Scary McCain Web censorship bill

John McCain has introduced S. 4089, a bill that would require ordinary message board Webmasters to go through roughly the same formal notification process for kiddie porn posters that an ISP now has to go through.

CNET has published an article pointing out how burdensome this kind of bill could be for small-time message board managers.

On the one hand, kiddie porn is awful and ought to be stopped. On the other hand, I think we have to figure out how to keep well-meaning people (and, of course, devious creeps) from giving wouild-be authoritarian dictators the tools they need to use a combination of censorship, fear and fear of censorship to suppress open opposition.

Here is a little bit about S. 4089 from the CNET article:

Senator: Illegal images must be reported
update John McCain proposes law to force Web sites to report unlawful activity and delete posts by sex offenders.
By Declan McCullagh
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: December 8, 2006, 6:40 PM PST

Millions of commercial Web sites and personal blogs would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000, if a new proposal in the U.S. Senate came into law....

According to the proposed legislation, these types of individuals or businesses would be required to file reports: any Web site with a message board; any chat room; any social-networking site; any e-mail service; any instant-messaging service; any Internet content hosting service; any domain name registration service; any Internet search service; any electronic communication service; and any image or video-sharing service....

My sole involvement in anything to do with this is that once when I was 8 I was molested by a neighbor, and I have a Web site somewhere that shows, among other things, my own baby having a bath at the age of about 4 months. (Shockingly enough, you can see some ... umbilical stump. The horror, the horror.)

The text of the McCain bill isn't yet available on Thomas, so I'm not sure what it deals with, but apparently it includes "social networking site" on the list of "reporting companies." It's not clear to me whether "social networking site" is narrowly enough to mean "MySpace and MySpace Clones" or broadly enough to include tiny little nonprofit hobby message boards.

I think it's great if Webmasters forward child porn sites to the appropriate authorities, but one obvious issue that I've noticed as the administrator of a tiny message board is that I'm way too busy to even really notice what the spam that shows up is about. I simply notice that it's spam and delete it. It's rare that I even bother to ban the poster. The assumption that the spammer will just get another e-mail address, anyway. So, I think it's really mean and impractical to expose some person who runs an obscure message board about stamp collecting and maybe remembers to look at the board once every 6 months to follow some kind of complicated reporting procedure. I think it would even be absurd to apply those kind of rules to sites such as RedState or Daily Kos.

More important, it's just terrible to let Lester the Molester scare us into (if the CNET article summary of the bill is correct) monitoring and recording the Web activities of many innocent people who have never had any connection whatsoever to child porn.

I think the very, very worst thing that non physically violent child molesters do is to try to convince the victims that black is white and/or that they dare not talk about what has happened, because the molester will find out and something bad will happen.

My impression is that the McCain bill would put federal child porn investigators in a position equivalent to that of the mind-gaming molester. But, in this case, instead of children not being able to tell Mommy about the funny games that happened in the trailer, adults will have a vague feeling that they dare not complain too loudly about the next evil Republican administration on the Web, because, you know, all message board administrators have to save messages for 6 months and hand the message archives and all available user information to anyone who claims to be looking into a child porn claim at the drop of the hat.

And I think one thing to keep in mind is that most authoritarian governments end up becoming victim-collection tools for perverts. If I'm right and S. 4089 would become a tool for censorship, and then for helping to turn the United States into some kind of authoritarian dictatorship or oligarchy, then, in tinfoil hat theory, the bill could lead to perverted government officials using the law to commit horrible, sick crimes that would turn the stomach of the typical child molester.

One easy way for the feds to get universal access to all user information would be to create a worm or human-run program that would somehow post child porn pictures to every conceivable message board every few months. That way, the investigators would have an excuse to ask for the message board's user information every few months, on the ground that someone had posted a porn picture to the site within the past few months and the investigators were trying to figure out the identity of the pornster.

In other words, maybe the investigators themselves could put kiddie porn on Daily Kos anonymously, then use the fact that dirty pictures had appeared on Daily Kos as an excuse of ask for all of the registered users' user information.

