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Congress May Add Record Requirements to MySpace
An anonymous reader writes "CNet is reporting that Congress may be working to extend the record retention requirements they're already working on for ISPs to social networking sites. Sites such as MySpace or FaceBook would be required to hold onto content access records for an unspecified length of time." From the article: "In those meetings, Justice Department representatives went beyond the argument that data retention was necessary to protect children--and claimed it would aid in terrorism investigations as well. During Wednesday's hearing, politicians also claimed that social-networking sites were not doing enough to verify that their users who claimed to be a certain age were telling the truth. (Recent news reports have said that sex predators are using MySpace and similar sites to meet up with teens.)"
While the parents groups were in DC lobbying congress, their children were chatting with this really awesome guy who's only a few years older than they are, honest!
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5130742.stm
It's time we put a stop to these horrible predators.
In those meetings, Justice Department representatives went beyond the argument that data retention was necessary to protect children--and claimed it would aid in terrorism investigations as well.
What's going to stop freedom terrorism happening in our country? Bullshit, like this, is eating at the highly regarded morals *I* hold which are being left the fuck alone to do whatever the fuck I like w/o having to wonder "am I a terrorist?!"
The "Republicans" are happy to erode our media's rights to disseminate important information being withheld and to chastise them using "their" news outlets while the rest of us sit here whining in near silence.
I've always said that I'm no better than anyone else as I'm sitting here whining to the Slashdot community and not doing anything but when are we going to stand up and tell the Government to go fuck itself?
This will help terrorism? Does Osama have a MySpace profile??
I think the terrorists may have won, and they only had to kill a few thousand US citizens. What a shame. I wonder when single men will be required to produce ID if they walk past a public place where the children might be or where a terrorist attack would claim many lives.
Blar.
In those meetings, Justice Department representatives went beyond the argument that data retention was necessary to protect children--and claimed it would aid in terrorism investigations as well.
guys, you KNOW you're only required to use one of those. EITHER think of the children OR terrorists
this is over the top. someone might notice your tactics!
In other news:
I hear there's also a bill pending that will make posting fingerpaintings in kindergarten classrooms illegal, and that the Department of Homeland Security will be investigating all reports of graffiti for possible terrorist links.
I just thank god that all of this is making us so much safer and that we can rest assured that we'll never be attacked again. Those weird concepts such as freedom and liberty and privacy have always been overrated anyway.
I'm sorry, but why are the parents of these kids asking the age old questions of their kids???
Where are you going?
Who are you going with?
Who is going to be there?
What are you going to be doing?
Do I know these people? (If the parent doesn't know them, then they probably shouldn't let their kids hang out with them unsupervised!)
I mean what the hell people! It's not a website's responsibility to keep your kids away from predators, IT'S YOURS!
All teens? Even ones who are 18 and 19? Arnt those legally adults? Should records be kept on those folks as well? How do you prove they are 18 and 19 and not 12 or even 50? Should they then just retain all record for everyone 'just in case'? Sounds to me like it is just more information they want to put in the vast database of everyone in the US.
They really are so cute, so adorably innocent and naive, as they go about their daily business, chatting away to other people, getting crazy naive ideas in their inexperienced little heads. Of course they think what they're doing is right, but they just don't have the capacity or life experience to understand. If only we could gather them around, hug them, tell them it's all going to be okay as long as they stop for a moment and consider what they're doing, and educate them about the full, terrible impact their actions will have not only on themselves, but on everyone else around them. But, of course, they don't want to listen to wisdom, not at their age..
..I'm referring, of course, to the damn fool parents groups and lawmakers.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
i can remember a few years back when it was the parent's resonsibility to watch their kid; when they would talk to them about stuff like this just like they would tell them to not talk to strangers, especially ones with candy.
did anyone ever sue a mall for being the place in which their child was abducted/abused/etc?
Those damn kids^Wterrorists with their flash, background music and 32 sized Comic Sans fonts have to be apprehended!
My EYES!
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Terrorism is their trump card.
They'll keep spewing this BS to get what they want. In the cold war days, it was communism, now it's terrorism. I wonder what's next...
That the parents of today are convinced that they are no longer repsonsible for their own children, Why moniter video games when you can penalize the industry making them, why watch what your child does online , when you can simply put that problem off on the webamsters, The parties their blaming have no control over the kids, so... how is it that they can be without the repsonsiblity yet still have the gusto to claim it is someone elses fault? that is just way to lazy
Did someone say cake?
