Over the weekend, the always-terrific Lenore Skenazy published a provocative editorial in Forbes entitled, “Shred Your Sex Offender Map.” (For more on Skenazy, see my review of her amazing book Free-Range Kids here last year). In her Forbes essay, Skenazy argues that, as currently constructed, America’s sex offender registries “are making our kids LESS safe.” How can that possibly be? I explained why in a lengthy essay on this topic I penned last summer entitled, “Rethinking ‘Sex Crimes’ and Sex Offender Registries.” In it, I made an argument similar to Lenore’s. In a nutshell, if we really want to keep kids safe from real sex offenders, we need to completely rethink the way we define and punish sex offenses in this country because a significant percentage of the people listed on sex offender registries pose almost no threat to children, making it difficult for us to know who really does pose a threat to our kids and what we should do about them.
Consider two groups of people. Let’s call Group #1 the “petty sex crime crowd.” This would include anyone convicted of indecent exposure (streaking / public nudity / public urination); a 19-year-old teen who gets caught having sex with a 17-year-old girlfriend; two gay men who had consensual sex in a state where sodomy was previously illegal; etc, etc. The crucial distinction for this group is that their actions were consensual and non-violent. No serious harm came from their actions, even if some of these activities are less than socially desirable. Now, let’s talk about Group #2: violent rapists, child molesters, child pornographers, and other creeps who sexually abused people (or even animals!) These people are the wretched scum of the Earth.
Anyway, here’s the first problem with the current sex offender registries: Group 1 and Group 2 are all mixed together! There’s a word for this: Insanity. How in the hell did it ever come to pass that non-violent, consensual sex “offenders” got stuck on the same list as sadists, pedophiles, rapists, and other violent, evil scum? Honestly, I don’t know and I don’t care. I just want that nonsense to end and end right now because as I noted in my earlier essay and Lenore argues in her’s, this means current sex offender lists / maps are largely worthless to parents like me unless I take the time to drill down into the details of who was guilty of what. (Even when you do, it can still be confusing since some crimes aren’t made clear). But the public is basically being subjected to a panic attack when they hear sex offender registry numbers or see maps of sex offenders in their neighborhood because the overall number of “offenders on the lists,” or dots on the offender maps, is being artificially raised by the presence of Group 1 “offenders.”
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The Entertainment Software Association, which represents the video game industry, has just released its latest “Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry” publication. It’s a handy annual resource that I always look forward to reading. There are many interesting facts and figures found in the report, but here a few worth calling out from the data they have aggregated:
- 93% of the time parents are present at the time games are purchased or rented
- 64% of parents believe games are a positive part of their children’s lives
- 86% of the time children receive their parents’ permission before purchasing or renting a game
- 48% of parents play computer and video games with their children at least weekly
- 97% of parents report always or sometimes monitoring the games their children play
- 76% of parents believe that the parental controls available in all new video game consoles are useful
The survey also bolsters the findings of many other polls and reports which have found that parents employ a variety of what I have labeled “household media rules” to monitor or control their children’s media consumption: Continue reading →
I was interviewed yesterday for the local Fox affiliate on Cal. SB 1411, which criminalizes online impersonations (or “e-personation”) under certain circumstances.
On paper, of course, this sounds like a fine idea. As Palo Alto State Senator Joe Simitian, the bill’s sponsor, put it, “The Internet makes many things easier. One of those, unfortunately, is pretending to be someone else. When that happens with the intent of causing harm, folks need a law they can turn to.”
Or do they?
The Problem with New Laws for New Technology
SB1411 would make a great exam question of short paper assignment for an information law course. It’s short, is loaded with good intentions, and on first blush looks perfectly reasonable—just extending existing harassment, intimidation and fraud laws to the modern context of online activity. Unfortunately, a careful read reveals all sorts of potential problems and unintended consequences.
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Note to Washington regulators and would-be censors… Don’t look now but parenting is happening! Yes, it really is true: Parents are parenting. That’s the result of this new survey by Yahoo & Ipsos OTX. Please pardon my snarky-ness, but I’ve been going at it for years with mobs of people here in DC who think that all parents are asleep at the wheel and kids are heading straight for the moral abyss. It’s a bunch of bunk, as I’ve pointed out here before. This new Yahoo!/Ipsos survey illustrates that, once again, parents are monitoring what their kids are up to online and taking an active role in mentoring them about web use:
- 78% of parents are concerned about their children’s online safety.
- 70% of parents talk to their children about online safety at least 2-3 times a year; 45% talk to their children at least once a month.
- 74% of parents are connected to their children’s profiles on social networking sites.