I'm really not one of McCain's enemies on this site, and I just hope that I'm getting the wrong idea about how the bill would work, or that he hasn't really thought through the implications. But I think anyone who even has a tiny bit of concern about freedom ought to try to read these bills as if he or she were Stalin and wanted to try to use the bill to impose censorship and thought control.

•  so stupid he is

  the Democrats better squash this, I never want it to see the light of day.

  by missreporter on Tue Dec 12, 2006 at 09:14:59 PM PDT

  •  I agree.

    And it probably doesn't stand much of a chance of passing in it's orginal form and could be modified so that Republicans can't say "The Democrats want to protect child molesters".

    My guess is that it won't even see the light of day.

    by CanYouBeAngryAndStillDream on Tue Dec 12, 2006 at 09:23:20 PM PDT

  •  here's how to squash this

    Attempt to insert a provision requiring the same compliance from newspapers with respect to their classified advertising.  

    After all, Chester the Molester could find some way to sneak into the classifieds, right?  Maybe as a babysitter?  An "advertising talent search agency" looking for kids for "commercials"...?  Not to mention, the personals!  Who knows?!  Therefore all print media outlets should be forced to save all that stuff for however-long, just in case...  Oh, and same for any advertising medium that uses children, if for no other reason than to prevent otherwise-legal images from being used as kiddie porn in some other forum.  For example, think of some pervert jacking off to pictures of kids in the clothing or toys section of the Sears catalog..!

    Needless to say, the print media will scream bloody murder about any such thing.  

    And just in case this provision doesn't make it into the bill:

    An equal-protection lawsuit would do the trick nicely, on the grounds that the bill, as passed, did not require the same "vigilance" on the part of the print media for its classifieds and personals and advertising and catalogues and so on.  Thus the bill unfairly targeted electronic media compared to print media.  

    Needless to say, First Amendment lawsuits are a no-brainer.  

    And as for McCain, so is he.  

    by G2geek on Wed Dec 13, 2006 at 03:19:11 AM PDT

    •  What is really sick is that

      there are conservative "alternative papers" out there that have a huge "adult ad" sections.

      It's like, they're for ruining the life of some poor 17-year-old girl who doesn't want to bring a baby into the world at the wrong time. But, if some guy out there wants a 3-way with a moose, an elephant and a "just legal" prostitute who actually isn't, well, isn't that what newspaper classified ad sections are for?

      by sclminc on Wed Dec 13, 2006 at 08:16:47 AM PDT

      •  someone should do some investigative reporting...

        Re. those conservative papers:

        Have a 16-year-old girl place one of those "girl seeks guy" ads in a conservative paper, or a bunch of them at the same time.  The ad should be worded so it attracts child molesters, I understand they have their own special code-words for things like "teenage girl seeks older guy."  

        Have her make contact with the guys who respond, and record all the phone calls (she needs to be in a state that has "one-party notification laws" so she does not have to tell the caller she's taping the calls; BTW, you can get phone recorders at Radio Snack, and test it first before commencing the investigation).  

        Then see how many big fish she catches in her net.  And either a) go to the DAs to get the guys busted or b) make a scandal in the media including the recordings.  

        Woo-hoo, that could be very interesting.  Probably worth a few more seats in Congress,  maybe even a Senator!

        by G2geek on Wed Dec 13, 2006 at 04:52:01 PM PDT

•  McCain is a dolt!

  He and Stevens are two of a kind; both are 'free market' conservatives, in theory, yet neither have enough technological or social accumen to understand the implications of their actions (all calibrated to appeal to a certain 'base').

  Yes, there is a place for limits IMO, perhaps -- where those limits should lie and the means of enforcement is also a matter of informed judgement reached by a consensus of the electorate, not John McCain.  The consensus is something to be reached after informed debate, not just among politicians, but among all of the citizenry.  Just another grab at political grandstanding, if you as me.  And a very stupid one, at that.

