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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 78 responses total. |
scg
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response 24 of 78:
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Oct 27 06:08 UTC 1998 |
Right. I don't think the Constitution is harming children, at least to the
extent that changes to it wouldn't in general do more harm, so I support
leaving it alone. If there were a provision in the Constitution that I felt
were harming children, I would think the Constitution needed to be changed.
But, the US is the World's second largest democracy (India being the largest).
The US Constitution is ammendable, but intentionally it was made rather
difficult to ammend. If I felt the Constitution were harming children, I
couldn't just go out and ammend it; I would have to convince a really large
number of other people that it was worth ammending. Likewise, those who now
feel that free speech harms children would have to convince a lot of other
people that it was worth changing the constitution to get rid of freedom of
speech, to protect the children. It's one thing to push a rider on the budget
bill through Congress, but I don't see the CDA making it as a Constitutional
ammendment any time soon. That sort of thing tends to get much closer
examination.
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morpheus
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response 25 of 78:
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Nov 11 07:37 UTC 1998 |
well, i care about this issue a lot. i have had something about this on
my website for about 6 months now. i suppose it is time to update it,
now that this got passed (that, and I could remove the marquee asking
for pledges for the June 8th Ecology Center Bik-a-thon, though I
suppose that, much like Christmas lights, i could just leave it up for
NEXT year ;-). I imagine that a fair number of people care about it far
more than they have expressed in this conference. It is probably good
to assume that for every 1 person who said something about this, 10
have heard about it.
Of course, these numbers are still low, so I urge everyone to go send
an e-mail / fax right now. F'real. Take the initiative NOW please.
As far as having an electorate that doesn't care about the
constitution, they are only representing American interests. Americans,
as a general rule, don't care about the constitution either, as they
are too lazy to find out what is going on in their government, and
presumably think that what they hear on the evening news is "correct"
and "complete." If people would take the initiative to find out what is
happening in their government, we wouldn't be facing this problem right
now. The fact of the matter is, most of the time the only people who
are aware of the governments workings are the Christian right and other
politically-organized and politically polarized action groups, who
don't typically represent the views of the average American.
When the average american hears on the news that the government is
cracking down on kiddie porn with a new bill, however, they are pretty
likely to think it is a really bitchin' thing, without realizing that
what is actually being cracked down on is personal freedom and privacy.
The long and short is, in order for this current state of affairs to
stop, more Americans need to TAKE THE INITIATIVE to find out what their
government is REALLY doing. This is the only way to prevent more CDA's
and prayer in schools bills from being produced in the future.
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jep
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response 26 of 78:
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Nov 11 14:18 UTC 1998 |
The CDA keeps getting passed because a lot of people want it. Just as
with motorcycle helmets, seatbelt laws, TV/movie/music rating systems,
and laws about smoking, drinking and drugs, they want someone to make
choices for their neighbors. No one, of course, needs regulation
himself, but everyone else around does.
It isn't driven by just a few people. It's driven by most people. The
CDA was a popular law. The president held his nose when he signed it,
(and so did a lot of senators and congressmen as they passed it) but he
signed it -- he had to. People wanted it. The CDA II will be even more
popular, because it more directly targets the 'protection of children'.
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mcnally
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response 27 of 78:
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Nov 11 20:14 UTC 1998 |
#26
If that's true, then why have both bills (the original CDA and "CDA II")
had to be tacked on to large measures that were passed based on the
support for the large measures and in spite of opposition to the CDAs?
(the first CDA was tacked onto a huge telecommunications bill that was
basically guaranteed to pass and the second one was added to this year's
last-minute budget compromise. In a way, the full Congress has never
voted on either CDA, only on the proposition "you can have this other
thing that you really want only if you'll also accept this CDA.")
As far as the popularity of the bills go, that's in large part a
function of how they're described. If you ask people if they're in
favor of laws to protect children from pornography you're going to get
a lot of positive responses. Ask them, though, if they're in favor of
censorship and the response is going to change considerably.
