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Senators Call for Universal Internet Filtering
An Anonymous Coward writes "US senators today made a bipartisan call for the universal implementation of filtering and monitoring technologies on the Internet in order to protect children. Their statement came at the end of a Senate hearing in which civil liberties groups were not invited."
is that any argument that invokes 'Think of the Children' automatically loses. We grew up in a dangerous world, so will they. Its up to the parents to monitor what they're doing not the state.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Orwell must be looking down and shaking his head.
Children and terrorists
What a nice blessing for any power hungry totalitarian government
Anyone else notice that this is being headed by Senator Ted Stevens? Why is anyone listening to him about this kind of a thing?
Every time one of these stories comes around (and some politician proposes some ludicrous internet filtering/logging/restriction every few months it seems) I always wonder the same thing:
Are they completely out of touch with technology (it is often a guy in his 60s or 70s proposing the law) and they really see it as a menace and thing these things will solve it, or
Are they completely aware the program won't do one damned thing to solve any problem, but the propose it anyway just so they can put a blurb in their campaign ads about how they protect children.
But I'd rather my kids see a boob and suffice a natural desire, than hrm I dont know drugs, gang banging, drinking, smoking, HAVING sex, skipping school, watching the news and seeking people blown up/burned, and the rest of the horrible things out in the REAL world. Life sucks, putting up an internet filter sounds a lot like another country who's authority we question (china). The net is meant to be an open flow of information.
Freedom is a THREAT to national security! //end sarcasm
"There are ways for parents to keep their kids from the stuff we want to censor out, but we don't trust them to do it. Also, those darn kids are to sneaky for their parents to stop."
Whatever happened to letting the parents do their job and parent?
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
We have Republicans in Congress propositioning their same-sex underage pages, others sleeping with prostitutes, and a Democrat president a few years back getting frisky with his intern and a box of (contraband) Cuban cigars -- and all this makes it onto the news.
Who's going to protect the children from being exposed to the examples from these pinnacles of morality?
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
This has nothing to do with the children... It has everything to do with complete control of YOU.
VOTE 3rd party immediately.
Wasn't the Great Firewall of China implemented to "protect the children?"
Hmm...
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
It's more closely tied to your second point but even that's just PR spin and campaign hype.
The majority of the push for this sort of thing is money. The allocations of taxpayer money to devote to these pet filtering and monitoring projects will be huge. One particular military subcontractor, Battelle, was already building an _ENORMOUS_ datacenter in Aberdeen, MD, when I left in '07. Why were they building? Most people working at the (existing) tiny site new that it would be mostly devoted to computer science technology but few people knew exactly what. The inside word was that there were going to be enormous contracts coming down the line for processing, indexing, storing, retrieving, and minin gargantuan amounts of data.
Politicians and top-level businessmen work together for years to figure out how to grant themselves a huge chunk of the taxpayer pie. When the news releases start making it to the headlines it's not a matter for debate anymore--it's after the fact justification. The insider trading knowledge that these folks have, by being able to both write the laws and determine the size of the checks and decide to whom the checks are written, is a golden gift from God for the gravy train.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
This once again shows that Ted 'teh Tubes' Stevens simply does not understand the technology of the Internet.
For every content blocking filter you put up, I can simply encapsulate my content and go right through. Or will SSL/TLS, IPSec, SSH tunneling, PPTP, PPPoIP, L2TP, and a myriad of other available methods of encapsulation suddenly be outlawed?
Then comes the question of seeding the content filters themselves. How will it be done?
IP filters are a horrible method, since many websites utilize virtual hosting. The elimination of thousands of virtual hosts just to block a single bad host will simply anger too many people. Worse case scenario is that people stop using virtual hosting, causing an even greater need to the few remaining IP addresses available.
Image fingerprinting is also worthless. Simply take a lossless format such as BMP, IFF, GIF, PNG or TIFF and move the bitplanes around. Looks like garbage to a filter, but a simple restore will render a hidden kiddie porn surprise inside.
Heck, bittorrent the stuff. You can't filter what you can't see since the kiddie porn is simply bits of bits coming from all directions when you pull from the torrents.