Can someone tell me how this is any of the business of Congress?
i on.articlei.html#section8
i on.billofrights.html#amendmentx
According to Article I Section 8 of the US Constitution this is NOT a function of the US Congress.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitut
And according to 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."
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitut
Libertas in infinitum
As per the DOD: Terrorism is "the unlawful use of -- or threatened use of -- force or violence against individuals or property to coerce or intimidate governments or societies, often to achieve political, religious, or ideological objectives."
If Terrorist hate freedom and the Western way of life, it would be their political goal to reduce or remove our freedoms.
And out wonderful government, while attempting to fight against the terrorist have been slowly erroding our rights and freedoms.
So the harder our government fights, the more the terrorist win. Our government has done more to destroy our way of life than any terrorist organization ever could.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Well start telling these teens that they got what they deserved for being stupid? Blame the victim? Damn straight. If at 13, especially if you're a girl, you don't realize that people who are 20 or older and who are attracted to you and trying to hook up with you are bad people, you are one of hell of a daft future sheeple. You can blame the victim for letting themselves get into the situation while throwing away the key of the rapist who did it. Responsibility can be dispensed 100% for both people involved. The rapist was a POS, the victim not only walked right into it, but probably did their part to instigate it.
The reason that teens don't take responsibility is that we say "no one should ever be a victim." That's all well and good, but the world doesn't work in "shoulds." If you are 14 and hook up with a 25 year old, chances are, he or she wants to screw you silly. This is not an age of innocence. Don't give me that bullshit about teens not understanding sex. The average teen today knows more nuanced things about sex than most adults did 50 years ago!
"Our children" aren't being victimized. Our dumbass, horny teens are. They're old enough to know better. Show me a real kid, ie a person who is a prepubescent 11 year old or younger who has gotten really hurt this way. Where are all of the 7, 8, 9 and 10 year olds getting raped? Uh huh. It ain't children, just adolescents. People who are old enough to understand personal safety, even if they can't fully grok the ramifications of sex.
I know that in many of the blatantly neoconservative states on the US, the trend is to not encourage teens to be responsible. This manifests itself through the drinking age being 21, the age of consent being 18, and so forth. Meanwhile, in Europe and various other nations, such age limits are far lower, or even nonexistant. And what do we often see? Far more responsibility on behalf of those teens from areas where they are treated more maturely.
The problem isn't so much the predators, as it is the teens who have been shielded by their parents, and otherwise kept from learning about responsibility. For the most part, nobody forces them to give out personal information on the Internet. If they do, it's likely something they did completely on their own. If they then proceed to meet up with somebody who isn't a very nice person, that's again something they likely arranged on their own. The only way to stop such activity is to get the teens to smarted up, and to not provide their address to strangers, and to not agree to meet them in alleyways.
In the 1970s, we were always told in school not to get into a car with a stranger. And for the most part, it worked. There were a few stupid fucks who didn't heed such advice, of course. But in general, if you're open and honest with children and teens, they often will understand your concern. It's when you treat them like fools that they truly become fools, as we so often see in extremely restrictive places like Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and so forth. They won't learn responsibility in such an environment. And passing numerous data retention laws won't have any beneficial effect at all, because the root problem of stupid/ignorant/irresponsible teens is not being addressed.
that the goverment is using the excuse of terrorism to be able to index everything about those who post on social network sites?
scary...
While I agree that the most desired goal is religiously based, the administration (specificly Pres Bush) has stated that "Terrorists hate our freedom"
Here are a few other ways of looking at it:
Is the real freedom the administration of today want to take away is The Freedom To Not Have Conservative Christian Values?
Or is the administration themselves a terrorist threat as they use the threat of violence against individuals or property to intimidate society to achieve political objectives? True, they themselves are not perpetrating the violence, but they are saying things along the line of "vote for us, or there will be bloodshed." Sure, they wrap it up a little more pleasantly with things like, "Other political parties are pansies, only our political party care for your safety." But that sounds an awful lot like a protection racket coming from a neighborhood gang. "The police can't keep your store from burning down, only the Crazy 88s can protect you."
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
It's amazing what media-hysteria can accomplish. There are millions of children without healthcare in the U.S., and Congress thinks it is a matter of the highest priority to worry about this overblown "OMG think of the children!!!" crap.
