Tennessee has a proposal to create a “Tennessee community conscious Internet provider” seal to be awarded by the consumer affairs division. A bill introduced in the Tennessee General Assembly – HB 2530 – would award a seal to ISPs that:
1) retain IP addresses for 2 years;
2) take down communications that are obscene or harmful to minors;
3) prohibit customers from publishing communications obscene or harmful to minors; and
4) comply and cooperate with law enforcement requests and court orders.
Granted, Tennessee is the “volunteer state”, but if this bill were to pass would ISPs really participate?
Note how the bill links “obscenity” – which is not protected speech under the 1st Amendment – with material harmful to minors – which could be almost anything, most of which would be protected speech.
This is a trend we’re seeing–using child porn and child online safety as a “trojan horse” into regulating the online behavior of everybody through rules on ISPs. Adam Thierer calls it “deputizing the middleman” — an apt phrase for the kinds of policing that ISPs may be doing in the future based on the regulatory and market pressures they’re seeing today.
Hawaii has a bill pending that would make it a felony for ISPs to knowingly fail to report subscribers who acquire, possess, solicit or transmit images of child pornography.
Forget a “seal of approval” – may as well just throw ISPs a badge.
Last week on the Google Public Policy Blog, Peter Greenberger of Google’s Elections and Issue Advocacy Team posted Google’s new guidelines for political advertising on the site. Most of the guidelines seem fairly straightforward and sensible to me since they relate to general principles of fairness and transparency. But sandwiched in between those principles is the following guideline:
No attacks on an individual’s personal life. Stating disagreement with or campaigning against a candidate for public office, a political party, or public administration is generally permissible. However, political ads must not include accusations or attacks relating to an individual’s personal life, nor can they advocate against a protected group. So, “Crime rates are up under Police Commissioner Gordon” is okay, but “Police Commissioner Gordon had an affair” is not.
I understand what Google is trying to do here in terms of making the Net a more civil place to engage in deliberative democracy without all the mud-slinging and name-calling. In one sense, I applaud them for that. On the other hand, the world is not a perfect place and candidates are not perfect people. And, candidates for office are not just like any other citizen in our society. They are people who will be given power over other people. Power over our lives, our liberties and fate of the nation.
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I spend a lot of time griping about actual or potential threats to freedom of speech and expression here in the United States. But, I also feel it’s important for us to occasionally step back and remember how lucky we are to live in a country like the United States that has greater protections for freedom of the press and freedom of individual expression than most other countries of the world. This Washington Post story today serves as a good occasion to do so.
In Afghanistan this week, a young reporter and journalism student by the name of Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, 20, was sentenced to death for speaking his mind. His “crime”? …
His alleged offense was distributing to classmates a report, printed from a Web site, commenting on a Muslim woman’s right to multiple marriages. The article, written in Farsi, which is close to the Dari language spoken in Afghanistan, questioned why men are allowed to have four spouses in Islam while women are denied the same right.
Without a lawyer to represent him, Kambakhsh was hustled Tuesday into a small hearing room where three judges and a prosecutor conducted a five-minute proceeding, according to his older brother. He was then handed a piece of paper saying he had acted against Islam and should be executed, said the brother, Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, who visited him in prison Wednesday night. “There was no defense lawyer, no human rights adviser, no family member, no discussion, nothing,” Ibrahimi, a 26-year-old journalist, said by telephone from Mazar-e Sharif. “They did not let him explain. It was a joke.”
Makes me sick to my stomach. Hopefully, the pressure being put on the Afghan officials by the U.N., Reporters Without Borders, and other groups will reverse this travesty.
The USA Today editorial board published a nasty piece today belittling MySpace.com’s recent efforts to implement more safeguards for its users. Despite the fact that MySpace made over 70 promises to the Attorneys General as part of the agreement–the entire agreement is summarized here–that’s still not good enough for the USA Today’s editorial board, which wants full-blown identity verification before anyone is allowed on a social networking site:
“Even in the absence of a perfect software solution, interim steps are possible. How about using databases of drivers’ licenses to cross-check ages? In more than 20 states, they are public records. The point is, more effective safeguards are needed now, …. MySpace [should be] moving faster to set up age and ID verifications, not just study them.”
