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Rhode Island Bill Would Impose Fee For Accessing Online Porn (providencejournal.com)
If a recently introduced bill passes the General Assembly this session, Rhode Island residents will have to pay a $20 fee to access sexually explicit content online. The bill, introduced by Sen. Frank Ciccone (D-Providence) and Sen. Hanna Gallo (D-Cranston), would require internet providers to digitally block "sexual content and patently offensive material." Consumers could then deactivate that block for a fee of $20. The Providence Journal reports: Each quarter the internet providers would give the money made from the deactivation fees to the state's general treasurer, who would forward the money to the attorney general to fund the operations of the Council on Human Trafficking, according to the bill's language. If online distributors of sexual content do not comply with the filter, the attorney general or a consumer could file a civil suit of up to $500 for each piece of content reported, but not blocked, according to the bill.
The RI lawmakers are Idiots.
Negative on both counts.
It isn't legal because it runs afoul of the Interstate Commerce Clause. Internet regulation is a federal concern. States do not have authority.
It isn't hypocritical because Net Neutrality says nothing about content type. It is about content providers. It says you can't treat one porn provider differently from another porn provider. Blocking all porn providers is entirely consistent with the principle of Net Neutrality.
Good luck proving in court that "because his packets were this size, he *must* have been viewing porn". If that's so accurate, VPNs would be worthless in repressive states like China and Iran (and apparently Rhode Island now, too, lol) because they could just *tell* that you're visiting a site they don't like, and shut you down.
But VPNs are still very effective in many countries if your endpoint isn't a "known" VPN operator. The other option is for the ISP operator to maintain a strict whitelist of which IPs/websites are reachable from their network; a few countries have begun to think that this is the only true way forward, because if you default to routing any traffic, it's still trivially easy to bypass just about any filtering or deep scanning attempts using standard crypto like TLS.
Sure, you can probably inspect the timing and bandwidth utilization of an encrypted connection to distinguish between streaming video, working in an online office suite, uploading a video to a streaming service, or viewing a restaurant's menu, with high accuracy of being able to at least rule out one or more of those categories. But being able to tell which actual *website* is being visited, or what content is being consumed? That seems very unrealistic to me. The degree of confidence you'd have in your assertions would be, at best, around 50% or so, and almost always much lower than that. This sort of "suspicion-based reasoning" wouldn't fly in most courts in countries that uphold basic human rights.
Oh, and any timing based traffic analysis deductions can be easily defeated client-side by inserting random, non-deterministic jitter into all outbound packets. Since the server endpoint's send rate is also dependent on your client's responses (TCP ACKs), you can effectively control the delay in your server endpoint's responses by introducing small amounts of random latency into your own client's ACKs. Then you can further muddy the waters by having the endpoint pollute the encrypted tunnel with nonsense data. The most accurate conclusion that could be claimed with a high degree of certainty thereafter would be "They seem to be using a lot of throughput for some reason".
Indeed, any justice system that would allow such leaps in logic based on packet size and timing analysis (while having no idea of what the actual contents of the datastream contained) is not a justice system I'd want to be subjected to. That's getting dangerously close to guilty until proven innocent.
The second amendment does not represent an individual right, but a collective right for members of a well-regulated militia.
Otherwise, out would be unconstitutional to have limits on other arms like missile launchers and grenades.
Uh, the constitution set up the federal government and its powers, and anything not mentioned is reserved for the states or the people.
Shit got hairy quickly, so we slapped on 10 new items that explicitly call out some bullshit. #2 explicitly states that people have the right to keep and use weapons.
And yes, strictly speaking, preventing someone from owning a missile launcher is unconstitutional. If you disagree, change the constitution.
Other countries like Venezuela, and Australia removed guns from the plebes... and mysteriously the mass shootings stopped. Gee whiz.
Strange, it looks like the number of homicides rose steadily after the gun ban in Venezuela.
Oh look, Maduro is giving guns to his supporters
Here's an example of responsible government gun usage
And another
It's a good thing that they have a ban in Venezuela, it keeps candidates in elections from getting shot
The Gun ban is working so well with petty crime too.
It always has been an individual right. The Federalist Papers make that quite clear. it's the Supreme Court that has fucked up on the interpretation time and time again. There's a reason why Jefferson thought we'd have to have a revolution frequently. Governments always devolve into corruption. ALWAYS
But leave it up to Democrats to try to impose a nanny state upon those who elected them.
Bullshit. Read the goddamn federalist papers. The 1st Amendment is protection FROM THE GOVERNMENT.
"What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms." - Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, December 20, 1787
That letter isn't from the revolution. It's during the drafting of the constitution. He's not referring to Great Britain. He is talking about the government that is being created.
You are partially correct when you say the militia was there to help. This is supported by the fact that the states were also given the power to levy war if there was no time to wait on the federal government. BUT, the founding fathers intended that gun ownership NEVER be infringed by the Federal Government. That's why it is in the Bill of Rights. All 10 amendments deal directly with YOUR rights and prohibiting the Federal Government from fucking with them.
Article 9 makes that abundantly clear The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Repeat this to yourself until you get it: "All 10 of the Bill of Rights inform the Federal Government that it may not do SOMETHING or MANY THINGS. Not a single power is GIVEN to the Feds in the articles. Every bit of text is a prohibition on the government."
But, assuming you believe nothing I have written. We'll take it from the guy that wrong the fucking thing in the first place.....
"I ask, Sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them." George Mason Co-author of the Second Amendment during Virginia's Convention to Ratify the Constitution, 1788
Even if the 2nd were interpreted to only apply to well regulated militias that would not mean nobody else would be allowed to own a gun.
The Bill of Rights isn't a short list of what we are allowed to do. They are specific limitations on what the government cannot do.
That's why there are phrases like "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", "shall not be violated" sprinkled throughout.
Looking at the actual text of the law rather than the Providence Journal's story, actually, not "ludicrously and patently" unconstitutional.
It is, of course, ordinarily unconstitutional under First Amendment case law to regulate (including by differential licensing or taxation) based on content.
But this bill explicitly references RI Â 11-31-1 to define the content being regulated, and that is the bit of Rhode Island law that outlaws obscenity (not merely sexually-explicit material), in the same words that Supreme Court precedent holds obscenity to be unprotected by the First Amendment.
So, this law, as written, seems to only restrict access to such online content that, under the existing laws of the United States and the State of Rhode Island, would currently be illegal for someone in Rhode Island to possess on, say, DVD.
There's still potential "chilling effect" and "as applied" challenges to be made, of course, but whoever drafted this had a solid understanding of what would at least facially stand up in court.
You mean the originalists who were clearly intending that the right be reserved to the people? The originalists who clearly stated repeatedly in the Federalist Papers and their own personal writings that disarming the people is not acceptable?
No, they did not throw the orgininalist view of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights out the window, rather they stuck very closely to the original intent of the founding fathers.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.