  McCain is noting more than neocon-lite, yet he has show that his 'values' extend to whichever way he thinks the political winds are blowing at the time.  (Much like one Democratic lady I could mention!)

  OMO.  Cheers:)  

  by wgard on Tue Dec 12, 2006 at 09:19:41 PM PDT

•  This smacks of "warm fuzzy" with no real teeth...

  I'm waiting for 4089 to be published, because I'm curious how they intend to enforce the "if you're a sex offender, you must register all email addresses and screen names and using any email address besides the one you registered is a crime" part of this that I keep hearing about.

  Seriously, I've got 5 email addresses, 4 of which you will never be able to connect to me, because I want anonymous contact information in some cases.

  And, if any site has to start monitoring their users for kiddie porn/dangerous things/et al, the "we'll monitor your site for you for a low monthly fee" business is going to boom.

  Right now, looking at THOMAS, it smacks of: "They introduced legislation to require sex offenders to register their email addresses..(insert Congressperson's name here) is tough on sex offenders".

  The babysitting of America's public has got to stop. There are plenty of perfectly good commercial solutions to the problem of web censorship that we don't need yet another law on the issue. I use a censorship solution because I leave my Wi-Fi point wide-open to the world. You can't get to my personal computer through it, and I don't care what you surf, so long as it doesn't crack a couple basic ground rules, and I haven't had problems with this.

  If your children are surfing porn or talking to strangers, you need to address that, not count on a law to ensure that stranger isn't dangerous.

  by Our Man In Oregon on Tue Dec 12, 2006 at 09:28:01 PM PDT

•  What chance does this have of passing?

  We better not let this bill get out of committee. This is like the DMCA on steroids. Then again...a lot of Democrats voted for that POS legislation, and Clinton SIGNED it into law, so I'm not too optimistic.

  by Progressive Moderate on Tue Dec 12, 2006 at 10:10:07 PM PDT

  •  This bill might be doomed, but I think the

    problem is really the thinking in the bill, more than the bill itself. Even if this bill dies because of the change in control, some Democrat who isn't thinking clearly could try to take up the cause in an effort to look tough on crime.

    Somehow there has to be a way to stop child molesters without turning the administrator of a stamp collecting message board with 50 members into an arm of the Gestapo.

    by sclminc on Tue Dec 12, 2006 at 10:37:59 PM PDT

    •  Degette, (D CO)

      introduced a similar data retention bill a year ago.

      by ben masel on Tue Dec 12, 2006 at 10:55:05 PM PDT

    •  the way to stop child molesters is

      ...to educate parents about the issue and then let their natural protective instincts do the rest.  

      Educate parents to recognize that most molesters are known to the family, the signs & symptoms that children display after being molested, the various tricks that molesters use to cover up or throw people off the trail, and so on.

      The real problem is parents who say "Oh come on, he's our priest for God's sake, he would never...." or teacher, camp counselor, relative, or even the kid's own father in many cases.  In other words, denial.  

      But once parents are armed with the information, they will use it ferociously.  

      Think of how many times you've heard someone say, "If so-and-so did that to my child, I'd tear him limb from limb with my bare hands!"  

      The Nanny State is no substitute for parents, period.  

      by G2geek on Wed Dec 13, 2006 at 03:27:25 AM PDT

      •  I think the real solution is eventually

        to put some kind of recording/monitoring device on children under the age of about 10.

        This is a little creepy, too, but it's not that much different from using a baby monitor or a professional chaperon, and the truth is that small children have never had the same kind of right to privacy that adults want.

        I think that educating parents is good but can't work that well because, in practice, kids are always sometimes going to be alone with other adults or older kids who turn out to have impulse control problems. (The guy who molested me was about 16. How many adults would think of a 16-year-old being Lester Molester?)

        I think educating children may be good, but I don't think children under about age 5 would really understand the advice or have any practical way to act on it. At worst, maybe providing anti-molesting education would make matters worse for molested children, by making them or adults feel as if the kids were responsible for getting molested because they had followed to follow the anti-molesting instructions.