Unfortunately a lot of the press coverage that these bills get
uncritically uses the descriptions provided by the pro-CDA folks without
also raising the censorship issue. If you ask me, that's a pretty
significant omission for our nation's supposedly vigilant free press to
be making.
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aruba
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response 28 of 78:
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Nov 11 20:38 UTC 1998 |
Well put, Mike - I agree with that whole response.
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mdw
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response 29 of 78:
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Nov 11 21:56 UTC 1998 |
Actually, congress did vote on the original CDA. It lost.
There is a significant and powerful *minority* that supports CDA and its
ilk. They are the conservative right, the same people who want to
outlaw abortion, legalize school prayer, and all that. I've never seen
anything to suggest these people command an absolute majority of popular
opinion. (Otherwise, I imagine we'd be voting in Pat Robertson's 3rd
presidential term in the next election). Besides the conservative
right, CDA and its ilk also enjoy a certain amount of support on the
left, from "femninists" who are against "exploitation" of the female
body in any form.
It should be noted that while there are a *lot* of commercial oriented
pornography sites out there, there are also a significant number of
sites oriented around "erotic art" (some of which are commercial, and
some of which are not), as well a significant number of sites that
contain what I guess you could describe as "sexually explicit" amateur
material (mostly stories). I don't think many people will shed tears if
the commercial oriented pornography sites were to disappear (especially
as they seem to generate a significant amount of spam). On the other
hand, I suspect CDA II would also apply to most, if not all, of these
other sites, and it is likely to have a dampening effect on many other
sites as well.
It could well effect grex. If we have a "singles" conference here,
would we be able to buy a commercial internet ISP connection and allow
people on the internet to read that conference? Or would most
commercial ISP's enact stricter regulations on customers to avoid any
possibility of risk?
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scg
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response 30 of 78:
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Nov 12 06:16 UTC 1998 |
ISPs are not responsible for content that they do not originate, according
to this law, so ISPs can't be held accountable for content created by their
customers, or users of their customers' systems.
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mcnally
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response 31 of 78:
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Nov 12 06:38 UTC 1998 |
Except that over-zealous prosecutors in (I believe) New York state
recently seized equipment and shut down temporarily a couple of ISPs
(Dreamscape and Buffnet) for carrying the Usenet newsgroup
alt.binaries.pictures.pre-teen. Even if the CDA protects them or
they are found to be common carriers and not responsible for the
material they carry they will still have suffered considerable hassle
and the actions of the New York Attorney General's office can be
expected to have a chilling effect.
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cyklone
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response 32 of 78:
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Nov 12 13:26 UTC 1998 |
Re #26: You say: "The CDA keeps getting passed because a lot of people
want it." This demonstrates the error in your logic. People want results
(protecting children from inappropriate sites). They do not necessarily
want the methods that politicians have chosen to achieve those results.
Part of the problem is that the technical aspects of this issue escape
both the general public and the average politician. Its interesting that
there has been almost no discussion of creating new "filterable"
appellations such as ".sex", even though this idea periodically gets
raised. If Grex truly wants to accomplish something, it would be to
educate the public and politicians about the technological alternatives
available to achieve results the public may desire, as well as a
clear-headed discussion of the technological and social implications of
the various alternatives.
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morpheus
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response 33 of 78:
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Nov 12 14:30 UTC 1998 |
Yeah. If people want to stop their kids from being exploited, they
should do something towards looking after them. This doesn't mean
depending on a piece of legislation, because all the legislation will
do is make the people breaking the laws that already exist (and last I
checked, there was a certain legal age that you have to be to be
involved in the production of pornography) a bit more careful.
This is redundant, unneccesary legislation that is being marketed as
being pro children. Of course, every state in the country has an age of
consent, every state has laws against minors making pornography. So,
this law won't really accomplish a whole lot except to annoy ME, an
ardent believer in free speech.
I am not the kind of person who normally subscribes to mass beliefts,
however I used to think that I was a patriot because I felt almost
religiously about the constitution. I feel that newCDA is a violation
of the constition, and if it gets passed, I won't even be able to
believe in our country anymore.
