech involved
I'm wondering, what privacy are you speaking about? Why do you have an expectation of privacy in a cybercafe? You are on someone else's property, using someone else's machines and someone else's badwidth. Into a public network.
So, basically, what privacy that was existent no longer is?
I don't mean to be antagonistic, and it seems you care very strongly about this matter, so please don't take it that way. I just want to look at this logically.
-s
Oh, I know what you are getting at (I hope). The Cafe's themselves do nothing to "cause" crime any more than adult bookstores do. The patrons of these establishments cause the crime. That makes the Cafe a public nuisance as far as the city is concerned.
The big thing here in Los Angeles is issuing conditional use permits to put a leash on certain types of businesses. One classic example is when Dave & Busters tried to open a place here in Woodland Hills. D&B is 18-and over, they have a dress code, they card, and overall it's a very nice place. But D&B has a video arcade in it. D&B wanted to pour millions into the building to fix it up. The city would only give them a conditional use permit which would be revokable for any reason they see fit after some time period (6 to 18 months or so). D&B decided to screw all that and went somewhere else.
So there it is in a nutshell.
The patrons are the problem. The solution, it seems, is to get rid of the problem by getting rid of the businesses.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Though I communicate a lot over coffee, I don't think that Starbucks and cybercafe's are in the same ballpark. One serves coffee and the other one is used for communications.
Nobody is forcing you into a public pay phone either (I hope). But that does not mean they should be able to listen to your calls.
I think it is an interesting question to ask why Vietanmese youth gangs have latched onto cybercafes as places to meet and get into trouble. Thats not a typical gang venue.
Background: Garden Grove, Orange County, California has the highest concentration of Vietnamese immigrants in the USA, with the Silicon Valley area second place. Garden Grove is above 1/3 Viet, 1/3 Hispanic and 1/4 Anglo. Ethnic groups in the US has often have disaffected youth groups to socialize and/or make easy money.
Cybercafes havent really caught on with Anglo youth because they access at home and school. Cybercafes are quite popular in most non-US countries, perhaps due to the lesser InterNet availability in the school and home. Parents probably sanction these as places for kids to hang out because they seem "educational" and not as naughty as bars, malls or ordinary cafes.
So I guess the youth in Garden Grove starting socializing in cybercafes. More opened in each strip mall to fuel the popularity. Then they became "teritories". Then they became places of making easy money by either computer scamming or other means. It takes a fair amount of money to equip a cycbercafe, so these become big-cash businesses of interest in themselves.
Cyber cafes are still in their infancy; however, since you can run just about any type of business you want in the guise of a cyber cafe, the cyber cafe will be under a great deal of scrutiny. As cyber cafes can be anything, the worst scenario is that they can quickly become the source of everything illegal in a community.
One of the obvious uses of cyber cafe's is for conducting ecommerce. The cyber cafe could easily be used as a place for ordering and even shipping items. In this regards, cyber cafe/mail center combo could be a great service to the homeless or to travelers.
With a good screen and sound system, the cyber cafe can quickly become a quasi theatre where the owners are essentially selling tickets to whatever is displayed on the 72" plasma display.
Imagine a cyber cafe promoting an adult dating service...where you essentially order from the women waiting in the back room of the cafe.
I've checked out cyber cafes dedicated 100% to gaming. This cafe was essentially an arcade game. The ease with which cyber cafes can quickly drift into other forms of business brings up questions beyond an individual wanting to browse porn in public.
Of course, public accessible computers aren't just limited to cafes. Stores of all sorts are starting to have publicly accessible computers that do things like price checks, allow for customized products, etc..
I think these cases and rulings are simply part of the evolution of a new type of business. Unfortunately, since a cyber cafe can be anything, there needs to be public scrutiny and debate.
I remember when all of the hype about how dangerous payphones were because they empowered drug dealers and pedophiles and the like.
If you look at the timing of this scare you will note that it was just after the cell phone was introduced. I remember this because many many pay phones were removed, as part of the patriotic appeal to stop drug pushers. The problem is that now that cell phone are pretty much universal I can't help but notice many of the pay phones have been put back.
Although I have no problem believing that many illegal businesses were based around using pay phones to receive calls. The timing of the events makes it hard for me to believe that that was the real source of all of the hype.
JACEM
DOC Disinformation Obfuscation and Confusion
The carrot to FUD's stick
Theoreticaly, if the phone booth said "All calls from this booth will be recorded" they might be able to record since you have been notified about it, and still chose to use the phone. Much like the "These premises protected buy closed circuit cameras."
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
So if you have a free access point, it's OK, but if you charge, you're a "CyberCafe", and have to have a security guard and video surveillance.
Now find every WAP in Garden Grove that bills, and insist on strict enforcement.
What's wrong with that part of the decision? You can't expect to use a "public" computer AND have complete privacy. You want privacy, do it in your own home.
Those ARE "private" computers. They're the property of the Internet cafe businesses. As I understand it, the root problem was hooligan regulars at a small number of cybercafes, almost certainly due to their geographic locations and the fact that they were open late. Unreal Tournament plus open late hours equals teenage males that live nearby. The "solution" (security guards and video cameras) lost sight of that problem, and wound up having profound privacy and free speech effects on ALL cybercafes in that region.