        E.g., Judgmental Adult: "If only you hadn't gone into that trailer with that guy to see the bunk bed and the map table in the trailer, you wouldn't have been molested?"

        Kid: "But the teacher not to take candy from strangers. Not to stay out of the neighbor kid's trailer!"

        by sclminc on Wed Dec 13, 2006 at 07:32:52 AM PDT

        •  Actually...

          ...the solution is an air-gap. If you're not there to monitor their internet access, unplug the internet. You do have the respective hardware in a controlled location, right? Why is your child getting on the internet unsupervised, anyway?

          If they must have internet access, there's a piece of hardware called a router. A decent one will run about $100.00, and will allow you to block websites that you don't want your children to go to, either by domain name, keyword, or IP address. Then you talk with your children about "bad people", once they're old enough to understand and apply the concept.

          Yes, I know this might require more work for parents than some amorphous "law" from the Feds, but it will be cheaper in the long run. However, I know plenty of tech geeks who will be happy to help someone set this up.

          As a disclaimer, I am a tech geek, however, I'm willing to barter my services.

          by Our Man In Oregon on Wed Dec 13, 2006 at 09:50:36 AM PDT

          •  But the Internet isn't the problem

            I was molested at a time when my school bragged about having a computer that could add 2 single digits.

            I guess there's an issue here of, "ISPs and message boards should cooperate with police who trying to find abducted teenagers and their abductors," but it seems to me that's a much easier, narrower thing to legislate than preventing child molestation.

            The only way to really prevent molestation today is for a safe adult (ideally, two) to always to be with a child. And, really, aside from the fact that that's not really possible (how, as a parent, do you know all the adults or older kids around a small child's preschool or daycare center are safe?), how do you know the safe adults are safe?

            About the best parents can do is to press a cell phone button occasionally and press a button to hear or see what's going on around the child. But now that I'm writing this, I'm realizing that this wouldn't work because molesting parents would use the system to prevent reporting of molesting.

            So, OK, I rescind that suggestion. All I know is that getting Markos to turn over registered user databases to the FBI at the drop of a hat is the wrong approach.

            by sclminc on Wed Dec 13, 2006 at 10:23:32 AM PDT

            •  I agree with that approach...

              What's to prevent the all-knowing government from suddenly determining that, conveniently enough, every user on this site needs to be in that database to protect America? I know, this is kind of a draconian example, but the possibility exists.

              I've got my own beef with the whole "we'll watch for danger so you don't have to" philosophy behind many government laws, but that's another time and place.

              And, you're right, the internet isn't the root problem, that being the issue of child molestation in the first place, I should have expounded better in my reply. However, I'm completely unqualified to speak to the solution of the root problem, so I prefer to stay in my sandbox, which is the world of "Information Technology".

              In this sandbox, addressing the issue of "How do we protect our children from the dangers of the Internet?" is something I think I'm qualified to speak on, and my solution is thus: air gap the computer or install a router that can handle keyword/domain name/IP address blocking, and keep an eye on what your children do. There are plenty of "nanny" programs for computers that will allow you to record everything done on the computer and review it at your convenience. I don't think we need a Federal law (and its associated largess for private companies in the IT field) to solve this particular problem.

              Moreover, I think the fundamental flaw with "register your email address if you're a registered sex offender" is that anyone can have multiple addresses, and there doesn't necessarily have to be any indication that they're associated. Sure, that offender registered '[e-mail]', but what if they also have '[e-mail]' that they haven't told us about?

              I want to see the text of S.4089 before I really tear into it, but on the face, that's the flaw I see. I'll do a comprehensive "this bill is bogus" diary when I get diary privileges and we have the full text.

              But, I stand by my original assessment: this bill is grandstanding by someone who's already announced that they're considering running in 2008. It's points from the "I want to protect my children without actually having to work at it" crowd.

              by Our Man In Oregon on Wed Dec 13, 2006 at 10:45:17 AM PDT

              •  I sort of hate censoring what kids can write or

                read.

