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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.
ludicrously and patently unconstitutional
The RI lawmakers are Idiots.
And like the Australian blacklist, 'somehow' content that has nothing to do with that listed on the bill will end up blocked. Like rival businesses. Or political opponents.
Or is the list of banned content going to be made available for public ... scrutiny? Ahem.
I'll be fascinated to see how they expect this to be implemented.
Not their problem.
It doesn't have to work, it's just that "something must be done", and this is "something", therefore it must be done.
Legal because I have no doubt they can create a tax or fee on anything they want to.
Hypocritical because Rhode Island claims to also be in favor of "Net Neutrality"
http://www.providencejournal.c...
"Rhode Island just joined the list of the states with net neutrality legislation"
https://www.fastcompany.com/40...
Ah, so those are the same people who now want the government to "filter" and "restrict" the Internet unless you pay more for certain parts of it. Doesn't sound very neutral. Doesn't sound like freedom. Doesn't sound like keeping ISP's from interfering with accessing of information.
That is completely independent of the total impossibility of an ISP being able to figure out how and which sites serve "porn" and exactly what constitutes "porn" and what happens when things are misfiltered.
Rhode Island- you must really like just PARTS of the Bill of Rights. But which parts? We know you dislike the 2nd Amendment, but I guess the 1st Amendment is now not to your liking, either? Which of the remaining 10 is next? Maybe the 4th?
might indeed have worthwhile goals, but they demean their name and their cause by being associated with a shakedown operation.
Isn't this a violation of both net neutrality AND 1st amendment.
YES. The concept is absolutely unconstitutional, and a violation of both.
State governments can tax on paid content for sale in their state through sales tax, but cannot charge a tax discriminating based on subject matter of the speech.
"Filtering" or "Blocking" any message using technological filters would also be a prior restraint on free speech.
This is what you call a poorly-conceived, UNLAWFUL, and Unenforceable bill.
Yes, but not for the reason that you think - this has very little to do with people commenting on porno, and everything to do with a content-discriminatory tax on pornography.
You can try to dress it up any way that you like, but content-based taxes are unconstitutional. This way, > that way, and especially when adding mandatory filters.
But it's not as if politicians have sworn to uphold the constitution or anything...
A VPN that is connecting through some other state, or some other country would easily defeat this.
Porn is almost half the Web. Putting a fee on it is almost like having a hamburger fee at Burger King.
Table-ized A.I.
This isn't about censorship, this is about getting votes-- nothing more or less. It has no chance of becoming law. It's laudable to attempt to stop human trafficking, but porn sites aren't necessarily the source of human trafficking, just as correlation != causation.
Nothing to see here, just more politician flatulence.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
While this is an egregious example both of why the R's are 'on paper' against taxes, there have been similiarly stupid shit by D's in other places, the most hilarious being California, like that one Representative, Asian-American, in the Bay Area who was pro gun control... because he was helping with illegal gun trafficking in the region...
There are also Boxer, Pelosi, Feinstein and co with their pro-surveillance security theatre while also being pro-privacy for themselves (I don't remember the specifics but someone flew a drone over Feinstein's house with a video camera on it? Irony much?)
At this point in time people really need to purge the partisanship and then purge the partisan politicians. If America is to survive it needs its people focusing on the issues we CAN agree on and getting legislation on them enacted, then revisit the hot button issues once we have other parts of our house in order. And for fucks sake, both former sides need to stop dicking around on pressing issues and trying to use them to push those non-pressing issues through. Save those and debate on them for when you have nothing better to do with your time!
There are crumbling infrastructures, climate change issues, serious challenges with globalisation and wealth inequality, health care systems in peril, an opioid crisis, unaffordable higher education, a fragile financial system, serious deficits, nations all over the world at the brink of bankruptcy or devastated by war and these morons have nothing better to propose as a bill which is not only unnecessary but also technically impossible to realize.
Headquarters are irrelevant, they're only asking for them to implement things at the local level. This is not different than the multitude of other local laws that these organizations must follow, or do you not think that the ISP has to get local permits to dig up the local streets, or local registration for their vehicles based in a certain state, or pay local taxes on their office buildings, and collect local sales taxes on their products?
This is just one more local law they have to implement in one place.
Local lines go to local offices, and can be filtered there (no technical limitation why not, sure it would cost money, but the whole scheme would anyway)
As for interstate commerce law, sure, it may be invoked, but it won't be based on the filtering needing to be done out of state, but rather on the idea that a legal service being sold in one state is being blocked from entering a different state.
And if you point out how absurd their idea is; you're against 'doing something', and supporting human trafficking + child porn.
It really is a genius rhetorical device that works surprisingly well.
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.
If the VPN is not based in the USA, then it doesn't matter that an overreaching state fee exists.
Pretty sure Rhode Island still has that law that it's ok for a stripper to be as young as 16...as long as she's home before curfew.
Yep, there it is : http://abcnews.go.com/Business...
Ah, America.
-Styopa
C'mon, it's in the name.
Yep, typical USA story, starts taking about sex and is changed to discussion about guns. No surprise really, same with USA movies. If a movies is not made in the USA then when a pretty girl gets topless the next scene is usually her making love but if the film is made in the USA the odds are pretty high that she is murdered violently in the next scene.
There were several multi-shot weapons in existence at the time the Constitution was being drafted. (Puckle gun, Giridoni Air Rifle and others) But by that same logic the 1st Amendment only applies to speech expressed verbally in person, via hand written or hand cranked press printed documents. Surely the founding fathers could never have imagined being able to post a Message or opinion in a way that could be instantly seen across the nation and even around the world.
By your logic the freedom of speech does not apply to any of our modern communication methods. No phones, no computers, no Radio, no TV or interweb. Not even multi-color high speed presses capable of producing thousands of newspapers an hour.
If the 2nd only applies to muzzle loaders, then the 1st and 4th are equally limited to protecting our rights via the technology of the 1780's.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
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10 U.S. Code § 246 - Militia: composition and classes
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
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