Well, where do I begin? I get so frustrated when I see comments like this because it is abundantly clear to me that people don’t think things through when it comes to age verification. As I pointed out in my lengthy PFF report, “Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions,” age verification is extremely complicated, and it would be even more complicated in this case because public officials are demanding the age verification of minors as well as adults, which presents a wide array of special challenges and concerns.
What Age Verification Really Is: The Death of Online Anonymity
We need to begin by understanding what age verification really is. By definition, mandatory age verification represents an effort to make online anonymity a crime. In simple terms, citizens would be forced to “show their papers” at the door of every website or else run the risk of being denied access–simply because they do not want to surrender their name or age.
Think about what that means. It’s easy to take the benefits of online anonymity for granted. There are millions of people who comment anonymously on blogs like this one every day, or write anonymous book or product reviews on Amazon.com or eBay, or who just chat with others about various topics under the cloak of anonymity. It is a wonderful thing.
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Is it appropriate for a student to call a school administrator’s house and petition him to give his classmates a snow day? If the administrator’s wife gets the message, returns the student’s call, and tells the “snotty-nosed little brat” to “get over it, and go to school,” is it acceptable for the student to record that message and post it on the Internet such that it leads to even more harassment of the administrator and his wife at home??
These are just a few of the interesting questions raised by this interesting case study in Information Age ethics / etiquette. [The story has generated almost 500 responses on the Washington Post website with passionate comments being made from both perspectives. Clearly it touches a nerve.]
Back in 2005, I threw away a book I was writing. Well, I didn’t exactly toss it in a garbage can or take a match to the manuscript; I just abandoned the project to work on other things, including a different book and a big law review article. I’m still mad at myself for never finishing it up because I think it put forward a provocative thesis: Censorship is dead. Specifically, as I argued in the first lines of the book, “A confluence of social, legal and, most importantly, technological developments is slowly undermining the ability of legislators and regulators, at all levels of government, to control the nature or quality of speech or media programming.” Accordingly, the running title for the book was: “The End of Censorship?: The Future of Content Controls in a World of Media Convergence.”
Anyway, I recently unearthed an old draft of this discarded manuscript and thought I might as well at least throw the introduction online. In it, I outline my thesis and the “5 Reasons Content Controls Will Break Down.” I also highlight how governments will fight back and discuss what alternatives are out there to address concerns about objectionable content. Someone out there might be interested in all this even though much of what I say here is now widely accepted or been said better by others. I’ve stripped out all the footnotes and cut out significant sections to make what follows more readable. So, here it goes…
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“The End of Censorship? The Future of Content Controls in a World of Media Convergence.”
Content regulation–at least as it has been traditionally defined and enforced in the United States–is doomed. A confluence of social, legal and, most importantly, technological developments is slowly undermining the ability of legislators and regulators, at all levels of government, to control the nature or quality of speech or media programming. Specifically, it is the distribution channel-based system of content regulation employed in the U.S. and many other nations that is breaking down. That is, the ability of governments to regulate speech and expression by regulating its distribution channel or provider (such as broadcasting), represents in increasingly ineffective and illogical method of policing content flows.
The demise of traditional content controls may take many years–potentially even decades–to play out, but signs of the impending death of the old regulatory regime are already evident.
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This morning in New York City, social networking website operator MySpace.com announced a major joint effort with 49 state Attorneys General aimed at better protecting children online. (Coverage at CNet, NYT and Forbes). At a joint press conference, MySpace and the AGs unveiled a “Joint Statement on Key Principles of Social Networking Safety” involving expanded online safety tools, improved education efforts, and law enforcement cooperation. They also agreed to create an industry-wide Internet Safety Technical Task Force to study online safety tools, including a review of online identity authentication technology.
Generally speaking, the agreement is step forward for online safety. Indeed, many of the principles in the agreement could form a potential model “code of conduct” that other social networking sites could adopt. In a report I authored for the Progress & Freedom Foundation in August 2006, I argued that it was vital for companies and trade associations to take steps such as this to avoid the specter of government regulation or censorship:
All companies doing business online… must show policymakers and the general public that they are serious about addressing [online safety] concerns. If companies and trade associations do not step up to the plate and meet this challenge soon—and in a collective fashion—calls will only grow louder for increased government regulation of online speech and activities. What is needed is a voluntary code of conduct for companies doing business online. This code of conduct, or set of industry “best practices,” would be based on a straight-forward set of principles and policies that could be universally adopted by [a] wide variety of operators…
In particular, this code of conduct proposal called for companies to make specific pledges regarding improved online safety tools, expanded education / media literacy efforts, and ongoing assistance to law enforcement regarding investigations of online crimes.
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I just realized that I forgot to blog last month about the release of the Family Online Safety Institute’s (FOSI) “State of Online Safety Report 2008.” As Stephen Balkam, CEO of FOSI, notes in the preface, the report is “[an] attempt to take an international snap shot of the incredibly diverse and innovative attempts to keep kids safe online, while also respecting free expression.” It features chapters on 9 different countries, including the US, the UK, Australia, Germany, Mexico, Canada, Austria, Netherlands, and Belgium.
Each chapter was authored by an online safety expert from those countries. Stephen Balkam was kind enough to invite me to submit the chapter on the state of affairs in the United States and it is included as Chapter 1 in the report. My contribution is based largely on material pulled from my big PFF report, Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods.
FOSI hopes to improve and expand the report in coming years to give analysts, policymakers, the press, and other interested parties an in-depth feel for the state of play in many other countries. But it already serves as a uniquely importantly resource for those who want a snapshot of online safety efforts internationally. Here’s more of what Stephen had to say in the preface of the report about the current state of global online safety efforts:
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TLF readers may be interested in reading a piece I just wrote with John Berlau, a colleague of mine at CEI, about Hillary Clinton’s stance on video game regulation. Senator Clinton has taken a very aggressive stance against video game violence, suggesting the FTC should oversee how games are rated, opening the door to further interference with the ESRB system.
We’ve quickly received feedback from one of the heavy-hitters in the anti-gaming world. None other than Jack Thompson emailed John today. Thompson, a famous anti-gaming lawyer and activist, has supported a wide variety of legislative solutions to the supposed plague of video game violence. His email to John contained no text in the body, but the subject line read as follows:
You’re wrong. Video games inspire violence. It’s a public safety hazard and a legitimate governmental concern
He attached a PDF of a Stephen Moore column for the Wall Street Journal to back up this assertion. In the piece, Moore complains that his children have turned into zombies, claiming that video games are the “new crack cocaine.” Though I love Moore and his columns for the WSJ and agree with him more often than not, this is one of those instances of not.
Video games are addictive, I’ll say that from personal experience, but I’ve been able to wean myself off a nearly debilitating addiction to Company of Heroes–I’m now down to a reasonable 4 hours a week. But games aren’t the new crack, they’re just a new diversion that neither kids nor adults should invest too much time into. Kids don’t have the self control to keep themselves away from them, so once parents let the kids vegetate for 8 hours a day, it is a tough job for parents to refuse kids their endorphin-producing joy-machines, but government won’t do a better job.
Instead of pushing for government action, which would be a 1st Amendment violation in addition to being ineffective, Jack Thompson ought to be trying to educate parents about sensible limitations for little ones and pointing them in the direction of Adam Thierer’s Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods.
It’s ironic. The more that new technology makes it possible for people to communicate, the more that free speech is threatened.
Internationally, the censorship trend is worrisome. First, there’s this Guardian article about how Russia wants to create an internationalized domain name for .ru that would allow Russian speakers to use Cyrillic characters for typing the country code. Sounds great, but there’s the fear that the government would create an Internet just for Russia, providing the government with greater control over what is accessed on the global Internet.
Then there’s Saudi Arabia. A New York Times article confirms that the government has detained a Saudi blogger “for purposes of interrogation” about his writings about political prisoners. Apparently writing about political prisoners will make you one.
No surprise that China is still an active censor, the latest news being that China will restrict where Internet videos can be broadcast. Only websites that have a permit can broadcast or allow users to upload video content. “The policy will ban providers from broadcasting video that involves national secrets, hurts the reputation of China, disrupts social stability or promotes pornography,” the AP reports. Though as Forbes reports, this may only be a scare tactic threat for self-policing by sites like YouTube, because China’s government lacks the ability to filter video like it does text. China also just announced that it is cracking down on sex in all video and audio products.
What is a surprise is Australia’s ambitious net censorship proposal. According this Australian news article, the federal government would host a blacklist of sites that ISPs would be required to block. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy wants filters in place to shield children from online porn and violence.
Even in the digital age, government is “here to help” – only just may not “hear” (or read or see) anything.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.