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morpheus
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response 34 of 78:
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Nov 12 14:31 UTC 1998 |
By the way, while were at it, would someone care to define what porn is?
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mta
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response 35 of 78:
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Nov 12 14:42 UTC 1998 |
"Porn is sexually explicit material I don't like; Erotica is sexually
explicit material I do like."
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remmers
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response 36 of 78:
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Nov 12 15:01 UTC 1998 |
Re resp:32 - "The technological alternatives available to achieve
results the public may desire" -- Now that's a thorny area. I don't
think there are any such alternatives, and am pessimistic that there
ever will be. Designing a filtering protocol that's flexible and
actually works -- i.e. gives the user some reasonable degrees of freedom
about what to filter, then correctly filters all such things without
false positives -- is extremely difficult. I'm not at all surprised at
the news stories I read about failures of existing filtering products --
letting through stuff they weren't supposed to, rejecting things they
shouldn't have rejected.
The PICS project (PICS = Platform for Internet Content Selection)is one
very ambitious attempt to provide standards for doing filtering. (See
http://www.w3.org/PICS/ for lots of info.) It provides a flexible
protocol for content labeling, which can then be used as a basis for
intelligent filtering. PICS shows promise of being useful in various
areas, for instance as a basis for intelligent search engines. However,
it requires cooperation among users, rating agencies, and content
providers. If you're using it to screen "content unsuitable for minors",
what do you do about providers who don't cooperate with the standard?
I'm a firm advocate of free speech and support putting a blue ribbon on
Grex's web page (an issue being discussed in another item). But I'm
pessimistic about the prospects of coming up with a technical solution
for something that -- if it's a problem at all -- is a social problem.
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rcurl
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response 37 of 78:
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Nov 12 16:15 UTC 1998 |
Since parents can control (up to a point) what books and magazines are
in their homes (but not in the library), one "fix" would be software
that (even imperfectly) scans for (levels of) "objectionable material"
(using the "contemporary community standards", for example), and then
sends a message to the parents to look at it and decide if they wish
to filter it. [I'm not yet sure that I think this is a *good* idea, but
it is an idea that meets current parental responsibility and rights.]
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senna
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response 38 of 78:
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Nov 12 17:08 UTC 1998 |
CDA type legislations all deals with drawing lines between decency and
indecency, lines that become extremely complicated, jagged, and undefinable.
The lines shoudn't be drawn in the first place.
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rcurl
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response 39 of 78:
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Nov 12 17:13 UTC 1998 |
Does it matter if lines are drawn so long as acting on the lines is
optional? If we can choose to accept or reject any lines, then they
just become an opinion (and others can offer them too). It is the
enforcement of opinions that is objectionagble.
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senna
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response 40 of 78:
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Nov 12 17:18 UTC 1998 |
Rane, I'm referring to lines drawn by the law. The country is not in
the position to say "this is decent but this isn't." I've written
extensive thoughts on this before. The minute the government becomes a
"value judge," it has gone over the line. Legislation like the CDA
proposals draws such lines and makes it the government's responsibility
to enforce them. That is blatantly wrong.
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rcurl
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response 41 of 78:
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Nov 12 17:21 UTC 1998 |
Ofr course I agree with that, but I've just suggested drawing lines anyway
but making them optional. That is midway between having no lines and
legally enforcing lines. Everyone should be happy with that, right?
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remmers
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response 42 of 78:
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Nov 12 17:31 UTC 1998 |
Who draws these optional lines?
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remmers
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response 43 of 78:
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Nov 12 17:40 UTC 1998 |
Who draws these optional lines?
And re the *technical* feasability of doing the scanning for
"objectionable material" suggested in resp:37 , I see big problems. For
instance, how do you decipher a graphic automatically and determine
whether it is a photo of Shirley Temple or a Playboy centerfold? A
website with sexually explicit graphics could get past the filters by
having completely innocuous text.