Yep. It's called juxtaposition. See "Al Qaeda in Iraq"
No need to vote 3rd party: vote for Ron Paul. He is basically a libertarian running as a Republican. The more I listen to the guy, the more I like him.
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
Is still Ron Paul.
Is this really how the U.S. government thinks it should regulate Internet communication and content?
...and after 6 months, let's add certain political speech (i.e. views of those not in power) to the definition of obscene.
...and we continue to slide down the slippery slope...
Let us ban internet content deemed obscene to save our sensitive childrens' eyes. What standards should we use?...Oh, of course, we already have the FCC's handy guidelines for obscene content on over-the-air TV and cable TV broadcasts. Let us just use a similar definition of obscene content to filter out the internet. That is very convenient since the FCC already has a lot of experience in this area, and of course we can apply old laws to new mediums in which they were never intended to regulate.
Oh, but how will we enforce these new filtering laws? We need to remove anonymity with internet postings (technologically, almost impossible, and if implemented this will essentially remove the best form of communication for whistle blowers that exists). Also, we need to block all foreign internet content if that is obscene, so maybe we should build a whitelist of sites without offensive content...
End sarcasm.
Apparently so are the rest of them. Specifically the first and tenth....
:(
It's becoming increasingly apparent that the second might need to be taken out and exercised in the near future.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
At the end of a major LUG today the members all endorsed a bipartisan plan to introduce universal senator filtering. Under the filtering plan no senator judged to have a tech-iq less than 150 would be allowed to speak or vote about technology issues. Hopes are that such powerful bipartisan legislation would lead to a safer internet for personal rights.
"While filtering and monitoring technologies help parents to screen out offensive content and to monitor their child's online activities, the use of these technologies is far from universal and may not be fool-proof in keeping kids away from adult material"
...oh God no!! What about satellite dishes and even shortwave! Those porn terrorists could be beaming it directly into our homes. Why if a minor were to come into the possession of a electro-magnetic wave receiving device, it could be the end of civilization as we know it!
And the same can be said of the fucking postal system.
While it's true that parents can screen the letters that arrive at and are sent from their home post office box to somewhat guard against their children using the postal system to solicit, receive, and exchange adult material, the practice of screening by parents is farm from universal and even when applied may not be fool-proof.
We had better start filtering and monitoring all domestic mail as well. And, my God, what about international mail? We'll have to screen that for sure, maybe even just stop it all.
And, and,
This is exactly why I think being "bi-partisan" is overrated.
The slowness of Java is something Java programmers just accept. Unfortunately, as a result, many Java programmers just ignore the problem of performance at all. The best form of optimization is algorithmic complexity reduction.. it has nothing to do with the language you use. You can use the slowest language in the world and still get massive performance if you optimize your algorithm suitably. Thing about Freenet is they don't optimize. They're interested in slow-but-safe browsing.. so the day you see them switch from Java to something faster is the day you know that the focus has changed.
How we know is more important than what we know.
He doesn't understand that the computer's not watching him. So then if "kids are being exploited online"
In other words the senator has no friggin idea what being online is actually like. The worst that happens is some 13 year olds find a few videos of adults at orgies. I've overheard the neighbor kids talking about that as they walk down the street. It's a curiousity, but obviously doesn't mean a lot to them. It wouldn't bother me if that stuff was blocked from such kids, but it doesn't bother me that it's not. It was just in the news that porn site revenues have taken a steep drop in the last year. It seems that our culture's been so saturated with the stuff that people just aren't motivated to buy it like they used to. Maybe the senators figure if they can create a more restrictive environment again, it'll revive the porn industry.
After all, that's worked well with recreational drugs.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I'm buying stock in websense tonight. Because if they think they can control it then the answer is obviously websense.
You said "Research" and "Ted Stevens" in the same sentence...I don't know if you remember, but this is Ted "The internet is a series of tubes" Stevens, the guy knows flat nothing about technology...Hell, he probably thinks this is technically feasible, when anyone with a networking background would just start laughing.