Bet you dollars to doughnuts that the guards and cameras at the five problem cybercafes will simply cause the hooligans to take their activities elsewhere. Cost is high, and root problem remains unsolved.
Even though those were privately owned computers, consider the effects that would be had on publically owned computers. Suppose that someone was murdered outside a neighborhood library, because its late hours and geographic location made it a popular hangout for wayward youth. Would a reasonable solution be to mandate the installation of security guards and surveillance cameras in ALL public libraries? That's effectively what's been done here.
[cybercafes] probably have to maintain an inventory of enter keys just to keep up with the theft that occurs.
Yes, they maintain their inventory from other cybercafes. There exists N cybercafe keyboards, and N-k enter keys.
Isn't there a famous problem about sharing these keys... the Porn-surfing Philosophers or something?
You know what is damn scary?
A 20-year-old man dies in a Garden Grove parking lot after having a screwdriver smashed through his skull. That's scary. My friend gets followed in his car from a cafe and shot at a traffic light. That's scary.
In these cafes, you have a junior high school students sitting across from gang members. The customers have shown they cannot regulate themselves, the businesses have refused to regulate them, so, unfortunately, it has become the government's task.
Besides, if privacy is the foremost concern in your mind (more important than say, the lives of children), just go somewhere other than a public internet cafe. The choice is yours.
I couldnt get the article to come up for some reason, but from this thread I've gathered that the city requires the use of cameras and security guards at cyber-cafe's, can anyone tell me if they specifically require video footage of whats on the computer screens?
If not then why don't these cyber-cafe's just buy those privacy guard monitor covers, looks just like a glare screen, but unless you are directly in front of the monitor theres no way you can see anything.
It might not be following the spirit of the law, but in this case, the spirit of the law is stepping a bit too far by REQUIRING that they monitor these places.
Anyway, like I said I can't get the page to come up so this might not be allowed.
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
The right to anonymous free speech is, in fact, exactly the sort of thing we have the right to. I give the voting process as an example of this-- there was a time in this country when somebody's boss or landlord or their cronies could look over his shoulder while he was writing out his ballot, and indeed a person could be fired, evicted, or end up beaten as a result. The anonymous vote was established to allow people to express their opinions free of harrassment.
Now, if I post to the internet that the Martians have landed, and this causes mass panic, this is perhaps analagous to the "fire" situation you've described, often the example given as a limit of free speech-- but this is the internet. First of all, you're not going to take my word for it, you're going to check the major news sites and reliable sources to see if this is true, or turn your TV to CNN. The internet is not a "crowded theater." People don't panic about web postings, and even if they did, it's hard to imagine large numbers of injuries and deaths resulting (see trampling issue in fire/crowded theater).
The internet is already filled with hate speech, protected under law in this country-- and if the sort of thing on the KKK's website isn't enough to cite riots, I can't imagine what would be.
The thing about public computers is this: there's nothing I can do on them I can't do at home. From here, I can post an article declaring the Martians have landed (I'm sure many websites already claim such), and from the internet cafe I can do the same. My anonymity is always protected, because it's the internet. Although the cafe is a public place, I am not broadcasting my message in the cafe-- I am broadcasting it on the internet. The other people at the cafe can keep on doing what they're doing, and won't know what the hell I've typed, unless they happen to visit my site, on pure coincidence.
"Anonymous cowards are just K-whores afraid of their accounts being modded down." - Bob the O (me)
Nothing increases the reported incidences of crime like noticing it.
That, and planting agents provocateur to instigate more crimes.
-kgj
-kgj
And today's freedom fighters are often tomorrow's terrorist scum.
Just think, if security cameras in cyber-cafes were not required by law, how many cyber-cafes would use that and not have them? They have large volumes of cash on the premises. And once you have security cameras in your establishment of your own volition it's trivial for the government to get access to anything they record. Whether they are required or not is really moot point.
"Why are you watching the washing machine?"
"I love entertainment, as long as it's clean"
It's not clear where you stand on the issue so this isn't necessarily directed at you, but anyone who thinks a right has to be enumerated in the constitution in order to exist needs to read the 9th Amendment:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Paraphrased, this means "just because we didn't list it in Amd1 thru Amd8 above does not mean a right does not exist."
There was a lot of debate over the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution. One side felt it was important to put together a "top 10" type list so as to clearly illustrate what they were talking about when they spoke of inalienable rights. The other side felt that if any such list were enumerated, some would interpret this as the whole list of rights and refuse to recognize other rights not enumerated therein. The first group won the debate (obviously), but the second group had a very good point.
It never ceases to infuriate me when people claim "strict constructionism" when denying rights not listed in the Bill of Rights! First, "strict constructionism" has no business being applied to the rights of the people. It's really a philosophy on the limitation of government: basically, it's the notion that if it's not specifically listed in the constitution as one of its powers, then the federal government isn't allowed to do it. In essence, strict constructionalism should be all about the 10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Unfortunately, it seems to attract the type of lunatics who wail about Roe v. Wade being based on "non-existent rights" because the right to privacy isn't specifically listed in the Bill of Rights! This is unfortunate, because the other side of the debate is the "living document" clowns who read the constitution looking for new interpretations of the role of the federal government in order to extend its reach! What's a wacky libertarian to do?
Sorry. Kinda went off on a rampage there.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.