- 71% of parents have taken at least one action to manage their children’s use of the Internet or cell phones such as: Check to see where children are searching online; Set time limits for children’s use of computers or cell phones; Set parental controls on video sites; Use filters to limit where children go on the Web.
These results are consistent with what I have found and described in my ongoing PFF special report, Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods. Obviously, many parents utilize the growing diversity of parental control technologies that are at their disposal to better control/monitor their children’s online activities/interactions. But what’s really impressive (and far more important) is that so many surveys and studies continue to show that the vast majority of parents utilize a variety of household “media consumption rules” as a substitute for, or compliment to, parental control technologies. Continue reading →
On June 29th, The Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF) and the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) will co-host a National Press Club briefing entitled “Sending an Online Safety Message to Congress.” This event will feature a discussion about the recently released report of the Online Safety and Technology Working Group (OSTWG), “Youth Safety on a Living Internet.” OSTWG — a congressionally-mandated blue ribbon working group — analyzed the state of online child safety and offered policymakers and parents a wide array of recommendations for how to keep kids safe and secure in today’s “always-on,” interconnected world. [For more background on OSTWG and our final report, see this post.] Several OSTWG leaders will be on hand to discuss the report and outline the next steps that need to be taken on this front. Here are the details.
| What: |
Sending an Online Safety Message to Congress — A discussion about the OSTWG final report and the future of childrens’ online safety and public policy. |
| When: |
Tuesday, June 29
9:00 a.m. – 10:45 p.m. (breakfast provided) |
| Where: |
National Press Club
First Amendment Lounge, 13th Floor 529 14th Street NW Washington, D.C. 20515 |
| Who: |
Hemanshu Nigam, Founder, SSP Blue, and Co-Chair of OSTWG
Larry Magid, Co-Director, ConnectSafety.org
Michael McKeehan, Executive Director, Internet & Technology Policy, Verizon
Adam Thierer President, The Progress & Freedom Foundation
Stephen Balkam Chief Executive Officer, Family Online Safety Institute, (moderator) |
To Register: Space is limited, so an RSVP is required to attend. Please register here.
Faithful readers know of my geeky love for tech policy books. I read lots of ’em. There’s a steady stream of Amazon.com boxes that piles up on my doorstop some days because my mailman can’t fit them all in my mailbox. But I go pretty hard on all the books I review. It’s rare for me pen a glowing review. Occasionally, however, a book will come along that I think is both worthy of your time and which demands a place on your bookshelf because it is such an indispensable resource. Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace is one of those books.
Smartly organized and edited by Ronald J. Deibert, John G. Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain, Access Controlled is essential reading for anyone studying the methods governments are using globally to stifle online expression and dissent. As I noted of their previous edition, Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, there is simply no other resource out there like this; it should be required reading in every cyberlaw or information policy program.
The book, which is a project of the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), is divided into two parts. Part 1 of the book includes six chapters on “Theory and Analysis.” They are terrifically informative essays, and the editors have made them all available online here (I’ve listed them down below with links embedded). The beefy second part of the book provides a whopping 480 pages(!) of detailed regional and country-by-country overviews of the global state of online speech controls and discuss the long-term ramifications of increasing government meddling with online networks.
In their interesting chapter on “Control and Subversion in Russian Cyberspace,” Deibert and Rohozinski create a useful taxonomy to illustrate the three general types of speech and information controls that states are deploying today. What I find most interesting is how, throughout the book, various authors document the increasing movement away from “first generation controls,” which are epitomized by “Great Firewall of China”-like filtering methods, and toward second- and third-generation controls, which are more refined and difficult to monitor. Here’s how Deibert and Rohozinski define those three classes (or “generations”) of controls: Continue reading →
There’s a bill moving in California (SB 1361) that restricts how social networking sites display the personal information of 13 to 17 yr olds. It’s billed as a privacy bill and at first glance seems relatively harmless — after all, kids don’t need to be broadcasting their contact information, right? Maybe. It all depends.
It depends on the situation, obviously. We teach our kids to recognize risky situations and to react appropriately.
But whether or not teens are at risk by publishing their telephone numbers is not the threshold question here. The law presumes such and I’m not aware of any specific findings offered in testimony about the bill.
Instead, the issue at hand is whether we need a law to restrict social networking websites from publishing certain information from teenagers. And with any law, there’s always the corresponding principle of unintended consequences.
A bit more about the bill. It restricts a social networking website from displaying the home address and telephone numbers of minors who self-identify as being under 18. It only applies to “web fields specifically designated to display the registered user’s home address or telephone number” – recognizing the impracticality of having hundreds of thousands of websites police every area where kids can share information.