Hopefully fossils like him will just die off or (even better) get thrown out of office and replaced by people who aren't utterly clueless. Our only hope in this situation is for him to kick off, unfortunately, because he'll never stop winning in Alaska as long as he keeps up with the "Bridge to Nowhere" pork projects.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Yup and don't forget the flipside. Large sites that can afford to buy political muscle will have an ace in the hole once the great firewall is in place. After all, nothing shuts down a competitor like a state enforced denial of service.
Why do people think it is okay to put the responsibility of the parent onto the government? The parent isn't supposed to just take away access to a TV or Computer; they are supposed to instill discipline and judgment into their child. Even if I was in a room with three TVs and two computers; if I were told by my parent not to turn either of them on, I didn't. Not because I was the model child and didn't get into trouble, but because I was taught that every action has a consequence. We had the old Tandy 1000s in my school, and if you didn't follow the rules you didn't get to play. When the rules were broken there were consequences and we quickly learned to try to not break the rules. We were also taught about dangers and why we shouldn't do things. Stop trying to put your parental responsibility on the government. Do it yourself or don't have children.
But freedom is a threat to national security. Freedom of the people is the only real threat to the security of any state. Always has been, always will be. Some people don't seem to understand that those same personal freedoms are the only real security the people have. Again, always has been, always will be.
Is that the world you want to live in!
Not just yes, but Hell Yes! The human body is nothing to be ashamed of, though specific people should be ashamed of thier own body.
FalconShould there be a Law?
How does he jump from kids seeing pr0n to pr0n of kids?
Maybe because he is a child molester.
If congress was serious about internet pr0n, they would require all pr0n sites to use an "XXX" TDL.
Likewise, if they were serious about combating phishing, they would require all FDIC insured institutions to use a TDL of ".BANK".
The fact is they don't care about either issue, but merely in giving the appearance of caring about the issue.
It's the same thing as all the Patriot Act crap wasn't really for fighting terror, it was a wholesale monitoring of the US public by a paranoid administration. It's like calling wrecking the educational system "no child left behind". It's like a whole lot of what is going on these days -- call a violation of our civil liberties or Constitutional rights something that sounds patriotic or like it is protecting kids, or protecting 'Merca.
Maybe they should just go ahead and call this what it really is - just another step towards a totalitarian police state.
Two Senators in their 80s find the Internet kind of scary. What a surprise. I wonder if either of them has ever used a computer or even knows how to type.
The thing about "free enterprise" doesn't mean that business are allowed to do whatever the heck they feel like, it's the freedom of people to engage in enterprise, selling and buying things with no coercion involved. That's all.
Whether a Libertarian party or candidate can reassure you of this, I dunno.
...what has insider trading to do with it?
It's not that kind of insider trading like you hear about in the high drama of Wall Street. Though there is plenty of that also. Most inside traders don't get caught. 10% maybe. This is a whole 'nother economy in and of itself. Off the books and running parallel to the "official" economy. All business of this magnitude operate with more than one set of books. As long as the government is involved, and you can't sue it, none of these pirates will be held accountable, outside the one or two that will be thrown in front of the bus for good PR. And the government won't be held accountable because 99% of of you keep handing the power right over to them over and over. How are you going to deal with the crooked bankers that make all this happen as long as these same bankers hold the mortgage on your house? You're not going to do anything. It has been this way for thousands of years. There is no indication that it's going to change anytime soon. For them the risk is nil.
What?
We grew up (Rather I did [I'm 22]) without the internet. Even when it really started to boom it was not near as bad as it is today. The world is alot more dangerous today then when I was a kid. Hell I could walk to school without fear or rape or something like that.
This is a good hearty laugh. You are safer today than you ever were. Your generation will live longer then any of the humans that came before you, you most likely you are going to die of a very mundane and boring age related disease. Want to talk about scary? Imagine a world where stepping on a nail is potentially lethal, a scrap can lead to an amputated arm, you can die of a sore throat, or you are a few minutes away from nuclear Armageddon.
