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.