In addition, politicians proposed a slew of related measures this week, including blocking access to off-color Web sites for all Americans, dispatching "search and destroy" bots that would seek out illegal content, regulating search engines and targeting peer-to-peer networks.
Oh, great. That will work out well. Internet censorship ala China, here we come!
Well put.
Incidentally, there is a good manual for terrorists, that everyone should read: Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare. It was written by the CIA for use by the Contras in Nicaragua; it really makes you think who the real terrorists fighting against the US population are.
If MySpace is used by predators to target teens, they should have a record retention policy.
Or parents can educate their kids about meeting people from myspace, and to be careful about how much detail they put on their account.
It also holds people more accountable to law enforcement too.
Like we don't already have enough laws to turn normal citizens into criminals.
If they have illegal information on there and they "delete" it before the cops see it, they data retention would be the only way for the police to get evidence.
Um, what exactly is 'illegal information'? Are you claiming it violates the law to know something? Wow, that's a pretty hard stance. Lets just solve all of our problems, and put an officer in every home.
fMRIs. New flavor of MRI machine that "determines" whethere you are lying. And perhaps eventually act as a crude mind scanning device as they learn more about the human brain. Coming... this year.
And the book "The Culture of Fear", which inspired Mike Moore to make "Bowling with Columbine", pretty much nails what's happened. America is ruled by fear, and fear makes money and power. Nothing new about that; people went to prison or were executed for being anarchists, atheists, sodomites, communists, socialists, jews, in one way or another, in the US for all its history. And let's not forget the biggest fear of all, used to manipulate us for over a hundred years: the dangerous blacks.
What's important is that the fear police have tools they've never had before, technological and legal. They've no laws to follow, so they can do what they like to us. And now with the internet and digital telephony and cheap surveillance and GPS, they can lock us into a prison that we can't escape. All for fear.
And none of those things will make us one bit "safer". There is no safety in life, and never will be. What we need is a rational ability to assign probabilty to risk, and fear accordingly. For instance, what are the odds of getting killed in your car opposed to being killed by "terrorists"? And why the discrepancy in response, other than stupidity on the part of the manipulated and cold calculated fear manipulation by those who will get infintite power and endless wealth making people "safe" from nearly nonexistent threats.
- The terrorists want to take away our freedoms.
- The administration is taking away our freedoms.
- The administration is therefore doing the terrorists work for them.
there is a logical fallacy. The two "freedoms" are not the same thing. The administration is taking away what we usually call our "civil liberties". The terrorists we are fighting are trying to take away, as I said, the freedom to not be muslim, to live under something other than the Islamic Caliphate, to choose something other than being Muslim, Dhimmi, or dead.Terrorists don't care about "civil liberties" as such. They claim to care about creating the Islamic Caliphate, and taking it one step further, one can assume that they believe they will of course be running it, being Chosen by Allah and all that.
This is pretty close to objective truth, unless you really think that the Muslim terrorists really do just want to take your free speech away, and are willing to murder, kill, and even die just to strip of your civil liberties and for no other reason. If that's "flamebait", frankly that says more about the community or the moderator than me.
Thus, the argument is over-simplified and not really useful for thinking. The argument that "If our enemies want X, we must not give them X" (which is what this is trying for) is always oversimplified; to use that logic is to concede far too much control to the enemy. The question of whether or not a given civil liberty must be modified somehow is one that must be considered independently from whether "the terrorists" want it.
A couple of you lept to the conclusion that this therefore implies that I think civil liberty must be curtailed. That's even weaker thinking than the original argument; that an argument is bad does not imply that the conclusion is false! Plus I have an established history of being on the side of civil liberties; I ran a website about it for years. That means I want to see good arguments used all the more, and I dislike bad arguments that lead to conclusion I agree with all the more. There are good reasons not to curtail civil liberties. We don't need bad ones!
Now Ben, tell me all the ways the masked gun man with an AK-47 pointed at your head has destroyed your way of life. I mean, you can still go to work, raise a family, etc, the guy with the AK-47 pointed at you head the whole time hasn't prevented you from doing anything.
You just never know if, or when he will shoot. Same with the government. They have the power to detain you at the drop of the hat. The question I have for you is, do you wait until the gun man starts shooting to take his gun away? Do you wait for the government to start abusing there power before you place limits on them?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs