The latest attack on anonymous online speech comes from Kentucky Representative Tim Couch, who proposed legislation last week that would ban posting anonymous messages online. The bill requires users to register their true name and address before contributing to any discussion forum, with the stated goal of cutting down on “online bullying.”
The right to speak anonymously is protected by the First Amendment, and the Kentucky proposal raises serious Constitutional questions. In Talley v. California, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Los Angeles ban on the distribution of anonymous handbills on First Amendment grounds. However, the Court has yet to directly address the question of anonymous speech on the Internet, as few existing laws target online anonymity.
The Kentucky bill comes on the heels of controversy over the growing popularity of JuicyCampus.com, a “Web 2.0 website focusing on gossip” where college students post lurid—and often fabricated—tales of fellow students’ sexual encounters. The website bills itself as a home for “anonymous free speech on college campuses,” and uses anonymous IP cloaking techniques to shield users’ identities. Backlash against the site has emerged, with Pepperdine’s student government recently voting to ban the site on campus.
Under current law, websites like Juicy Campus cannot be sued for user-posted messages. As Adam Thierer mentions in a recent post, Daniel J. Solove of George Washington Law School has offered some insightful analysis on anonymity in the digital age. Solove points out that under the Safe Harbor provision found in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, providers are immunized from liability if they unknowingly distribute libelous messages so long as they remove libelous postings upon receiving a takedown request. This issue was further clarified in 2006 in Barrett v. Rosenthal, in which the Court found that website operators are immune from liability when distributing defamatory communications.
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Most of us think of watch-listing as a fool’s errand in the air travel context. Well, here’s a story of how it can wreak havoc (more accurately, deny free speech and due process) in the context of Web domains.
The U.S. Treasury Department’s OFAC list (for Office of Foreign Asset Control) is a list of people and entities that U.S. entities can’t do business with. Because doing business with them would be support for the terrorists.
Oh, and support for travel agents specializing in getting Europeans to Cuba.
The debate over online child safety is just as heated abroad as it is here in the States. Over in the UK yesterday, according to this London Times article, Conservative Shadow Home Secretary David Davis…
attacked the Government for not doing enough to raise awareness among children of the dangers posed by cyber-crime, at a time when the threat was growing and criminals were using increasingly sophisticated methods to target their victims. “From e-mail to file-sharing, social networking to shopping, the internet is part of our lives. But we’re not the only ones to have migrated to this new communication platform,” Mr Davis told delegates at an e-crime conference in London. “The internet is a shopping mall for criminals, and for many of us it’s in the home that cyber-crime strikes. These days our real valuables are the personal details that are measured in megabites, rather than our belongings.”
Apparently, Mr. Davis and fellow conservatives have also argued that children as young as 5 years of age should be taught about the dangers of putting their personal details on the internet.
A few thoughts on this… First, I’m all for online safety education and media literacy, but shouldn’t we be teaching our kids basic literacy first? My six year old doesn’t even know how to spell “Internet” yet!
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I’ve started to force myself to use Twitter to see if I can discover why people find it so compelling. Well, yesterday, after UPS delivered Clay Shirky’s new book, “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” I decided to subscribe to Shirky’s tweets. Lo and behold, a few hours later I get this tweet from Shirky: “Getting ready for a talk tomorrow at New America Foundation in DC.” I had no idea he would be in town. Twitter is actually useful.
So, I attended the talk at the New America Foundation. It was based on his book, which looks at the how new online tools of conversation and collaboration (like Twitter) are affecting society. I took notes and thought I’d share them here. Be warned they’re more or less chicken scratch, but they should give you a flavor for his ideas. They’re after the jump.
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I have long been intrigued with the effort to regulate online gaming activities because it represents the most sophisticated effort by our government yet to eradicate a specific class of online speech or commerce. (My TLF colleague Tom Bell has done seminal work in this field). In her weekly “The Regulators” column, The Washington Post’s outstanding regulatory columnist Cindy Skrzycki writes about the enforcement challenges at work here:
It’s not easy making rules for a U.S. law intended to deter illegal Internet gambling by choking off the flow of funds to offshore sites. That’s because no one seems to agree on what the law covers. Officials at the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve found that out after sifting through more than 200 comments from banks, gamblers, church groups and members of Congress on recommendations for the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006. The basic sentiment was that their Oct. 4 proposal, which depends on financial institution enforcement, won’t work.
The outcome will affect 23 million online gamblers, some 2,500 Internet sites and the growth of an industry with an estimated $15 billion in annual global revenue. The law bars financial institutions from processing payments involving Internet gambling — with the notable exceptions of Indian gaming, state gaming and horse racing. “If the federal agencies themselves cannot agree on the law, what hope is there that banks can resolve these confounding legal issues?” the American Bankers Association said in commenting on a conflict between the Treasury and Justice departments on the legality of betting on horses. The Washington trade group said the suggested rules are more likely to catch its members in a compliance trap than stop profits from illegal gambling from escaping offshore.
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There’s a good opinion piece on age verification and social networking websites by CDT’s Leslie Harris on the ABC news site.
Third, can we verify age or identity and still protect privacy? Would personal information about minors have to be submitted and maintained in large databases, or would Internet users have to have an authenticated identification card to go online?
Along with TLF’s very own Adam Thierer, CDT is on the Berkman Center task force setup by the MySpace & Attorneys General joint statement to study online authentication techniques. Intelligent study of the issue is much needed, as age verification is a hot topic in the states.
So far this year we’ve seen age verification bills introduced in Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, and Mississippi (last year also saw Connecticut and North Carolina). These bills would force the sites to age verify its users and obtain parental consent before kids under 18 could register. I’m happy to say that Mississippi’s bill failed to make crossover and is dead, and Georgia’s bill is effectively dead.
Age verification is looked upon as a way to keep our kids safer online, but it’s really an access control device that by itself does nothing to limit opportunities for sexual predators. Politicians should avoid age verification mandates, particularly as we have a panel of experts to study the issue over the next year!
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), Australia’s content and communications regulatory agency, has just released a comprehensive new report on “Developments in Internet Filtering Technologies and Other Measures for Promoting Online Safety.” It’s 120 pages long and contains a survey of all the various tool and methods that Australians can use to deal objectionable online content or communications.
What I like best about the report is that the ACMA ultimately came to the exact same conclusion that I did after conducting a thorough review of these issues in my “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection” report. Namely, (1) there is no single “silver-bullet” technical solution (rather, some combination of many tools and methods must be used), and (2) education is essential. Here’s how they put it on page 91 of the report:
“there is no single mitigation measure that is effective against all online risks. Neither is there a single mitigation measure that is effective in addressing even one category of online risks, that is, content risks, e-security risks and communications risks”…
“Education campaigns appear to be effective in addressing a broad range of online risks. Of the range of alternative risk mitigation measures, education is to the most effective measure in addressing risks associated with illegal online contact. Education is a viable alternative or supplement to filtering in targeting risks associated with inappropriate content, particularly for older children who may endeavor to circumvent filtering that they perceive to be restrictive. There is evidence from programs deployed in other countries that eduction can be deployed to address bullying.”
Absolutely correct. As I argued in my report, “there isn’t any one, silver bullet tool or method that will get the job done on its own. … [W]e will need to adopt a ‘layered’ approach to parental controls and online child protection to do the job right” that involves a combination of “rules, tools, schools, and talk” with education at the heart of all those strategies.
I suspect many of these issues will be considered by the new Internet Safety Technical Task Force that I will be serving on and which I discussed here this week. The Australian report will serve as a good resource for us as we begin our review.
GamePolitics.com reports on a murder trial in Alabama in which the attorney for a disturbed teenager is blaming video games for his barbaric behavior:
The lawyer for a man being tried for murder is trying to convince an Alabama jury that the defendant believed he was acting out a video game when he murdered an 80-year-old man on Halloween, 2005.
As reported by the Decatur Daily, Andrew Reid Lackey, 24, does not dispute that he stabbed, shot and gouged out the eye of his victim, Charlie Newman. However, Lackey’s attorney, Randy Gladden, is pointing the finger at video games. From the newspaper report:
Actions that led to a deadly confrontation between a defendant and an 80-year-old widower resembled a video game to the accused… [Attorney] Gladden described Lackey… as a computer geek who had immersed himself in video games and lived in “a different world than you and I.”
Tapes of a 911 call made by the victim during the fatal confrontation, however, indicate that old-school greed may have been the motive. Lackey is heard to demand of the victim, ”Where’s the vault?” seven different times. Charlie Newman’s grandson had previously told Lackey that the victim kept a large sum of money in a vault under the stairs. However, no such vault existed.
It’s just disgraceful–but perhaps not all that surprising–that this desperate defense attorney would employ tactics like this. Video games have become the universal excuse du jour for violent behavior. It’s absurd for all the reasons I have pointed out here before. It’s abundantly clear that old fashion greed and a disturbed mind motivated this particular crime, and if you think that sort of thing didn’t happen before video games came along, then you just haven’t read any history. Of course, they instead just blamed movies, comics, and books for the crimes back then! There’s always someone else or something else to blame. It’s the never-ending search for a universal scapegoat for irrational or criminal behavior. The twisted logic = Don’t blame the individual, blame the media.
Pathetic.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.