Arguing against bills that aim to protect children is really hard work – who can be against the children (or in this case, adolescents)? But I truly believe this bill has serious unintended consequences and sets a bad precedent for how minors are allowed to share information on the Internet.
Here’s why SB 1361 shouldn’t become law: Continue reading →
I spend a lot of time here trying to debunk media “moral panics,” “techno-panics,” or unfounded hysteria over the impact of commercialism in general on kids. To believe what some politicians and regulatory agitators have to say, today’s youth always seem at the precipice of the moral abyss. Our misguided youth are seemingly all going straight to hell and they dragging our culture and society down with them.
Except they’re not. It’s all the same old tripe we’ve heard one generation after another. As the late University of North Carolina journalism professor Margaret A. Blanchard once noted: “[P]arents and grandparents who lead the efforts to cleanse today’s society seem to forget that they survived alleged attacks on their morals by different media when they were children. Each generation’s adults either lose faith in the ability of their young people to do the same or they become convinced that the dangers facing the new generation are much more substantial than the ones they faced as children.” And Thomas Hine, author of The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, argues that: “We seem to have moved, without skipping a beat, from blaming our parents for the ills of society to blaming our children. We want them to embody virtues we only rarely practice. We want them to eschew habits we’ve never managed to break.”
Anyway, I was reminded of this again today as I was finally reading through a report published last year by the U.K.’s Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It’s entitled “The Impact of the Commercial World on Children’s Wellbeing” and it is very much worth your attention. Several people had recommended I check it out in recent months, but I’m ashamed to say I am only now getting around to it as I prepare an amicus brief for the Supreme Court’s review of a California video game law. But this U.K. report is not to be missed. Here are a few of the choice bits from the study: Continue reading →
The Online Safety and Technology Working Group (OSTWG) has just released its final report to Congress entitled, “Youth Safety on a Living Internet.” As I mentioned here last year, this government task force was established by the “Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act,” (part of the ‘‘Broadband Data Improvement Act’,’ Pub. L. No. 110-385) and its mission was to review and evaluate:
- The status of industry efforts to promote online safety through educational efforts, parental control technology, blocking and filtering software, age-appropriate labels for content or other technologies or initiatives designed to promote a safe online environment for children;
- The status of industry efforts to promote online safety among providers of electronic communications services and remote computing services by reporting apparent child pornography, including any obstacles to such reporting;
- The practices of electronic communications service providers and remote computing service providers related to record retention in connection with crimes against children; and,
- The development of technologies to help parents shield their children from inappropriate material on the Internet.
The task force included over 30 experts from academia, industry, advocacy groups, and think tanks. It was my great honor to be a member of OSTWG and to serve as the chair of 1 of the 4 subcommittees. The four subcommittees addressed: data retention, child pornography reporting, educational efforts, and parental controls technologies. I chaired that last subcommittee on parental controls.
Our conclusions will not be surprising to those who have read previous online safety task force reports, which I have summarized in 2009 white paper, “Five Online Safety Task Forces Agree: Education, Empowerment & Self-Regulation Are the Answer.” Generally speaking, we concluded that there is no silver-bullet technical solution to online child safety concerns. Instead – and again in agreement with previous research and task force reports – we have concluded that a diverse toolbox and a “layered approach” must be brought to bear on these problems and concerns. Here’s how we put it in the report:
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Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) hosted an all-day workshop on “Protecting Kids’ Privacy Online,” which looked into the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA) and challenges posed to its enforcement by new technological developments. The FTC staff did a nice job bringing together and moderating 5 panels worth of participants, all of whom had plenty of interesting things to say about the future of COPPA. But I was more struck by what was not said yesterday. Namely, there was:
- ZERO explanation of the supposed harms of advertising, marketing, and data collection. Advertising-bashing is an old sport here in Washington, so I guess I should not have been surprised to hear several panelists yesterday engaging in teeth-gnashing and hand-wringing about advertising, marketing, and the data collection methods that make it possible. But this grousing just went on and on without any explanation by the critics of the supposed harms that would result from it.
- ZERO appreciation of the benefits of advertising, marketing, and data collection. Not once yesterday — NOT ONCE — did anyone pause to ask what it is that makes all these wonderful online sites, services and content free (or dirt cheap) to consumers. Everyone at this show was guilty of the “manna fallacy” (that all this stuff just falls magically to Earth from the Net Gods above). Well, back here in the real world, something has to pay for all those goodies, and that something is advertising and marketing, which are facilitated by data collection! Or would you like to pay $19.95 a month for each of those currently free sites and services? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.