What do you have to worry about today? Over eating or smoking. Yeah, that is right... the thing to most likely kill you is stuffing too much food down your gullet or a voluntary behavior. Oh god, the horror... the horror. Your pool is dramatically more likely to kill you than a terrorist. You stand a far better chance of being killed in a car accident than being murdered, and the rate of murder and rape in respect to the overall population has been on a nose dive since the 80s*.
The only thing that has changed in this world is that you are far safer and far more likely to live to be a crotchety old bastard than ever before. We don't need politicians "protecting the children" and more than we ever have.
*http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/data/table_01.html
I was thinking more along the lines of violence inflicted as "corporal punishment" (and I'm not talking a slap on the behind, I once witnessed my headmaster punch a 12yo kid and break his nose for "giving lip", he remaind head for another 2yrs after expelling the kid).
But yes I see your point and yes my parents would order a "shandy" (50/50 mix of lemonade and beer) for my brother and I when we went out for dinner. Here in Australia it is still legal for a gaurdian to order wine/beer for a child provided it is served with a meal. - But since few people know about the law it's a rare occurance these days.
The statistic that puts a lie to the "think of the children and cripple the net crowd" is that in 80+% of ALL cases of criminal child abuse, the child's tormentor is related to, or known and trusted by, the child's family.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The really sad part is that your probably right. No, the REALLY sad part is that, no matter how much NEED there might be for it, it won't happen. Americans have made apathy an art-form.
> that tens of thousands of child molesters are grooming their children right now
Presumably you meant that as the number of child molesters actively using the Internet for "grooming children". Can you point me to a source for that statistic? I was under the distinct impression that the modus operandi of the vast majority of child molesters was to molest children who know them personally (e.g., their own children, or children they meet in their work).
I hate it when they try and pass it off as a 'save the children' load of crap.
Think of the children!
Yeah--go ahead, install a huge monitoring and filtering system. I'm sure no one will abuse it by monitoring and/or filtering other content.
Zark off senator asshat. I am a responsible parent. I can watch out for my own children.
There's no place like
[Link down - so I cannot read the article] I take it by 'universe' he actually means the USA? If not then he should just butt out. The rest of the world didn't vote for him or the Government he is part of. We do not need, nor do we want, his interference in what we are allowed to do in those countries which are outside the small proportion of the world that he represents.
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
Nonsense, the third amendment is still going strong. You're not asked to quarter troops in your home, just support them with your taxes... and put bumperstickers on your car... and silence all political debate because it would embolden the enemy and put our troops at risk.
Nevermind
Your ad here. Ask me how!
No, the only way that our elderly politicians will be able to retain their shabby dignity is if they're allowed to keep the bodies of attractive young folk safely hidden away, out of the public eye.
Exactly. Government is never a good substitute for parenting.
The senators might as well pass a law saying that gravity and common sense are not in effect in Washington DC, at least they would be right on one count. It should be clear to everyone that *if* effective filtering of Internet content on a global scale were possible then it already would have been done by someone. Even the great firewall of China is not completely effective and those people live in a police state. Also, consider the massive financial incentive that has been in place for the music industry to fund discovery and implemention of this type of technology. The only thing stopping them is the near impossibility of the task. This proposed legislation will not change anything. If the free market couldn't provide effective global filtering despite massive financial incentives then how much less will such a system magically spring into being from legislative fiat?
Every once in a while when there's a discussion about the latest ".xxx" or ".porn" TLD, the idea of a ".kids" or ".kids.[countrycode]" domain comes up. (Actually I think ".kids.us" already exists, there's just very little there.)
.kids.us, and what's OK for kids in France goes in .kids.fr (though I doubt they'd call it "kids"...) and people can restrict access based on their personal values. Enforcement takes place at the name-registrar level; if you don't comply to the standards for that domain, the registration gets pulled.
While I still think it's a conceptually flawed idea, it's at least better than trying to either censor or round up all of the 'smut' and put it into some sort of a blacklist. Fundamentally, if you're trying to make a 'clean internet,' whitelists are the way to go; not blacklists.
