Guess what almost every Democrat (and all but two Republicans) in the House just voted for:
The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including "obscene" cartoons and drawings--or face fines of up to $300,000.
That broad definition would cover individuals, coffee shops, libraries, hotels, and even some government agencies that provide Wi-Fi. It also sweeps in social-networking sites, domain name registrars, Internet service providers, and e-mail service providers such as Hotmail and Gmail, and it may require that the complete contents of the user's account be retained for subsequent police inspection.
It gets worse:
This is what the SAFE Act requires: Anyone providing an "electronic communication service" or "remote computing service" to the public who learns about the transmission or storage of information about certain illegal activities or an illegal image must (a) register their name, mailing address, phone number, and fax number with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's "CyberTipline" and (b) "make a report" to the CyberTipline that (c) must include any information about the person or Internet address behind the suspect activity and (d) the illegal images themselves. (By the way, "electronic communications service" and "remote computing service" providers already have some reporting requirements under existing law too.)
The definition of which images qualify as illegal is expansive. It includes obvious child pornography, meaning photographs and videos of children being molested. But it also includes photographs of fully clothed minors in overly "lascivious" poses, and certain obscene visual depictions including a "drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting."
Has the House lost their minds? The way this Act reads, anyone who provides Wi-Fi access to the public has a legal obligation to monitor their patrons' Internet traffic and report anything too "lascivious" to Big Brother. If they don't, they are liable for criminal prosecution and fines up to $300,000. Hotmail and Gmail are now supposed to somehow examine every single image that passes through their servers to determine if it meets some minimal standard of "child porn".
My first thought was that this had to be some kind of Republican chicanery; it's what I would expect from the Party of Censorship. But no:
Wednesday's vote caught Internet companies by surprise: the Democratic leadership rushed the SAFE Act to the floor under a procedure that's supposed to be reserved for noncontroversial legislation. It was introduced October 10, but has never received even one hearing or committee vote. In addition, the legislation approved this week has changed substantially since the earlier version and was not available for public review.
And by the way... one of the two Congressmen (both Republicans) who voted against this travesty? Ron Paul. How freaking sick is it that one of the most extreme right-wingers in Congress is more concerned about civil rights than Nancy Pelosi is? Is this what we wanted from a Democratic majority?
Please, please don't make excuses for them by claiming they are cultivating the soccer-mom vote. All of us here are Internet-savvy enough, and Constitutionally knowledgeable enough, to easily articulate why this bill is an authoritarian mess, and so are our Representatives.
I hope you will all join me in contacting both your Representative, to chastise him or her for voting for this garbage, and your Senators, to urge them not to pass any equivalent legislation. This bill is not about stopping child porn. There is no national scourge of pedophiles trading dirty pictures over coffee-shop WiFi connections. All this does is place an unreasonable, unbearable onus on the very people who are at the forefront of the Internet wave -- which is what floats people-powered politics. And, of course, if Congress can pass a travesty like this using phony concern over child porn, they will have no end of socially-acceptable excuses: drugs, adult pornography, "radical" or "subversive" sites (Islamofascism anyone?), etc. etc. etc.