                It seems to me that if a kid wants to look at "inappropriate" content or e-mail, well, I hunted through romance novels for the naughty sections.

                If someone is harassing a kid by sending, say, virus spam, it seems as if that's something that could be addressed by existing laws, or at least by laws that wouldn't be so draconian.

                To me, the only valid question is what happens when a kid gets kidnapped or assaulted in the real world, or when photos on the Web provide evidence of a real-world crime.

                So, for the parent, in my view, the issue is more how to keep the kid from getting physically attacked or find a kidnapped kid than what the kid is reading.

                If Daily Kos had to turn over user registration information only when a user was suspected of kidnapping a child, that would be a much narrower thing than if Daily Kos had to turn over user registration whenever a kiddie porn picture got posted.

                by sclminc on Wed Dec 13, 2006 at 10:57:59 AM PDT

                •  I agree, I'm not a big fan of censoring either.

                  Last I checked, there were laws in place to make it illegal for registered offenders to contact victims and/or a certain class of people, e.g. child molestors can't go within 1000 yards of a school or come into contact with children, et al.

                  I agree, I think these laws should address the issue rather well, but the problem is enforcement: within the current budget framework, there isn't room to hire the necessary manpower to ensure compliance, so we depend on the honesty of known criminals.

                  Of course, this only helps in the case of previous offenders, what about someone doing it for the first time or who hasn't been caught?

                  As to the issue of "How much help should a website give law enforcement?", I believe the answer is "Whatever help the subpoena calls for."

                  If law enforcement believes that getting Daily Kos to turn over user registration information will help their case, they need to present that to a judge and use the existing subpoena system. I can't speak for the administrators of the site (as I'm not a representative), but I'd like to believe that if they got a subpoena stating, "We need the user information for xxxxx because we believe they may have been involved in xxxx crime", there would be some compliance.

                  However, there's a flaw in this: your Daily Kos registration information doesn't give anything terribly useful, except for an email address that may and or may not be fake. I don't know if they're logging IP addresses for each user, and I don't really want to know.

                  Even that is a flawed medium: most ISPs don't statically assign IP addresses. The address that the offender had when they posted the picture may belong to granny smith when she posts about how the Republicans suck so much.

                  by Our Man In Oregon on Wed Dec 13, 2006 at 11:08:46 AM PDT

                •  agreed re. censorship

                  When I was a kid, my parents' attitude was "read whatever you want" and I never developed an interest in Playboy or any of that stuff: as far as I was concerned it was just boring and frankly stupid.  Same case for other kids whose parents trusted them this way.  But the kids whose parents got all freaked out about bare breasts... well those kids had their stashes of "dirty magazines" and all that stuff.  And kids will always be ahead of their parents when it comes to hiding things, and especially when it comes to technology.

                  Look:  Mom and Dad go out for the night.  The kid just turns off their spyware and re-arranges the patch cords to bypass the router, and logs into the Nudie Channel.  When he hears the car in the driveway, he puts it all back the way it was and flushes the caches and turns on the Net Nanny software again, and gets back to doing homework.  

                  And anyone who doesn't think kids are good at hacking their parents' computers is dreaming.  

                  by G2geek on Wed Dec 13, 2006 at 05:27:27 PM PDT

                  •  I read my parents copy of the Kama Sutra

                    when I was about 12, and, aside from the part about being molested, I really didn't do anything that would get the abstinence folks too excited until I met my spouse.

                    by sclminc on Wed Dec 13, 2006 at 08:23:30 PM PDT

            •  cooperation with police...

              That would be reasonable.  

              In many cases, ISPs particularly locally-owned ones, will already have good working relations with the local police because they're all in the same (physical) community together.  So in a case like that, the local patrol officer calls up the ISP owner and says "hey we're trying to track down a badguy, can you help?" and the ISP owner does whatever's needed, purely voluntarily.  