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jep
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response 44 of 78:
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Nov 12 17:49 UTC 1998 |
re #27, 32: The CDA bills are large in part because they are popular
enough to carry other legislation. The press keeps reporting it as
protection for children and pro-child and all that, despite considerable
self-interest on their own part to ward off any barriers for anyone to
publish anything, because that's how most people see these things.
re #33: 'Exploitation of children' isn't just pictures of nude
children, or even access to sexual content on the WWW. Teenagers can
easily be encouraged to call sex chat lines, pay lots of money for
access to on-line pornography sites, and for sexually explicit materials
to be sent to their homes.
also: The CDA II was passed and signed into law. I don't know when it
takes effect, but it's probably around the start of the year.
I agree that it is a better solution to take charge of your kids
yourself, but many people have more important things to do with their
time, such as make money and watch TV.
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scg
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response 45 of 78:
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Nov 12 20:44 UTC 1998 |
re 31:
Those ISPs had just their news servers seized, not their entire
operations. I'm not at all convinced that that was a reasonable action by
the prosecutors, given that ISPs generally just take a full news feed,
accepting whatever is in it. The argument used by the prosecutors in that
case was that the ISPs had been notified that the child-porn being temporarily
stored on their news servers was illegal, and hadn't taken any actuion to
remove it.
That's a little different from the CDA II. Child porn is illegal whether or
not the CDA II is upheld. The question is whether knowing that your news
server is picking up child porn automatically, and providing it to your
customers, and not doing anything to stop the automatic processes from
happening, is knowingly possessing child porn. I've heard a lot of arguments
on both sides. I'm not a lawyer, and it probably is a somewhat tricky legal
question, so I have no idea whether that argument makes legal sense or not.
One thing that action has done is given lots of news server operators good
excuses to get rid of newsgroups such as
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen and the like, groups that had enough
traffic to be quite noticable from the resource utilization standpoint, and
which I imagine very few news server administratrators felt comfortable
spending their resources on.
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i
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response 46 of 78:
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Nov 13 03:12 UTC 1998 |
Given an easy-to-filter .SEX domain (or something equivalent), how much
incentive is there for porn providers to bypass the filter? Given a
bypass problem, does it have enough well-financed enemies to create a
healthy market for the moral equivalent of anti-virus software? (Most
employers don't want their workers doing any smut surfing on company
time - what will they pay for effective blocking?)
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drew
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response 47 of 78:
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Nov 13 03:20 UTC 1998 |
I can't help but wonder how the "children" whom the CDA-II bill seeks to
protect, feel about this. Do they feel endangered by the presense of porn,
or a need for such "protection"?
And I especially oppose bans on *possession* of just about anything,
especially patterns of magnetic force on a disk platter! Excessive do's and
don'ts.
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mcnally
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response 48 of 78:
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Nov 13 07:36 UTC 1998 |
re #46: Some sex sites deliberately masquerade as popular sites,
choosing names that are like those sites to get people who slip up
when entering their URLs.. (for example, there is (or was) a site
called "www.whitehouse.com" which was set up to catch people headed
for "www.whitehouse.gov". Since many people are conditioned to
assume URLs end in ".com" I'm sure they got a lot of accidental hits.)
Such a site is not going to want to clearly distinguish itself as a
sex site.
I'm not very fond of most of the filtering options proposed so far but
I think that what we'll eventually wind up with is some sort of self-
rating system where material "harmful to children" can be posted freely
on the net so long as those providing it marked it as adult material,
with substantial penalties for deliberately misrepresenting harmful
material.. Sites wanting to avoid the issue completely could just mark
everything on their site as "adult", making it unavailable to children
but keeping them safe from legal difficulties, at least those of the
CDA sort.. I suspect that there will be a problem with a "chilling effect"
where some sites with material appropriate to children might nevertheless
mark it off limits just to be on the safe side but it seems that such a
scheme would at least be better than the ham-handed regulatory solutions
we've been offered so far..
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