In 2008, an obviously important election year, 30 bills were introduced to Congress aimed at protecting children online; all of them failed. This was after years of attempts, at least one of which was overturned by the Supreme Court, to pass similar legislation, some of which sought to make it illegal for adults even to pretend to be underage in pornographic material.
Good intentions, road to Hell, you know how that goes. Chances are you know how old classroom fantasies go too, but I’m not accusing or admitting.
Sen. John Cornyn
Even the language in the press release about this year’s version—the Internet Safety Act—introduced by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) on the House side and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) on the other, is a bit icky.
Rep. Lamar Smith
“Investigators need the assistance of Internet Service Providers to identify users and distributers [sic] of online child pornography,” said Smith.
Yeah, he said users of pornography. Ew. He spelled distributors wrong when he said it, too.
That legislators are more than willing to sacrifice your civil liberties at the Altar of Protecting The Children—it’s a political resume builder they can take home to their ‘stitch-ee-unts, listed right there beneath helped fight the war on terror and above took on the fat cats on Wall Street—isn’t even really news anymore. It’s standard fare, really.
This bill specifically requires ISPs to retain for a period of two years records identifying users assigned dynamic IP addresses at specific times. It’s hard for detractors concerned about privacy, overreaching governmental power and authority, and false accusations to object to providing law enforcement with the necessary tools to track down child porn peddlers and, well, users. (Personally, if we’re absolutely sure of it, I’d just as soon have them tarred, feathered, and shot on sight—but this isn’t about that.)
The current iteration of the legislation succeeds with sufficient vagueness in respect that it doesn’t delineate which adult fantasies are legal while being specific enough that it may escape previous SCOTUS objections. With those two things going for it, it may have a chance at passing.
But just as legislators wanting proof they’re fighting the good fight isn’t news, neither are blatant hypocrisy and routine snubbing of arguments against unnecessary regulation to that effect. Regardless of how it looks on an international level—with the EU slapping Internet companies for not cutting retention policies enough—regardless of how conservatives love to pound the Reaganesque anti-regulation, downsizing-because-government-is-the-problem drums while simultaneously introducing more legislation and more government, regardless of how the feds have already sufficiently trampled constitutional privacy rights in a post-Trade-Center decade, regardless of how this is likely more useful to the copyright police than the porn police and is destined for abuse…
ISPs are already required to retain data on specific users if law enforcement asks them for purposes of an investigation. So, thanks Congressmen for, well, nothing.