Putting the 'kids' domain under the CC TLDs is even better, because it avoids having to create some sort of international consensus on what's appropriate for children, which isn't feasible. Whatever the Congresscritters decide is OK for kids (violence = okay!, sex = bad!) in the U.S. can get into
The problem with this is is that it's a solution looking for a problem that most people really don't seem to care about.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Because raping a 17 year old is also a "sex offense" and so is a 16 year old snapping a picture of herself on the cell phone.
Absurd?
OK, we agree.
A 15 year old?
Abusrd?
A 14 year old?
Absurd? Questionable?
a 12 year old? EXECUTE THE FUCKER!
wait... what about a really big 12 year old.
What about a really stupid 17 year old?
Execute the fucker.
Wait, I have an idea, lets take an extreme case (a 2 year old) and then use it to justify an entire argument.
But wait... how many sex crimes are actually perpetrated against 2 year olds? 75% of "child sex crimes" are perpetrated against teenagers.
Execute them?
I'm confused.
Mark Foley? Surely he's a schmuck. But.... execute the fucker?
OK fine, but what about my best friend. He was 12 when he banged his friend's mom. He still talks about it like it's the freaking icing on the cake of his life and he's almost 30. Should she be executed?
Where do you get off thinking there is some icon of "evil" and some glowing halo of "not evil" and you can automatically decide one gets death and the other gets a medal?
Oh wait... your reaction was based on irrational, emotive impulse, not logic. I forgot.
Stewed
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
What constitutes getting a life, then? Most people I know who consider themselves to have lives spend their weekends getting drunk with friends and their weekdays waiting for the weekends. Is that better in any way than posting on slashdot, and using the tools available to find patterns in the discussions?
ResidntGeek
The assumption is that kids shouldn't see boobies. This is a load of crap. There are kids, right now, on beaches all across France co-existing with topless females. This doesn't seem to have hurt the French any - in fact, a call to protect kids from boobies would probably be viewed in France like a call to protect kids from wine. "Well, eventually they will have some wine, and eventually they will either have or play with boobies, so why get excited about this?"
"Whenever 'A' annoys or injures 'B' on the pretext of saving or improving 'X', 'A' is a scoundrel." -H.L.Mencken
It's like when parents get divorced. I, and most of those I know with divorced parents lived happily with parents in separate places, but the _drama_ surrounding the actual divorce hurt some. Those where the parents split up as friends had no problems, since they had a relaxed attitude towards it.
When we treat something natural as sacrilege, we get messed up! Just look at all those priests abusing kids...
On a semi-related note, I also remember seeing a great play called "Blackbird" once, that talk about a sexual abuse case. The question raised by the play is whether the court case, the police interrogation, the parents crying, the need for discretion and forcing the kid to lie to his/her friends did far more damage than the act itself could ever have. Worth having a look at when you feel like screaming "Somebody think of the children!" (thank you, South Park, for this amazing quote).
Note to those who wish to derail the argument: the last example is not to condone abuse of kids, but rather to poke at the way we go about handling such things once they happen.
It's that many of these sweetheart contracts are conducted in secret and marked "Friends, and friends of friends" or "No foes, they don't want you in their sandbox". We should be forcing them to hold these discussions in full view of the public. No, it's no fancy conspiracy. It's just plain ol' stealing from the cookie jar. We let them get away with it and they know we will, so they dig deeper until somebody makes a fuss and then back off a little. The really sad part is that I see the same names that go back to the Nixon era and before. And the corporations behind them go back at least two centuries, maybe twenty-two. Business is that good. Nice little lemonade stand they got there. With Vito Corleone protectin' 'em from any usurpers and keeping the riff-raff out.
What?
``It's becoming increasingly apparent that the second might need to be taken out and exercised in the near future. :(''
At least you understand its purpose. But I think education should come first. I mean, people actually voted _for_ Bush in the last elections, when I thought it was completely obvious that bad things had and would come of it. If you can't even get people to vote for a different candidate, what do you expect to gain by armed rebellion? Getting yourself a one way trip to Guantanamo Bay? Replacing the democratically elected government in a violent coup d'etat? You might say it's for the common good, but that's exactly what the folks proposing this universal filtering are saying.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The reality is, if you are really concerned about what children have access to on the Internet, you should be able to activate a setting the would lock access to a separate DNS service and a set series of IP addresses that only provides content that has be accessed, reviewed and approved as fit for children web sites, as the web sites would have to be applicable to each of the age ranges for children, obviously what is fit for a young adult is not suitable for a toddler.