              In some cases, e.g. big cities, larger internet corporations, it might be necessary to get a search warrant, but that should be simple enough and it happens all the time for searching physical premises.  

              In an environment like that, ISPs may very well save reasonable records for some period of time anyway, just to be able to help out when a case happens.  

              But there is a huge distance between that and some kind of draconian law that basically shuts down free speech on the internet by making compliance so expensive that only large ISPs and media corporations can afford to comply.  

              by G2geek on Wed Dec 13, 2006 at 05:17:27 PM PDT

        •  monitoring devices...

          As a practical matter it's almost impossible.  Audio alone won't be enough to convict in many cases, you need video.  But that would be a huge file to store on a portable device operated by batteries.  And the device would have  to be worn by the kid properly: think of kids and wrist watches, not so simple.  

          Then there's the big-picture question:  

          Do we want to turn our society into a Big Brother pervasive-surveillance society?  

          If there's one crime that's worse than child molestation it's murder.  And most murders, the vast majority, happen in homes.  Now do we want to put cameras in every room in every household, for example tied into a private security monitoring company, in order to prevent murders?   I'd say, hell no.

          So if we're willing to tolerate murders for the sake of not having pervasive cameras everywhere, then I'd say we have to do the same for child molestations.  We can't protect all the people all the time from everything, and sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.  

          by G2geek on Wed Dec 13, 2006 at 05:10:36 PM PDT

•  More Big Government....

  ....from the party of Big Government.

  The next time I hear a Republican tell me about Big Government Democrats and Small Government Republicans....I'm going to kick them in the nuts.

  I'm not kidding. If this comment has to be troll rated I understand, no hard feelings.

  I'm done. I can't be civil to these freaks anymore.

  by Rex Manning on Tue Dec 12, 2006 at 10:57:09 PM PDT

  •  I''m not a TU

    Besides I gave you a rec.  ;)

    by UneasyOne on Wed Dec 13, 2006 at 12:12:49 AM PDT

  •  Reccing

    And offering to train you to strengthen your nut-kicking mojo (martial arts instructor, 5 yrs experience now) . . . it's time to remove the gloves because this ain't no civil discussion.

    by slippytoad on Wed Dec 13, 2006 at 06:53:59 AM PDT

•  I AM one of McCains enemies on this site

  When we rid ourselves of Bush, he will be the most dangerous jerk in America.  Thanks for bringing this up; sunlight kills fungus.

  by UneasyOne on Wed Dec 13, 2006 at 12:16:38 AM PDT

•  I thought Republicans...

  ...were for less government regulation, not more (at least to have heard Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater tell it). How is McCain going to claim that he is a true conservative and then introduce this anti-civil liberties piece of legislation? With the proper framing, McCain's maverick image will go to flames and he'll wind up alienating the very moderates he will need to win the presidency in two years (of course, when it comes to McCain, who can ever forget that he was the Arizona chairman for the Bush campaign in 2004 and campaigned actively for him in 2000 AND 2004. How is McCain going to weather this slogan-- A VOTE FOR MCCAIN IS A VOTE FOR BUSH?

  by alaprst on Wed Dec 13, 2006 at 03:09:50 AM PDT

•  You're right to be worried

  I foresee that, down the line (during the 08 campaign, perhaps) something like this bill will be offerred as a non-germane amendment to a bill in the Senate - and Uncle Harry will find himself without the votes to pass a motion to table.

  The Dobsonites then go hog wild, and Nancy suddenly finds herself short of votes to take it out.

  Then they have to try and sneak it out in conference.

  The evidence is that, when it comes to offensive material, Joe Sixpack is no defender of the First Amendment.

  So I think it might just sneak through.

  Based on the Free Speech Coalition and similar cases, there should be no problem in getting the courts to strike it down - though, post-Alito, there must a query there.

  That cuts both ways, though: some Dems may decide to turn to the Dark Side comforting themselves that SCOTUS will do their dirty work for them.

  by skeptic06 on Wed Dec 13, 2006 at 06:13:47 AM PDT