Leaving aside the fruitless bang-your-head-against-the-wall argument that it is the parents' responsibility to decide what is "fit" for their own children....."accessed, reviewed and approved" by WHOM? If it's the current administration, I smelleth a "faith-based" outsourcing here to insure that kids can only view appropriate history ("America is a Christian nation"), science ("We didn't evolve from no monkeys") and morality ("sex=bad and dirty; abstinence=good") to insure that the little tykes grow up to be good Republican Christians (and not agnostic Democrats or Wiccan Libertarians).
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
"Not to worry then, all these old guys will be dead in the next 10-20 years, if all goes well. Everyone seems to forget that all of us, the younger generation (which is obviously a huge span of years) is next on the list for power."
And the people who are in their teens and 20s today that eventually opt for a career in politics will be technological ignoramuses who will be passing legislation which is every bit as out of touch with the social issues surrounding emergent technologies from 40 years in the future as our lot are with what's happening now, and the equivalent of Internet forums from that era will contain the same claims about how it will all change when the old sods die off. Check out what things were like when Richard Stallman, Tim Berners-Lee, and Steve Wozniac were teenagers, and you'll see a period of notable political upheaval when youth activists could count on vast numbers of like-minded people to attend rallies and demonstrations, organise mass sit-ins, publish "subversive" magazines and newsletters, and generally stick it to "the man" despite heavy-handed and often brutal attempts by the police and government to stop them. They make today's youth look like a bunch of disorganised, cowardly whiners, yet their conviction that things would definitely change when the old guard died off turned out to be completely unfounded, and the same will happen again, and again, and again.
The reason for this situation is a simple one: those who tend to choose careers in politics mostly come from backgrounds in law, political science, business, and / or extremely wealthy and influential families (and increasingly, film and TV actors), none of which are renowned for their high level of technological awareness. Very few of today's young people in these categories have any real idea how venerable technologies such as steam engines, "land-line" telephones, radio and TV, or suspension bridges work, let alone complicated modern things like computers, cellular telephones, or the Internet, and it is they who will be governing in 30 years, not the sort of people who read Slashdot.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
I hear ya. I was watching the first Austin Powers flick on cable the other day (I forget which non-premium channel). I caught the scene where he's unfrozen and retrieving his personal effects (including the Swedish-made penis enlarger and related items). They bleeped out the word "penis"!!!
I would really like to know what purpose this serves. If they're pandering to parents who don't want to explain what a penis enlarger is, why include the scene at all? But to bleep out the formal reference to a body part, just because it happens to be a reproductive organ, makes me sick.
Here's where I'm confused, the senators appear to be looking for tech to combat child porn. But the argument they're using to get there (according to TFA) is that the parents need help protecting their children.
Well which is it? Those are two separate problems with very different solutions. Even if you accomplish the one, you don't necessarily make progress on the other.
Either you enable a passive filter, and essentially tag (to use a web 2.0 term) the net to help parents with their parenting, or you actively scour the dark corners of the net trying to find predators and child pornographers. How likely do you think it is that a child pornographer is going to get caught in a passive filter? If they were that easy to find they'd be shut down already.
So which is it senator, do you want to combat child porn, or do you want to help parents parent? If it's the latter lay off the child porn red-herring. Oh wait, you won't get any support from your porn surfing colleagues if you want to filter everything? Too freaking bad, make an honest argument for god's sake.
It's not that kind of insider trading like you hear about in the high drama of Wall Street. High drama? Wall Street is mostly pretty boring. It's lots of people shuffling around lots of paper. You clearly watch too many movies. Most inside traders don't get caught. 10% maybe. 97.342% of statistics are made up. Source, please. This is a whole 'nother economy in and of itself. Off the books and running parallel to the "official" economy. You seem to have jumped the rails, here. Are we entering tinfoil hat territory? All business of this magnitude operate with more than one set of books. Source please. As long as the government is involved, and you can't sue it, none of these pirates will be held accountable, outside the one or two that will be thrown in front of the bus for good PR. And the government won't be held accountable because 99% of of you keep handing the power right over to them over and over. How are you going to deal with the crooked bankers that make all this happen as long as these same bankers hold the mortgage on your house? You're not going to do anything. It has been this way for thousands of years. There is no indication that it's going to change anytime soon. For them the risk is nil. Once again, perhaps if you could be specific and back it up with some sources, we could understand what you're trying to get at.
It's hard to filter something when it looks like "(*#U(*YkaJH(*&F()*&G(SER". (Clearly that's a naked 12 year old boy.)
If the legislators in question REALLY wanted to do something effective they'd allocate funds for more traditional investigatory agencies, like the FBI. Social engineering is how these people get caught; their pursuit of their perversion is ironically their greatest weakness, which can be exploited. But I'm assuming that Congress isn't a logic-free zone, and that they actually want to do something useful.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
That perception needs to be fought against. I believe in an absolute right to privacy. If the government thinks I'm engaged in illegal activity, it can bloody well get a warrant and investigate. Until then, my web traffic is none of their business.
Incidentally, it was brought to my attention recently that the government doesn't need a warrant to know the sites you've visited; it only needs a warrant to determine the content of those communications. This goes back to a "pen register" precedent that was set decades ago regarding phone wiretaps.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
'I can understand not wanting to filter the internet itself, but what about if the government just had a database of labels for sites, and one of those labels was "not-kid-appropriate"?'
Still a problem. It gives the government the ability to censor content the government finds objectionable for anyone using the software. That could be millions of people. Plus, once adopted and accepted you would eventually see the same people who are suggesting this suggesting it be mandatory in schools and libraries and later all government systems. Eventually they would start holding people liable if a child saw content they shouldn't have and create a de facto requirement that everyone who might ever have a child access their computer use the database.
Once you give the government a sanctioned way to censor information it will be abused. It is always a bad idea, just as it is a bad idea to give the government ways to track its citizens and their actions (they like to use law enforcement this way).
"If the legislators in question REALLY wanted to do something effective..."
How about instead of spending billions on even more police to act as parents, we get more money to the PARENTS!
Like 2-3 year paid maternity leave for working moms/dads, benefit supplementation for part-time working moms/dads, or greater daycare/workcare allowances. Tax breaks for businesses to encourage working from home? THERE are some GOOD ideas on where we should be spending our tax monies, not adding even more damned police and making this an even bigger police state.
And just to be clear, so as to avoid the flame wars, I do not have a problem with police. In fact, I fully support and often pity them for the shiet they are forced to go through dealing with the masses. I just have a big problem with how we are using them these days.
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
Oops, I'm sorry. You're right. Everybody's on the up an' up. There are no crooks. They're all honest as can be. Nevermind. You keep those blinders on tight, keep taking those painkillers, and you won't feel a thing. Sweet dreams.
What?
People like you love to whine a lot and throw out a lot of accusations.
Yes, well, some of us retain our memories of past transgressions, and would like to prevent future ones. Others choose to forget the the pain of, say, Vietnam(that other great war for profit) and Watergate, and "political enemies" lists, and jump right into Iran/Contra, Savings and Loans, crooked Arkansas land deals that mysteriously disappear off the radar when a fat chick enters the scene, Enron, Iraq II, and addition to that, see to to it that those criminals are able to keep their ill gotten gains, and give them their old jobs back. All so we can put on a happy face and wear the flag proudly. No, sir, I don't whine. I laugh as I watch you sink into the morass so willingly. Apparently you don't like it when the slaves get uppity. Makes you feel just a little uncomfortable, doesn't it? Just a little scared we might "ruin everything" when your life is going so smoothly? Hehehe. I like watching you(editorial) squirm, as you all come out of the woodwork to defend the monster that enslaves you. It really is quite a show from my POV. Always remember, the safest place to be is in the center of the herd. Of course that's the position you all fight each other for. Everybody knows what happens to stragglers.
What?